Saturday 14 June

A strange experience this morning. I was sitting up in bed, half-awake, in total silence, except for a thin wave of city-sound that crept in through the open window where the curtain fluttered in the breeze.

After making up the bed, I dressed, lay back down and picked up a book: The Isle of Skye.

Then the music reached my ears, striking the eardrum, sending the signals up toward my brain.

The sound was feint and distant, tired after its long journey through the air. It seemed to hang in space, floating on the intervening air, just managing to reach the window before it fell to the ground and died unheard.

I bent my ear to the distant music, trying to unravel its magic, teasing out the notes from the confused rope of sound that snaked through the window and swirled inside my head, searching for the label 'this is what I am'.

Then it struck me. The rope was the national anthem, struck up by the band outside Buckingham Palace, not two miles from the topstorey window with the fluttering curtain.

Hardly a long journey, as the crow flies, but to hear it the distance seemed endless, like it came from some far corner of the world.

I saw the band marching on the tarmac, uniforms bright red, their instruments resplendent in the sun.

But the music seemed sad, melancholy, stripped of all jubilation. It no longer seemed itself, but something else entirely. Like there was something at pains to make itself known.

Then I realized. The music itself has no meaning. Music is just the vessel that contains our memories. It is the memories themselves that count, particular to each of us, stretching across our minds like a web, unseen, but always there.

Then the memories came, like intruders entering a closed place place, their footsteps echoing through the empty rooms, leaving trails in the dust, moving through the stale air.

The scene returns. The scene from ‘Chariots of Fire' where Sam Masabini sits alone in his hotel. Just as now, the national anthem floats in through the open window. His man has won--the one he trained for months on end. When the anthem is over, he unbows his head, sheds his reverence and punches a hole in his hat, giving it a cartoon look. All his ambitions lay behind him.

For Masabini, this was a moment of victory and elation, capping his career.

Back in the bedroon, I strain to hear the closing bars of the anthem but there is no victory, just melancholy.

Then I remember the anthem as I heard it on that day, ignoring the notes and peering into the spaces in between--into that particular chapter of my life, its people, its loves, its countless moments, which snag like barbs on my skin.

I surrender myself to the lost moments. I lay for hours while they flood back, plunging me into a trance, returning me to life, then plunging me in again until I felt there in the flesh.

The morning has long passed and a slanting shaft of afternoon sun touches the book.

I pick up the book and read. Skye pours out from the pages, as if a great vat had been uncorked, filling my head until there is room for nothing else.

Skye. The Isle of Skye. Not the island itself, of course, but what the place means, what it stands for, how it feels when you are there and what stays inside long after you have left, lingering like a weight dropped into your soul: the loneliness and desolation, the endless rain, the misty mornings, sea and land fighting for possession. A complete break from everything that counts.

I was gripped by the urge to return to Skye, to board the night train, to re-live the moment when I first saw the highlands as the gray dawn broke over the station and the steward rapped sharply at the door.

Perhaps someday I will return...