june 2

I had expected the highlands to be full of pallid, unassertive ghosts, retired churchgoing phantoms slithering amongst the yellow grass and dirty sheep without enough energy to undertake a good haunting. Instead my grandmother (converted by Billy Graham in 1959 a and more than capable of raising her posthumous voice one last time ) spoke from beyond the grave to perform her final missionary act, and warn us that those who had not accepted baby Jesus as their saviour would burn forever in a lake of fire. Her chosen mouthpiece for this sermon was the Pastor Shayne Hanes-inarticulate, self righteous, and without an ounce of poetry in his smug middle-aged bones. Inventer of deathbed repentance and alienator of heathens, the hero of the Picton Bible CHurch and its congregation of pensioners whose deaths he appropriates on behalf of father son and holy ghost. I will consult Umberto Eco and diagnose him for certain as either an idiot or a moron- watch this space.

Otherwise an opportunity for a family reunion with cousins first second and third- Kay (last seen as a young bride in white) is now a pushy middle aged mother, and the rest have shrunken or sprouted hairs in strange places or submitted- in general- to the unmistakeable mutations of age. Lyn, who I remember as a 14 year old in shorts with a hairstyle that situates her beyond doubt in the mid eighties, has gotten old even more quickly than the rest with the assistance of an abusive husband (thankfully departed) and a lifelong Holiday habit. Richard is a lonely old man, retired to his father's old house on the opal fields of Grawin and longing for some human contact to keep him tied to earth. On the way home I woke out of drooling uninhibited sleep to see my face in the obscurity of the train window looking creased and weary. In a couple of years I will be thirty and there's no more unavoidable reminder of the passing of time that a family event where nobody recognises you because the last time they saw you you were jy\ust learning to walk.