It’s explosive. There might not be a lot of mass. Velocity neither. But it’s enough. So when a ceramic object falls four feet or so from a kitchen worktop and hits the stone floor, it will shatter. There might be large bits, might be small. Usually it’s a mixture so you have to get the hoover out, whether the floor is ready for the annual dusting or no. But just for a minute you’re looking at a bit of your life, distributed all around the floor.
This morning it was the teapot. This also left a small, damp heap of soaked lapsang-souchong leaves. No smoky smell because you’ve already imbibed that. As my housemate’s mate said, Laphroaig tea. It’s the residue. The damp dross. My spliced three-strand rope handle is, of course, intact. That was a repair made about twenty-odd years ago. The lid, a darker and less matt clay than the rest, because the original lid took a dive some time back – that’s whole except for a chip. So it could be worth putting aside. But the terracotta unglazed clay pot has been in every address since the student days. It was in the cold Torrey flat and the room above the Brig o’ Cowie.
It was in constant service because I didn’t drink alcohol in them thar days, Jim lad. I was intoxicated by rhetoric. But there was the possibility of calm in the spaces between words.
The Edi Thompson bowl was very good for drinking tea. It was a comfortable shape in the hand. It had an unglazed ribbed line and then the smooth area went from something between Harris agate to Ross of Mull granite, maroons to pinks. It’s possible I might have sipped a dram from it too because it seemed I no longer needed to look for the rest of any bottle that was open. It took a good few sips to acquire a taste for malt whisky. I’d been reared on black rum, the sea angler’s preference, as the spirit of choice before I stopped drinking at the age of seventeen. In those days the choice of rums outnumbered the whiskies on the gantry in the Criterion Bar.
After the Parkinson’s set in, Edi was not going to be making more pots. So it became precious. I stopped drinking out of it and that’s when my bowl took the plunge as my sleeve caught it on its shelf. Edi was a librarian at a music college. He was deaf and a very good pianist. He was a keen climber and settled in Harris because of the hills that go straight up from sea-level. The ones that have no intrinsic landscape value, as quoted by the landscape consultant employed by the multinational company which wanted to develop the superquarry by wiping out a mountain. Would that have been a death? If the constituent rock had been shifted in ships to be laid as the foundation for new highways? Or simply a transfiguration.
Edi was gay and once wrote a brave letter to the Stornoway Gazette. As my own sister did but his was more of a direct statement, arguing against intolerance. He’s under the ground on the west side of Harris now. You can’t bury anyone on the east side. Not deep enough. Not without blasting equipment. They call the east side road the Golden Road because it cost so much to explode its snaking route from the gneiss. The ‘golden grave’ has a ring to it. Instead, they have the funeral path, east to west Harris. Each cairn is a dram-stop. There’s quite a lot of them.
It might have been after that breakage, I housed Mairi Bhan’s two raku pots in respective deep alcoves. They might be out of reach of glancing scuffs from elbows. Neither of them has a function. They both have a shape but you couldn’t say what it is. I mean, not the way you could say a buoy is cylindrical or its top-mark is a can or a cone. I put some gnarled twigs in one for a while but I took them out again. The pots are what they are. They are their own stories. I love them. I don’t mean I like them.
The daughter won a fine bit of stoneware made by the Island pottery with the longest standing. It used to be Stornoway Pottery though it was out in Benside, Laxdale, from 1974. Now it’s Borve pottery and it is made in Borgh (same name). The West Side Borve, on the road to Ness, not the Harris one. It was a sailing prize and she won it with her pal in the plastic dinghy. I should be able to tell you the type. But I can’t. Anyway, that piece of artisan’s porcelain took a dive too. I wasn’t responsible. I only visit the Leverhulme Drive abode by prior arrangement. But I saw it was in bits, set aside for a repair job that would never happen.
Now the amazing thing is that I won a very similar stoneware plate by Borve Pottery in a sea-angling competition. It was an accident and I’m a bit ashamed of it. I gave up competition fishing about the time the old king died. But there was not a scale to be seen on the east side so the cheapest way of getting out to feed a portion of Kenneth Street was to renew the membership for the Danglers. I didn’t know it was a competition. I was thinking of dabs for the neighbours, a ling for the cailleach along the road, a haddock for the ex, a cnòdan for myself. I just knew it as the word for the fish. I didn’t know it was Gaelic. I didn’t know if it had any accents or not. I had to look it up. I already knew that bodach ruadh were red codling so I knew cnòdan ruadh was the red gurnard. Anyway, you get points for catching different species of fish, these days. I scored, big time.
Anna broke her collarbone. Outdoor pursuits. I went to visit her and took the plate in the packaging it came in. A replacement for her shattered trophy. I didn’t have space for it anyway. Very bonny packaging. Aye but not plastic, not rainproof. Nothing’s Lewis rainproof anyway. I didn’t realise the bag was getting soaked. The bag with the plate and, of course, dark chocolates on top, grapes and all. It parted and that mass and velocity thing happened. I picked up the sodden base and wrapped it up with the rest of the debris. I couldn’t just leave the sharp bits on the pavement. And I didn’t find a bin and some sisters could be strict about visiting times, at least they were in the olden days and that probably hadn’t changed, so I kept on going and found myself explaining to Anna why I was carrying in a sodden bag of shards.
I said sorry I’d forgotten the Araldite because it was a kit, a puzzle really, to keep her occupied for an hour or two. That seemed to hit Anna’s fairly individual sense of humour. The daughter said it was exceflickinglenté but that maybe needs a note which is coming now:
(NB SY grammatical structure: the breaking of the conventional word with expletive insertion in its polite form, followed by a pan-European echo of French or Hispanic connotation – a nod to our neighbours down the searoad – as long as you work the tides – if you don’t you’re not going to get there, Bilbao or Vigo. Unless you’ve got a Kubota under your deck.)
So that’s really it then, the deaths of pots. I never did own a Bernard Leach one. He was a Bahá’í. I know a lot of kind and wide-looking people who are or were. He learned about the Faith through an artist called Mark Tobey. An abstract expressionist, who made white-line paintings, a bit like calligraphy in Arabic but out of conscious control. Leach wrote a modest book called Drawings, Verse and Belief. I returned to it often. He worked with Shoji Hamada. The Japanese master did the raku with a proper fire. But the blowlamp and oildrum method is quite in keeping with Island historical traditions of using what’s left lying around. I might have told you, that’s how Mairi made them, in a workshop at the school.
I’ve got the house to myself again. There’s a lot of space for one guy but not when it fills with files and books.