Finding True North - a journey to Orkney by Dr Linda Gask
This month I am grateful to Dr Linda Gask, a retired professor of primary care psychiatry now living in Orkney, who has kindly provided a fascinating and inspiring piece on her personal journey to find true north.
Finding True North- a journey to Orkney
by Dr Linda Gask
For most of my adult life I sought
out the Western Isles to escape, rest and find peace and quiet to write. My
fascination with all things ‘North’ began in childhood when travelling to Central
Scotland, my mother’s home. It was a 12-hour drive then from the East of
England going up the A1, forking West at Scotch Corner, turning North up the A6
and A74 then finally dropping down into Hamilton where my maternal grandfather
was a miner in the coalfields of Lanarkshire until his early death. On a couple
of these family holidays, we ventured as far North as Ben Nevis, Loch Ness and
Glen Affric - but never into those parts of the map that really interested me.
The regions of Scotland (but never England) that were always drawn in a smaller
scale on the British road atlases, as though they were an afterthought.
It was when I was
eighteen, just before university in Edinburgh, that I first came to Orkney on
the old St Ola that cars still had to be winched on and off and stayed, alone,
in the summer youth hostel in Stromness- now the Town Hall. By then however I
had already fallen deeply in love with Scarista Beach in Harris. That was where
I always imagined I would end up living one day. Meanwhile, I ventured further-
to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and even to Siberia and Archangelsk in
Russia in the middle of winter, finding the cold air suited me so much more
with my Scottish genes than the heat of the South.
The
millennium had come and gone before I returned to Orkney, gradually coming to
understand that I wanted to settle where there was not only a sense of history,
beauty and the extraordinary Northern light of winter days but also a powerful
sense of community. A place less limited by the constraints of not belonging
because of language and religion than the Hebrides.
Eight
years ago, I took early retirement from work, and moved, spending half of each
year gradually renovating a cottage near Stenness, and writing. First
completing one book I had been working on for over a decade and then beginning
another, which gradually turned into the story of how I came to be here each
day at my desk, trying to make sense of my life while looking out at the garden
in which, today, the daffodils are just coming into bloom, and from where I can
see the distant, purple hills of Hoy. Writing about how I struggled to get past
the depression that has dogged most of my adulthood and explore different ways
of leading a healthier, happier life. Coming to terms with being on my own for
long periods while my husband was still working in the South, then caring for
his elderly mother until her death. Trying to use what I had learned from years
of therapy and education to discover what really matters under the massive
skies of Orkney where it can seem impossible to hide from the world, even if
you are completely alone. I’ve been
searching for my own True North which, as I have learned, isn’t so much a real
island in the North, although being here is a place where I can feel at peace
and simply ‘be’, but a growing sense of tranquility and calm inside me.
Now at last, I’ve
settled her permanently and dedicated the book to my late neighbour who
befriended me when I was alone.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Finding-True-North-Healing-Power/dp/191320734X
You can learn more by visiting Linda's web site at
photograph copyright John Manton. Reproduced here with permission.
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