Fidra

It can be a funny, old place; this world of ours.  And oh how post-modern one becomes thanks to the Internet with its social networking sites like Facebook, web browsers like Firefox and even Google's calendar application (which Spike introduced me to today).

I logged into Facebook a short time ago to see who has been up to what in the virtual world of my Facebook friends (a thoroughly bizarre label to give any group of mostly real people but there we have it).  I saw a photograph tagged by my friend Jack (now Lord) McConnell.  It was a serene image of a heron standing at a weir in Crammond, Edinburgh.  I flicked through the Facebook album of the photographer; a woman called Shona MacMillan who I neither know nor have heard of.  She appears to be a published somebody.

I came across the image here of Fidra, in the Firth of Forth.  It's the island that Robert Louis Stevenson may have had in mind when he imagined Treasure Island.  Fidra sits maybe half a kilometre off Yellowcraig beach in East Lothian.  I lived five minutes from the beach, in Dirleton, for 5 years.  I have a Geoff Roper painting (the second that I bought) of Martin Currie, Alison Campbell and June Roper relaxing on that beach, a picnic spread out before them, Alison flat on her belly reading a book. 

Fidra viewed from Yellowcraig is a place of memory and imagination; an example, maybe, of pleated time and space (as in the crumpled handkerchief metaphor by Michel Serres).   It's a personal illustration (at least to me) of an idea I encountered in my Sydney University course last semester, Australian Texts: International Contexts.  In a lecture on Dreams Of Speaking by Gail Jones (one of the judges of a short story competition I entered last week) we were introduced to this proposition by Lynda Nead: "Modernity … can be imagined as pleated or crumpled time, drawing together past, present and future into constant and unexpected relations and the product of a multiplicity of historical eras."
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