Walking uphill with Gwen

Coming down that huge hill was bad enough, the thought of going back up looks downright/upright scary. Walk in zig zags advises our guide; a man who hasn’t noticed that those of advanced years with a predilection for red wine always stumble along in this manner, even when traversing the high street in town. The sunshine is glorious. Had it not been so, I’d be sitting in the minibus for the duration of the visit to Midhowe tomb and broch.

Having emerged from the main attractions in this historic theme park, I notice that Gwen, who wears a permanent smile, is nonetheless looking a little jaded as we pause to examine yet another pile of rocks. Shall we make an early and slow ascent I enquire? Oh, yes, she responds enthusiastically, I can’t take any more stones. I wander off to alert our leader to the fact that two of his party may be absconding shortly. But we’ve got another hour to go, says he. Well, that does it: the frail women have plenty of time to reach the distant van.

I’m seventy today. Gwen is eighty. We have dicky hearts, she says. This is the first I’ve heard of it, but I have a stick and she has nothing but fortitude and a pair of yellow rubber boots that she found in a charity shop. We stop frequently at points she’s identified as comprising particularly comfortable grassy tuffets, like two elderly little Miss Muffets on the lookout for spiders. Do you think we spent too long in the tomb I ask? By about an hour she replies sadly. Dave had gone on and on and on about possible inhabitants of the tomb that the recent powers that be had covered in a large hangar like structure: shamans, the sick and deformed, anyone that the ancients had seen fit to hide away. We, meanwhile, had looked wistfully at the sunlight teasing us as it streamed through hideously small windows, believing it to be a place where important folk rested.

Are you ok, I ask her on the second tuffet? We look down on the neolithic and on the seals sunbathing below. Gwen tells me about her time working at the BBC. It was easy, she recalls: if you did well in the job they gave you, you got moved up to the next level. Everyone was happy until the communists took over. Then we had to wait for that strange woman to become prime minister and sort it all out. I have little understanding of this narrative apart from the historical fact that Thatcher ‘sorted’ everyone out.

Are you ok, Gwen asks me on the third stop? We’re watching the sea birds. The problem is, she continues, Roger is an owl and I’m a lark. I’ve told my daughters, if you’re planning anything serious with a man, sleep with them first in order to discover whether they’re larks or owls: you need two larks or two owls to make it work. And at this point, I realise that we’re creating an important and joyous memory. Never again will I walk up a huge hill with such a woman, distancing myself from the prehistoric, and from the temporal.

Finally, we can see the rest of the party beginning their ascent of the incline. I can’t see Roger she worries. Oh, he’ll be there, I reassure her. And there he is striding onwards, as far removed from a man who was close to death last year as can be. Gwen’s husband died at an insanely early age. This isn’t the first time she’s spoken of him as if it was only yesterday that he left. We were gardeners, she explains in a manner that’s simultaneously inexplicable and meaningful.

We’ll have to make a last-ditch attempt to get to the top, I say, or else they’ll be here and overtake us. So we up sticks and no sticks and make our not-so-weary way. And at the top, we share a little self-congratulatory kiss as a reward.