Partitions

Things are happening inside that I do not understand

The glimmer of hope the last time I wrote was the start of what feels like a frenzy of activity in our eco-home-to-be. I’ve mentioned the Inuit word ‘quinuituq’ before: the ice-hunter’s deep patience followed by the frantic action of the kill, the long, slow dripping before the glacier calves, the Arctic rhythm of stasis punctuated by sudden change. This seems also to be the rhythm of construction.

Up until now, the building has been a single space. Suddenly it is subdivided into rooms. The partition walls are not all in place but the timbers that will hold them are, and so it is possible to walk through a doorway into a small area that will eventually be enclosed and private. Our home will have four rooms – a utility/lobby immediately inside the front door; a bathroom; a room we call the playroom, but which is written as ‘study’ on the plans; and the biggest space, for kitchen, living, dining and sleeping. The wall between the utility room and where our bed will be has been built, so we can now really imagine where we will sleep, and what we will see when we waken. It’s extraordinary how this structure changes what the building feels like.

On the topic of partitions, I feel the need to digress. Not long after we moved onto the croft in a caravan, we wanted to create a garden for fruit and vegetables. As red deer are very common here, and completely merciless when it comes to eating anything green and remotely edible, we had to erect a 2 metre-high stag-proof fence, and one of our neighbours had all the equipment and was willing to help. Banging in 2-metre corner posts is a non-trivial operation, but he was impressively big and strong enough to pull this off, with the aid of a monster device known as a ‘thumper’. As he thumped, we had a fascinating conversation, which led on from garden fences to barriers, barricades, land divisions and borders of many sorts, settling on a long discussion of the Partition of India and Pakistan after the end of British empirical occupation in the 1940s. Bill and I had recently spent a year living mostly in Nepal, while doing forest research in other Asian countries, and our neighbour had spent several months of each of the previous few years living in Bengal, working in English language education. So we had a lot of experiences to share about Asian borders, religious diversity and the post-colonial culture of the Indian subcontinent, and as the fencing job took a while, plenty of time to explore them in some depth.

As the fourth side of the rectangle reached completion, we noted that such a far-flung historical and political discussion was probably not what many people would expect of chit-chat among crofters. There is a stereotype of a crofter as an uneducated, sheep-obsessed and conservative creature, which is a very long way from reality. There are many, many crofters who have had fascinating careers and lived in all kinds of exotic places, before rooting themselves on their small patch in the Highlands and Islands. Some, it has to be admitted, do then develop an inexplicable obsession with sheep, a topic on which we and our neighbour had to agree to disagree on.

But back to the house.

With the partitions in place, another neighbour enters our story. Colin, who lives on the croft just the other side of Loch Roe, is an electrician and will be doing all the wiring of the house. The ‘first fix’, as we’ve learned to call it, involves a mind-bogglingly complex spaghetti diagram and more decisions about lights, sockets, switches, alarms and thermostats than can possibly be allowed without detriment to mental health.

From a cabin with four LED spot lights, we will be moving into something that will have a baffling 48 separate lights, each with at least one switch, several with two, and instead of a single cigarette-lighter socket for charging our phones, we’ll have 34 electrical sockets, not counting the USBs. 34! I cannot imagine possessing anything like 34 electrical devices. It blows my mind. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to blow Colin’s, nor do the incomprehensible instructions about spurs for the air source heat pump and ventilation system and goodness knows what other mysteries that are emerging under the guise of ‘utility’ in the small room just inside the front door. We watch and learn.