On the Island

 A collection of photographs I've taken on Mersea Island, and a poem

https://issuu.com/martinabradley/docs/on_the_island

The beginning

I’ll be honest. It was a retreat. Not in the sense of turning away and going back, but in the sense of ‘to go on’ a retreat. I recently read this description of a retreat, and thought to borrow it. A retreat is “…a time away in a quiet and secluded place where you can relax.” That, for me, was Mersea Island.

It was still April (2022), just, when I started to move my things into my rented 16th century cottage on Mersea Island. I say started as, although I have few belongings, I also have no car. My previous accommodation, yes the one with the 24/7 cannabis smoke and noisy neighbours, provided all the necessary kitchen equipment, pots, pans, toaster etc etc etc, so I needed only to buy a rice cooker and a frying pan (to call my own and know that it’s clean). 

Moving into a ‘house’, albeit a small, one bedroom, tiny kitchen, house I began to realise just how much I had relied on various items at the other place. One month on and I still haven’t bought all the ‘necessary’ items, including an oven-proof dish for making ‘Cottage Pie’.

And so here I am, on this island called Mersea, just, only just mind, off the British eastern coast and famed for its ‘native’ oysters. This does, however, beg the question as to why here, why Mersea Island?. That decision had nothing to do with Liverpool, The Beatles or Jerry Mardsen (and his pacemakers), that infamous song or the 1965 film ‘Ferry Cross the Mersey’. It’s a different spelling anyway.

Since the age of (roughly) eight, I had been living in the overall Colchester area, and knew Mersea Island was the closest beaches to where I was living. Though, in truth, I rarely went there until much later, when I was a young buck courting (she had a car). Skip through a few years, and I am actually living in Colchester town (due in its future to be a city once more) and I have a car of my own. I am, quite poignantly, also wanting to get into art school. Time permitting I travel the brief nine miles to sketch the boats at Mersea, or wander the sands. For me, beaches are for investigating, not sunbathing. Each to their own.

Forty years later, (during COVID 19 times) I was living in Cambodia (long story) and as Malaysia (where I had been living, previously) was effectively closed to me, and Europe being practically out of bounds due to both COVID 19 and that horrid miscalculation - Brexit, my only bolt-hole was the country which gave me birth, England, Britain (aka UK).

I had never really seen myself as a Colchestrian. I clung dearly onto my heritage of being born in London’s Clapham, so I really, really didn’t want to live back in Colchester. Besides, no-one there was prepared to help me with the necessary and the quite compulsory (at that time) ten days COVID 19 quarantine. So I prevailed upon a friend to enquire if she knew anyone who could let me stay. She did, and I stayed one month on Mersea Island (from June to July 2021) and fell in love with that peaceful, reasonably insular place. On leaving, I vowed that I would return to live there. 

So, here I am, at the beginning of one year on Mersea Island, soaking up the May sunshine and being serenaded by this garden’s bumble bees flitting from tiny blue flowers and almost as tiny white ones, and lulling me into a sense of peace and of horticultural idyll. In many respects this is my ‘retreat’. A time to recuperate from life’s many knocks and it’s buffering.

it's a Beautiful Day

It was a beautiful day on this island off the Essex coast.

Instead of taking the fifteen minute shortcut along the roads,  I opted, instead, to drop down to the coast road, and walk the thirty minutes to 'town' that way.

It was sunny, with a sea breeze which made me grateful that I'd taken my lightweight rain jacket. The breeze was enough to refresh but not chill and provided a pleasant accompaniment to my stroll. Ostensibly I was going shopping for lunch, in reality I was walking out in the delightful May weather.

It really is an oyster island. The 'mother of pearl' discards were heaped, and the area around various oyster sheds littered with the unwanted shells. I'm a newbie here, so I'm still fascinated about oysters, not to eat but the mere suggestion of their history here dating back to the Roman times, and before.

Because I'd lived in the vicinity for fifty plus years before scampering around Asia, it was inevitable that I'd meet someone I knew in a previous life, sooner or later. And today I did.

James and I were at Art School together, back at the tail end of the 1970s. Although I had followed his career from afar we'd not met for exactly forty years. He, as well as being an artist, developed both a gallery and an Art Cafe (another smaller gallery tripling as a delicatessen and bistro) on the island.

James was busy taking delivery of copious small trees to enhance his business exteriors, and I, well, I was busy doing nothing (as Bing Crosby once sang).

In a Garden

The afternoon meditation rang to the music of halyards and downhauls in the breeze, ringing against static yacht masts like singing Tibetan bowls.

The sun warmed me as I sat soaking up those sounds, the shore breeze tousled my hair as if with a lover's caress. The cerulean blue sky painted titanium clouds, while the May sun kaleidoscoped candy pink, golden yellow and lavender against the inside of my eyelids.

Not since Cambodian days has meditation been this easy. Blessed Mersig has brought me home to a lily of the valley and forget me not garden where peace has been gifted amidst this tiny sanctuary.

On an island

Waking at 5am, the first order of the day was to slip on my black 'Schuh' slippers and creak down to the toilet (for obvious reasons).

Next up was to open the bedroom window wide, and settle into the rattan chair with the chinoiserie cushions. I sat easing my breath for the morning meditation (about 20 minutes give or take) and listening to my own thoughts, moving past them to experience the day.

As has become usual, birds, at various interludes, praised the day as I sat listening in the morning's cool. It is, mostly, peaceful here, in this part of the ancient island with its myths and legends. The daily cussing, loud 'rap' music and thunder of motorcycles is left far behind me. So too are the scents of marijuana and rotting rubbish in the no-man's land which had been that accomodation's backyard.

That ten month endurance is only nine miles away, but seems like a far distant time and place. Almost as far as the East which still holds my heart, but is divorced from me.

I have come to this red squirrel and demur deer island for respite, for sanctuary, as a semi-monastic 'retreat' and to be able to rediscover the delights of rurality, of an island's balm and comforting pastoral bliss.

7am and, after a Peruvian coffee latte, work calls. I continue to create the next issue (54) of The Blue Lotus magazine (which practically seems to create itself from interconnecting milieux. I only have to provide the equipment and physicality of movement).

Hello Deer

This island brings copious surprises.

One day, out walking, one of the reintroduced red squirrels bounded across my path. Yesterday I walked up the slope from my house and there, midway, stood a young doe (deer). I say young, but actually I have no idea of her age, but she looked young. She did that customary still stance. She stood midway and mid road, listening, watching. I too stood still, and watched her. Soon enough she moved off.

Today, I performed an afternoon meditation in the small rear garden. The sounds are different here. There are fewer gulls and more pigeons, and bees. Oh so many Bumble bees, constantly droning. I meditated to those wondrous sounds of nature, the throaty cooing of pigeons and the soft flutter of their flights. The Cosmos has brought me here to aid my meditation. I could not be more grateful. Thank you.