The Happiest Day

29.9.1977

The Autumn equinox is here -- light and darkness hang, evenly balanced. We are poised for the take-off into winter. It all sounds cold and cheerless, especially since the summer just past has been nothing to write home about: long bleak periods interspersed with a golden day here and there. We had been spoiled by three warm sunny summers in a row. The summer of 1977 was quite like old times, a bit of a skinflint with the sun. In spite of its miserliness the tourists came in their thousands: bird watchers, amateur students of archaeology, people with postcards, guidebooks, binoculars and cameras. There was a couple of very pleasant American ladies, sisters, who came because they loved islands; the last lot they had been to were the Canary Islands... There are still a few hundred tourists around -- most of them students who have spent the high summer working at this job or that, and have taken to wandering in September before university classes resume.

If I was asked to pick out the happiest day of the summer, I think it would have to be that marvellous day, towards the end of June, when a boatload of us went to Rackwick. Peter Maxwell Davies, at the end of the St Magnus Festival -- the first of many, to be sure -- threw a party for performers, critics, helpers, friends, at his cottage Bunertoon, poised high on the cliffs above the Atlantic.

The sun shone from morning to night; at that time of year, when summer decides to be generous, the world is drenched in light. The Jessie Ellen went cleaving through acres of blue silk.

When, from various little private expeditions and meanders, the company assembled at Bunertoon, the delicious food and wine were consumed outside, sitting on benches, stones, and in the little fenced vegetable garden (now blossoming again after half a century's neglect). The talk flowed as sweetly as the excellent wine. It was one of those idyllic days that happen only six or seven times in your life.

We recrossed Hoy sound in the late afternoon, blessed with the sun of Orkney and with sun-blessed vintages of Italy and France, treasures of vanished summers.

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But winter has its compensations: friends and talk and books in the firelight -- sudden immaculate blossomings of snow in the heart of darkness -- over-mastering storms -- tea behind warm drawn curtains -- hot toddies before bed when the night has a snap and crackle in it.