Iolair Nan Speur: Eagle of the Skies
'Everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created.'
Happy Bicycle Day!
Greetings from my eyrie on the eighth floor.
On this day in 1943, Albert Hofmann deliberately ingested a small amount of LSD-25, a compound he’d synthesised in the lab some years before, but found ineffective as a respiratory and circulatory stimulant.
Despite being a pharmaceutical flop, something about LSD-25 piqued Hofmann’s curiosity and he decided to experiment on himself. After the initial shock of dropping into the first LSD trip in history, this is what he experienced:
Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.
[…]
Exhausted, I then slept, to awake next morning refreshed, with a clear head, though still somewhat tired physically. A sensation of well-being and renewed life flowed through me. Breakfast tasted delicious and gave me extraordinary pleasure. When I later walked out into the garden, in which the sun shone now after a spring rain, everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created.
~ Albert Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child
For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋
My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor and cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel. In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I write about psychoactive drugs. Like tea.
Let’s Hear It For… Oolong
Oolong tea looks like a green tea, tastes like a green tea, but has psychoactive effects more like a rum and coke. It’s amazing.
(For those of you drinking along at home, mine’s a Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference loose leaf. For pity’s sake: loose leaf!)
But here’s a fun fact: did you know that tea leaves from the same plant, harvested on the same day can make both green tea and black tea? I didn’t.
The decisive factor between these very different types of tea is the level of oxidisation that the leaf undergoes: how long it is exposed to the air before being roasted, steamed or baked.
It’s exactly like leaving a banana out on the counter: gradually it’ll go black. That’s oxidisation and, with tea as with bananas, it completely changes the flavour.
Also known as dark dragon, dark green or (in France) blue tea, oolong is a halfway house between green and black tea.
Where green tea is dried immediately after harvesting for minimal oxidisation and black teas are completely oxidised, oolong is semi-oxidised, giving it some of the proper-teas of both.
I’m not sure where the rum and coke buzz comes from. Like Albert Hofmann, we all need to experiment.
Iolair Nan Speur: Eagle of the Skies
A couple of weeks ago, I undertook the first week’s training for my Certificate in Advanced Wilderness Therapeutic Approaches.
As part of the ceremony at the end of the week, I was given my tribe* name. As our teacher, Robin Sheehan, is Scottish, all the names were in Scots Gaelic. Mine is iolair nan speur — the eagle of the skies.
The eagle is watchful. The eagle sees all. Nothing happens without the eagle knowing.
That’s why I was given the name. (I blame it on my habit of asking questions about questions about questions!)
But I thought I’d dig a bit deeper on the British symbolism of the eagle — it’s not a bird I associate with these isles so much, probably because other countries seem to be super obsessed with them. Naming no names… 🇳🇬 🇺🇸 🇦🇱 🇲🇽 🇪🇬
Alongside watchfulness and knowingness, there’s a decisiveness in the eagle: when a deadly raptor strikes, the field mouse sure as hell knows about it. There is no room for vacillation. It’s hit or miss.
Tennyson captures both these aspects of the eagle in this short poem that he called, imaginatively, The Eagle:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.~ Alfred Tennyson, The Eagle
Interesting that Tennyson finds something lonely about always being on watch — and the eagle watching for both prey and for predator. There is a fierce protectiveness about the eagle’s stare.
I’m currently reading Goshawk Summer by James Aldred, another imaginatively titled work about the renowned cameraman’s summer spent filming goshawks and other wildlife in the New Forest during the 2020 lockdown.
As good with words as he is with film, James Aldred artfully captures the vulnerability of goshawks chicks as they hatch and fledge — but it’s the territorial vigilance of their fearsome mother that comes through most powerfully.
As a reader, I feel like I’m being watched: one false move and she would show no mercy tearing me to shreds, talons ripping viciously through the pages.
This protective instinct is brought out more gently in the poetry of James Macpherson, AKA the mythical ancient Gaelic poet Ossian:
My shield is an eagle wing.
~ James Macpherson, Temora
(I’m reminded here of legendary poet comedian Jeremy Lloyd and his 1977 magnum opus Captain Beaky & His Band (Not Forgetting Hissing Sid!!!), where another bird of prey, Artful Owl, came up with the cunning idea that Batty Bat could use his wings as a flying um-ber-ella to shelter his friends from the rain.)
Given my new name, it’s bang on that the last twenty years has seen an explosion of raptors in my life.
A friend of mine once travelled with his uncle to the wild reaches of Wales to catch a glimpse of a red kite. In the early 2000s, I followed the flight path of a single red kite as it gliding over the streets of the village where I grew up, my eyes craning up through the windscreen to marvel at this wondrous beast.
Today, you can hardly move for red kits as they swoop to snatch roadkill from the motorways.
In 2020, during lockdown, a pair of white-tailed sea eagle were brought from Scotland to the Isle of Wight. After some years of exploration, including visits to Suffolk and (intriguingly) a crossing of London, the eagles have multiplied and are — apparently — a common sight in Poole Harbour.
And so, one day, sitting in my eighth floor eyrie and looking out to sea, I can dream of meeting one of these frankly mythical birds of prey, eye to eagle eye.
Watchfulness, knowingness, decisiveness, protectiveness and a pleasing range across the Southeast. All in all: a great bird to be paired with.
~
*If a white British guy from Oxfordshire referring to himself using the word ‘tribe’ makes you feel uncomfortable, then I hear ya!
The term ‘tribe’ has been used by anthropologists and archaeologists to track the ‘progression’ of different human societies along the successive stages of ‘cultural evolution’.
The implication was clear: the scholars belong to a ‘nation state’, the most advanced form of civilisation; the studied people belong to a ‘tribe’, only a short step from ‘savage’ or ‘horde’.
This form of social classification has been completely discredited, which is good, but we are left with the sticky problem of finding a term to describe communities united by and committed to a common cause.
‘Tribe’ is the word used by the people training me and, in fact, Robin Sheehan will quite forcefully defend its use:
I am from a tribe — I’m a Pict!
As an escaped archaeologist, I’m not quite convinced, but the irony is not lost on me that today even the language of belonging is contested. Suggestions welcome!
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. I’m pouring out an oolong tea in your honour. Thank you. 💚
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Big love,
dc: