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From Bamburgh to Stavanger: A Memory Not Lost at Sea
It’s Thursday just passed and I’m standing with Bamburgh Castle at my back. Its ancient stones are steeped in history, yet I’m not drawn to look behind me. My eyes are fixed on the sea. North-east, to be exact. That invisible line across the water stretches toward Stavanger, where I lived for a fleeting time during what could only be described, to borrow from Dickens, as the best of times and the worst of times.
But this moment isn’t about castles or history. It’s about something smaller and more enduring; the quiet goodness that lives in human connection.
I’m walking the shoreline with family and friends. The wind on Sola beach is gentle and like the laughter, warm. A young girl from Sandnes walks beside me; her family having been so hospitable to us during our time in Norway. She’s a teenager, bright-eyed and full of the same enthusiasm for music that once filled me. We swap stories and song titles, lost in the shared joy of discovering kindred taste and poetic lyrics.
Later, I give her a cassette of my all-time top twenty songs. Just a little plastic box with a handwritten label. At the time, it felt ordinary. But sometime afterward, her mother tells me that her daughter now falls asleep each night to the gentle music captured on the cassette.
Even now, I feel a hush inside when I remember that. The thought of those songs becoming a lullaby, a comfort, a thread between our human connection. Music carrying a presence, even after I was gone.
That was in 1999. I returned to Scotland, and life and distance, as it often does, scattered our connection with the family. I lost contact with the family. Still, I wonder. That young girl will be in her forties now. Perhaps she has children of her own. I wonder if they too fall asleep to music. I wonder if, in some way, the kindness shown to me, the conversation on that beach, the cassette passed from hand to hand, still echoes in their lives.
Because what are we, really, is determined in our small acts of goodness. A song shared. A moment of hospitality. A memory that lingers. So much of life feels fleeting, but these moments — they have a way of outlasting us.
And if we are made in the image of something eternal, perhaps it is this that reflects it most clearly. The impulse to give. To comfort. To be remembered not for what we built or achieved, but for how we loved, and how we made others feel safe enough to fall asleep.
