things that go bzzz and waaaaah in the night

As a polar vortex hits the UK and we lament that we didn't buy an extra bottle of wine this week, I'm strangely enjoying the sounds of this snow storm. With a red weather warning in place all but the most determined cars have left the roads, which means for once there is not the repetitive drone of traffic to contend with, and other things are making themselves known. For us that's mainly the sea, which is all in a lather and crashing and foaming away, and the wind, which is rushing past at some speed and bringing the blin'drift with it. Even here in civilisation, it's easy to feel very far away from everything.

It seems impossible at the moment, but late last summer we found ourselves camping on the summit of a hill in Inverness, on the remains of an old Pictish fort. It had been on a whim that I'd suggested we spend the night there as we stood in the goldening afternoon light, the air very still and full of leafy tree sounds. We set up our tent looking towards the Moray firth.

In the middle of the night we were woken by what can only be described as a close-by scream. I heard J tense up on the other side of the tent. We whispered so as to not wake tiddler, who somehow hadn't even twitched.

"Did you hear something?"
"Yes. What was that?"
"It sounded like someone screaching."
"It was close."

And it was moving, fast. There was no mistaking the Doppler effect, and the speed with which the sound had moved off was inhuman. I'm not exaggerating when I say I didn't sleep or move a muscle for the next hour. I heard the noise again, farther away this time, which was mildly reassuring, and eventually had to surrender unwillingly to exhaustion, imagining all the weirdest possible explanations.

The previous summer we'd had a similar experience, this time while camping in the middle of an ancient volcano in Ardnamurchan. We were woken by a sound like an enormous winged insect, so big it would have to have been one of those extinct prehistoric specimens you see in natural history museums. It seemed to fly right by our tent and then swoop away again, repeatedly. All three of us heard it on this occasion, and imaginations were running wild.

Blinding primordial fear aside, there was a sensation of feyness on both occasions, the feeling that we might not be entirely awake, or that we had planted ourselves on a threadbare patch in the fabric of the world.

On reflection, however, these were the sounds we heard: x x