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hands

I wondered if my Japanese maple would come into leaf this spring. Pot-bound for years, my Dad brought the little tree up for me last summer and planted it beside my caravan. It quickly took its place in the garden, a quivering carousel of small outstretched hands. However, Cumbria to Lochinver is quite a shift in latitude and I wasn’t sure if it would survive the deep cold spells of a Sutherland winter.

At first I thought it hadn’t. Some of the branch tips looked dead and, as the deadnettle and cerastium came into bloom around it, it remained bare. But then – one by two by three – small strips of life began to emerge. Like the autumn in reverse, these leaves initially looked withered, hanging limply like crumpled rags. Only their colour was strong, a vivid crimson like vegetal blood. Slowly they’ve unfurled, from rags to red claws, becoming rosier and greener, and finally reaching out like tiny tender hands.

Soon, perhaps, the whole tree will flourish – produce more leaves, lengthen its branches. It will be good to see it confirm its strength and presence, yet, for a while, I liked not knowing what would happen. I enjoyed the uncertainty, the lack of surety of the transition.

Now change is fully upon us. The sun rolls northward, summer comes on. Life becomes more defined. Soon I will gain clarity in the clear summer light and extend myself outward, firmly and with resolve. At the moment, though, I’m reluctant to leave the beauty of this strange season, the gentle possibility coiled in these emerging foliate hands. I will miss this time when all was gathered, held in potential, not yet sprung.

two tender red claw-like Japanese maples leaves on a background of vibrant green grasses and yellow buttercups

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
2nd June 2025

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candle

A candle lit on a summer evening in Sutherland.
What decadence, what superfluity.
What sustained need for flame.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
25th May 2025

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yellow

anticipating
the warm yellow flavour
the tang on my tongue

ribbed wooden cup full of rich yellow gorse petals on a grey mossy rock

Cnocnaneach, Assynt, Scotland
10th May 2025

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shadow

two bluebells casting long shadows on the kerbstone they're growing out of

Marlborough Road, Bounds Green, London, England
7th April 2025

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high fliers

Almost more startling than the jagged granite needles are the deft black birds which coast smoothly around them. They move like shadows, soundless and sure, dark wings and tails fanning out elegantly beneath us as we stare down from our perch. Mont Blanc rears above us, its rounded snowy cap strangely benign compared to the sheer faces and sharp fractures of the cliffs and spires which immediately surround us, and to which we are so improbably attached.

And how are we attached? How did this cluster of rooms and walkways ever get built onto this shard of red granite? As if stringing up a cable car was not challenge enough! We wander around the sunny terrasse in a daze of marvel and altitude-induced light-headedness. We ascended quickly – 2807 metres (9209 feet) in fifteen minutes – and after gazing up at these peaks for days, I’m finding it difficult to grasp that I’m really here, on the Aiguille du Midi, among the highest mountains in Europe.

I lean over the railing and watch the birds again. ‘Chocards’ my friend calls them, which I think must be choughs. I’ve never seen them before. They fly mostly in pairs, gliding buoyantly, their swift animal grace a surprising presence among these endless serrations of bare rock and snow. If I’d expected to see any birds this high, I would have assumed they’d be grand like eagles or dainty and snow-coloured like buntings, yet these most closely resemble jackdaws, birds I associate with towns and cities. Like jackdaws, they seem untroubled by our human encroachments, swooping over pinnacle and balcony alike. Unlike the procession of bulkily-clad skiers clattering their way to the slopes below, they are the true alpinists, utterly at ease in the austere drama of these mountains.

As I wish I was. I could stay here for eternity, with these radiating mountains and this dazzling sun which, at 3842 metres, I’m closer to than I’ve ever been. However, my legs feel heavy and my head is dizzy with height and brightness. I turn reluctantly to leave the terrasse. As I open the door, two of the birds fly close overhead and I see their pale neat beaks, their red legs and feet tucked tightly in. I step inside and walk slowly down towards the cable car but my mind, flight-filled, is light as a feather.

from the Aiguille du Midi

Téléphérique Aiguille du Midi, Chamonix, Haute-Savoie, France
6th April 2025

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Fox Point

This beach could be the end of the world. It isn’t, evidently: on all sides the horizon meets land – the dark spread lumps of the Summer Isles, the blue and white heights of Fisherfield, the tapering shelf of Rubha Reidh, the tall northern headlands of Skye, with the russet slopes of Isle Ristol, to my right, closing the circle.

It’s the light which gives this end-of-the-world sensation. It’s that northern light, that late November light, low, rare, and precious. I can see its source – the sun over the mountains there, maybe ten degrees above the horizon, filtered slightly through a smooth swathe of cloud – but the light doesn’t seem to have come from there. It seems to have come from some farther source, meeting us from great distance, or to be its own source, a light come mysteriously to rest here on these round pink boulders, on these frosted green mats of mossy grass, a light come, unbidden, to greet this quiet, aching heart.

I get up from my seat among the boulders and return to the little coastal path, following its slim line as it winds up and down over worn rocks and icy puddles and through the dark heather and crunchy bracken of the moor. As I approach Fox Point, the horizon opens: the mainland mountains extend themselves southward and in the south-west the Minch becomes visible, an empty line of cold silver. I walk round the headland to a narrow beach, a rocky cleft filled with boulders, and sit down at the back of it. The air holds a stiff chill and the frosted boulders glint softly in the pale gold shorelight. Across the water, the mountains – of Fisherfield and now Torridon – stand in a light of their own: a deep blue light, almost a dusk light, although it’s just past noon. The cloud is evenly drawn across the sky and the sun hangs in its upper stretches, white and ghostlike, almost translucent, behind its thin, striated veil. The mountains are only about ten miles across the loch but they look as if they exist in a different universe, on a coast utterly unreachable, a shore one could never sail to.

I stare over searchingly. It’s so unfathomable and beautiful that I don’t know what to do. I think of Kerouac’s phrase, ‘end of the land sadness end of the world gladness’. He wrote that in San Francisco, in a warm California summer night. This is another season, another century, another continent, another coast, but has anything changed? We’re still inexorably drawn to edges. In our hearts, oceans begin.

Fox Point / Rubha a’Mhadaidh-Ruaidh, Coigach, Scotland,
28th November 2024

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the stream

Out in the world. Glasgow on a Wednesday morning, Victoria Road, Govanhill. Low grey cloud after a false forecast of sun. I wander around trying to reorientate myself. My friend’s vintage clothes shop has vanished. My favourite cafe has become a refugee centre. The record shop cafe has become a yellow diner, complete with smiley American staff. Is it really that long since I was down this end of the street? In Queens Park, the magpies are still there, strutting and flitting in their handsome assured manner. I wonder how long magpies live, if these could be some of the same ones I’ve written about before, sliding smoothly up and down between the grass and the treetops, smart white fans snapping open and closed. I admire their clarity of movement, their crisp definition, their sure self-possession.

Back on the street, the human world seems less certain. It’s as if the street is undergoing an unseasonal moult, changing its plumage in patchy fits and starts. Above several shop fronts, painted signage from previous centuries has been uncovered or recreated, and there’s a lot of new signage which is weirdly old-fashioned. Garish fonts and hues from earlier decades compete with the alternative trend of twenty-first century Nordic minimalism. Of course, the charity shops persist: ‘shop here if you believe in children’, which I do. I saw one with my own eyes this very morning and, as I write this at my egg-yellow table, a gaggle of teenagers stroll past, puffer jackets on backs, mobile phones in hands. They’re much more glamorous than we used to be, with their dyed and straightened hair and polished faces. We saved our make-up for the weekends, for the Saturday nights going ’round town’, cramming in as many pubs and vodkas as we could manage. I heard they don’t drink to excess now, for fear of being filmed and ‘shared’ online. Better for their livers, I suppose, but I liked the forgetfulness of drinking, the possibility of a temporary loss of self and time.

In my own case, I don’t need to drink to get that now. Incurring a brain injury four years ago has done it for me. It hasn’t been catastrophic – I’m not amnesic – but I don’t feel like the same person. New memories fade quickly and old memories don’t always feel like mine. Reality has a different texture and, at a subtle level, it’s difficult to maintain a sense of continuity. All the more important, then, to stay in the stream of things; to not try to capture the moment but to absorb yourself in it. I settle up my bill and step back out into the street.

Govanhill, Glasgow, Scotland
13th November 2024