Category: hivernal

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afterwards

It always impresses me how bright the colour green is after snow. We’ve only had a week of snow cover, a fraction of the successive months I used to undergo in Quebec, yet as the grass reveals itself again it appears supernaturally viridian. The dullness of the day enhances the effect, the persistent rain and low grey cloud allowing the hues of the ground to come into their own, glowing with an inner luminance and seeming to rise out of the earth towards us.

I’ve loved having the snow. I’ve loved the simplicity and purity of the visual landscape and skyscape, the soft white carpet and laden charcoal-grey clouds completing each other in a quiet monochromatism. In Quebec, the snow stayed for so long that by February I would be longing for greenness, like a physical thirst. I don’t feel that now. Indeed, our snow spell has been all too brief. But something in me does feel relieved and enlivened—satiated—by the visible verdancy, the lurid green allure.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
11th January 2026

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downfall

I haven’t wanted the rain to come and wash away our lovely white blanket of snow, but it has its own beauty. The air is still and the raindrops pelt straight down in closely packed parallel lines which are unusually vertical. I stand at my caravan’s wide window and watch them, bouncing off the rounded sandstone copes on the wall or vanishing into the snow in front of me. Something about their straightness and linearity is very appealing, a change from the distracted, dancing drift of the snowflakes or the hard, angular momentum of the hail.

The sound is pleasing too, a precise patterning on the aluminium roof, gentler than the loud battering of the hail, more satisfying than the absent settling of the snow. The rain comes down directly, with thoroughness and vigour, and perhaps it’s that I’ve missed during these six days of snowy abandonment, when roads have been impassable, work delayed, and the world slowed and silenced.

The snow has been beautiful, soothing and serene, but it’s time now to move. It’s time now to wash our eyes and ears and step out.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
8th January 2026

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the first day

Heaven comes down to meet the earth in hard white balls,
sweeping curtains of swirling spheres,
bouncing as they strike ground, tree stump, woodpile,
gathering momentum as the wind strengthens
to form long battering blasts of horizontal hail—
       the air whitens,
       the sound against the caravan walls sharpens—
and then suddenly it’s quiet
and I look out to see
soft fluffy snowflakes
drifting gently all around us,
like benediction,
like a blessing for a new year.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
1st January 2026

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wild is the wind

I was afraid at first. Radio Scotland had talked all day about ‘Storm Bram’, the Met Office had upgraded its weather warning from yellow to amber, and XC Weather and Windy were in agreement, for once, that by midnight, when the wind veered to the south-west, Lochinver would be subject to winds close to 80 mph.

I’d done my best to prepare, tightly tying down the cover on my woodpile, taking in the hanging bird feeders, charging my phone, lamps and laptop in case of power failures, all the while anxiously eyeing the three tall ash trees near the south-west corner of the caravan.

By teatime the wind, still in the south-east, was picking up, its pitch intensifying and the caravan beginning to rattle. I waited for it to escalate, obsessively checking my weather apps to see how the low-pressure system was progressing, but instead there followed an an eerie lull.

At 11 o’clock, worn out with anticipation, I went to bed and waited for the onslaught. Now, as I lie in the darkness, I hear the wind rising and feel the caravan shuddering. My nerves tighten expectantly.

With some gales, like the unnamed south-easterly we had last week, the wind seems creatural, prowling around, probing and pouncing, snatching at the caravan or the corrugated plastic sheets on my woodpile, howling as it snaps twigs and branches from the ashes and flings them at the caravan where they strike with alarming resonance, the slightest glance of a twig amplified into a booming blow.

I brace myself for this but hear not the faintest clunk, nor any tearing bursts. In fact, there are no particular sounds at all—only a general roar, noisy but sonically diffuse, an unspecified loudness. Its volume continues to increase but with steady strength rather than fitful gusts. It, too, is a presence but an impersonal one, a great motion moving through the world, high and wide, so huge in extent it seems boundless.

I can feel it all around me, in the flexing of my flimsy walls, in the subtle lift in the floor, in the shaking of my bed. It’s like being in a small earthquake but instead of being beneath my feet, it’s everywhere: above, below, in all directions; an oncoming immensity, a great mass, enveloping, engulfing. And lying still, held in its surround-sound, I’m becoming part of it. I’m within the wind, in communion with it. For the first time today, I’m at peace.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
9th December 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