A frost meadow lies between the spreading oak trees and the slim birches, great palmfuls of leaves papering over the dew-sharpened blades, each of which is itself furred by myriad tiny hairs of frost, glittering in the first light, sun upon sword upon sward.
Queen’s Park, Glasgow, Scotland
23rd February 2016
The sun is a foreign thing, rising surprisingly from a puffy cloud on the Irish sea, limpid, lucent and pale, pale golden; a strange foreign thing, washing itself through rushes of rain as the car ferry reaches the shore, then flooding the low southern fields till all is glowing, green glowing, like a secret spring in the middle of winter.
Four, five, six weeks, we’ve had a drought of light, living dimly in the grey-ceilinged cloud of our Welsh valley, yet over here on Irish shores we are travelling the day with this bright foreign thing, following its arc as it slowly unwinds around the gentle Irish slopes, and gratefully soaking in its warm lustre.
It cools though, as it unwinds, as it gradually wanes, now sinking over the tidal river, tangling itself in the dark brown trees, anchoring itself in the muddy earthen banks. Down it goes, its illumination now cold and white. Oh, but still – illumination!
Drake’s Pool, Crosshaven, County Cork, Ireland
10th December 2015
After nights and days of rain the room is silent when we wake, but we open the curtains to a dense white mist. It presses in against the long window panes, cocooning us in a wet softness. The houses across the street are dimly apparent but the rooftops and hillsides beyond have vanished. There’s just what’s immediately here.
It reminds me of certain winter mornings in Montreal when I would wake to find my old un-double-glazed windows covered in a layer of frost. The frost was thick enough to be opaque, screening out the view of the apartment block opposite and giving me a rare sensation of privacy. And as the sun rose above the apartments, my frosted panes would become suffused with a gentle light, and the room would suddenly seem holy, like a small chapel glowing within patterned glass windows – because, when you looked closely, you saw the frost was a latticework, incredibly intricate, of intertwining fern-like fronds.
Our mist windows are uniform in comparison, and dull rather than illuminate, a damp blank haze. Yet still we have the temporary intimacy of insulation from the world, that depthless proximity which allows us to notice what we usually overlook, to feel what we usually forget to: quiet hovering glances, the warm breath of each of us, near.
Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
11th November 2015
Cwm Garw, Glamorgan, South Wales
13th March 2015
The world has been settled with a soft kindness. The sun glows with it. The pink tinge of the dawn lingers. We all feel a little tender. Our cups of tea steam up the windows, diffusing the whiteness outside into a gentle haze.
When I worked in a cafe in Montreal, we noticed that people were different the first morning it snowed. They would drift in off the street, snowflakes still falling from their hats and hair, looking around as if in a slight daze, the women leaning their heads a little wistfully, the men asking for their coffee in a quieter voice.
The atmosphere seemed to become a bit romantic and, when I could, I would put Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo and although we didn’t dance it felt like we were all yearning to – to slowly twirl each other around the pastries and croissants, and touch each other on the cheek, and melt a little…
Cwm Garw, South Wales
14th January 2024
Cwm Garw, South Wales
19th October 2014
The whiteness of Scottish winters is on the go. Not held static with ice or slowly settling with heavy snows but moving: slim streams rushing down hillsides, big sea rollers whipping off into windy spray and blowing foam, sudden batterings of hail. Overhead too everything is in motion: thick white clouds scudding across the sky, the swift belly-white of the gulls fleering around beneath. When there is snow, it comes and goes; a dusting here, a gully-full there, before it’s rained out, wind-scoured, leaving only bleached stones and bones.
And the whiteness of Scottish winters is noisy. None of the soft muffling of snowfall or low creaking of ice. Our whiteness roars and rumbles: beaching waves, rapid rivers, the high clamour of waterfalls, the bright clattering of frozen rain. Scotland’s whiteness throws itself in your face and into your ears. It whips and lashes.
Even the elegant pale-limbed birches wave energetically alongside the running water, although occasionally you come upon the stillness of a white sea-washed stone resting silently at the head of the tide, cast up, waiting for the pull of the travelling moon.
Assynt, Scotland
6th March 2014
River Inver, Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
1st March 2014
In Eastern Canada winter descends from the skies upon the land and holds it fast in freezing sheets of snow and ice sheared by bitter winds. Here it’s less extreme and is more as if the earth itself is pulling in, letting its foliage wither and dwindle while it gradually gathers in its strength.
Now, January, wet and sodden, it has fully drawn into itself, become cold, enclosed, turned inward, leaving only the sun to face us. Leaving only the sun, from distance, to show –
The earth is beautiful like this and I say ‘earth’ because in this winter we are clearly aware of earth, bare earth – dear earth! – stripped of worldliness. We are exposed to earth. No intervening sensuality: all sensations here are thin, pared, elusive but not illusory. Nothing in the air; no thickening of petals and perfumes, no drifting of leaves, no falling of snow, no covering on the ground to conceal from us what we tread upon. We are not within a world – a dreamy realm – of summer, autumn, season, time. In this winter we walk upon earth, and there is nothing to impede us, no life to wade through. There is nothing else except the sun, to inform us.
Nothing else except the sun and, devoid of decoration, the whole hold of this round earth.
Nothing else except the sun, and it treats us with a rare tenderness, illuminating the earth gently, and with a delicacy that is absent in the months of pouring summer abandon; as if patiently coaxing us to notice the elemental details.
With infinite care, the sun shows us. How lucky we are. How lucky we are to have inherited the earth, and the gravity that binds us to it.
Glasgow, Scotland
January 2007/2013
Strathendrick, Stirlingshire, Scotland
20th December 2012