Category: water

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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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liquidity

Another day, another city. Edinburgh, the Water of Leith. The bonny brown ribbon running through the city with its familiar metallic smell, the sun gleaming orange in the water. I recall my childhood at the foot of the Pentlands, where the river begins, playing in the parks and on the old railway line that ran alongside it, then, when I worked at the university, exploring the river paths that passed by my small flat in Stockbridge.

As I stroll into Saunders Street, I come upon a former university colleague, now, I discover, a recently retired professor. We discuss some of the people I used to know; she recounts the varied courses they’ve taken. Times and places, times and people. Water carrying it all along. A tear sits on her check, the cool weather she tells me. I feel liquid inside, the river of memory momentarily stopped, welling up, reminding me of its constancy, its resilience, its renewing presence.

Stockbridge, Edinburgh, Scotland
14th November 2024

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autumn

shaking aspen
shivering ripples
we quiver on the cusp

Unnamed lochan at Ardroe, Assynt, Scotland
4th September 2024

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heat

It’s like the sultry summer days when I lived in Montreal, heat so thick your skin’s running with sweat,and all your thirsts want slaking. You’re heavy with desire and you want to do something about it but the sun’s pressing in relentlessly and your will is liquefying and really all you can do is wait: wait for the humidity to build, wait for the humidity to break, and then….

First there’s the thunder – the clap, the flash, the weighted brightness – and then comes the rain. You’re standing out in it, lying out in it, feeling it patter all over your body like a thousand darting tongues; touching, tasting, quenching the heat of you, until you sigh and subside and gratefully dissolve.

Those were the days, and this is one now, although in this case the thunder is a low rumble rather than a violent crash, and the sky isn’t dense purple but medium-grey, and the rain isn’t filling the hot street with warmed flooding water: this is a Scottish summer, more temperate in all its aspects. Yet still the heat comes in, still the rain insists.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
13th June 2023

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afloat

This is where I am at home. And, after all these years of absence and homesickness, it’s not on the land of Scotland at all. It’s on this sea loch.

It struck me a few days ago when I was out in the tender on one of my wee rowings-about. It was a bit choppy and I was pulling towards my usual pausing place midway between the harbour headland and the loch’s southern shore – where I’m in the habit of drawing in the oars and laying my head back on the bow – when it occurred to me that, out here in the middle of the loch, I felt perfectly at home.

It’s not that I don’t usually feel at ease here. I’ve been living aboard our sailboat in this harbour, on and off, for years, and I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed our marginal position, tethered between the mountains and the Minch, between the evolving dock community and the local life of the village: I’ve always been most at ease on the edges of things. I’ve also come to feel very at home on the boat itself. Sailing the seas or coorying up in sheltered havens, its familiar fibreglass hull has become a cocoon, a container, not just for myself but for the skipper whose presence is soaked into every inch of it; a reliable and sea-kindly vessel bearing us onward together.

I’m sitting aboard the boat as I write this on a long still summer evening. The sun has just set and the northern sky is a thin lemon yellow and the sandstone faces of the mountains in the east glow pinkishly in the last of the light. The air is utterly clear and the water in the loch is glossy pink, yellow, and black-green, and almost mirror-flat. I feel at home right now, perched in the companionway, poised between these worlds of water, sky, mountains and folk, but the realisation I had out on the loch in the tender is more powerful. It means that my ability to feel at home here, to feel a sense – however slender – of belonging, does not depend on a particular boat or a particular location or particular company. It depends on me being afloat.

It’s time to find my own craft.

Loch Inver, Assynt, Scotland
9th July 2021