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marina

I sent photos of the marina: the still water brightly gleaming, the hills snow-covered in the distance, the boat bathed in soft late afternoon sunlight. I invited them to come and visit, telling them of how spectacular the sunset had been and adding that we still have some Aberlour aboard. Later I tucked myself into a thick downy cover beside a slowly ticking wood fire and thought snugly of them over there on the mainland, held in Glasgow’s bright busy lights.

I thought I would slide quickly into a deep sleep but instead I listened to the wind pick up and wheech round the breakwater, the halyard of the boat in the next berth start clacking against its mast; felt the waves start slapping, felt the boat begin its classic dockside jerk and sway. In the morning I woke cold and underslept and significantly less smug. But then the water stilled itself, the hills glowed rosy in the morning sun and, walking out from the marina a few hours later, a small white flower stood pink-edged against the blue twilight chill.

Boat life. Nothing beats it.

pink-tinged daisy flower seen from the side in front of blue sky, blue water and low dark hills in twilight

Port Bannatyne, Isle of Bute, Argyll, Scotland
22nd November 2016

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place

tiny yellow maple leaf sitting upside down on a large yellow maple leaf in the morning sun

Yellow is an undemanding colour, less emotive than red, yet no less intense. It comes to meet you, levelly, entering you somewhere beneath your turbulent heart. You let it in and sit with it and you find that, wherever you have been, you now have a place to come to. Like a sheltered patch in a city park beneath a sugar maple carpeted with russet and yellow leaves. You don’t gather up handfuls of them, the way you would if they were red, but just sit and watch the shafts of sunlight illuminating them intermittently, softly picking out their curled points and broad palms. This is where you are now. It’s a fine autumn morning in the north and nothing else is required.

Queen’s Park, Glasgow, Scotland
18th October 2016

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Suileag

The passing sunlight makes a cross on the worn wooden floor of the bothy. Outside the great mount of Suilven heaves around the winds.

Sun. Hill. Shelter.
Observance. Love. Relief.

simple cross shadow on old wooden floor illuminating its worn grain

Suileag bothy, Assynt, Scotland
10th September 2016

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tasks

Everything’s done that needs to be. The hills are heaped up, the moors stripped down, the beaches lovingly spread. The deer are taking care of themselves, ambling in their steady streams down and up the slopes.

There’s nothing to do here.

What a relief.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
3rd September 2016

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Tangasdale beach

marram grass blowing in the wind with fine pale sand beyond

The forewaves run to and from each other, lapping and overlapping in little rippling frills. The sand shelves steeply in a concave curve so that the waves running shorewards rebound diagonally, criss-crossing back through the incoming waves in a series of interlocking diamonds.

Occasionally simultaneous groups of wavelets collide, stop moving, and then fibrillate for a few moments, like a thousand tiny hands upwaving. My chest flutters tremulously in tandem. It’s unbelievably beautiful. And the delights don’t end. Just a few paces further along the beach, a slim freshwater channel is carved in the sand and, as waves flow in over its outgoing stream, their rims curl gently under it, as if they’re cradling the stream, folding themselves around it in light white rolls of froth.

Beyond this channel the sea spreads thinly over a shallow sandbar, swelling out roundly and withdrawing, leaving a trailing edge of lacy bubbles, like a delicate shawl being strewn out and slowly gathered in. Like my heart being strewn out and slowly gathered in, and returned to me, carefully washed and intricately sewn.

Tangasdale beach, Barra, Western Isles / Barraigh, Eilean Siar, Scotland
13th August 2016

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sunset

sun and shadow of window frame on stretched skin of vertically mounted taiko

slow beats in the slow sunset
warm sticks held in heated hands

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
7th July 2016