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Letter from Lanzarote

I sit under cool calm clouds – greyish and soft and medium weight – and watch bright white lines forming and diminishing out on the flat grey surface of the sea. The lines are new. Before they appeared, a whole patch of sea was blazing, as if the finely rippled surface had been fused into a plate of sheer platinum. Then, as the sun retreated towards Africa, the plate dissolved and the lines appeared. They shine, elongating and contracting, only near the horizon. Some of the lines are small and such concentrated white that they look like the foam of tiny distant breakers. However, the surrounding sea is too flat and peaceable to generate such froth and, although the lines change in size, the whiteness itself holds and doesn’t fold in.

If I could bear myself that brightly for so long –

palm trees silhouetted against a sun-shone sea

Puerto del Carmen, Lanzarote, Canary Islands
2nd February 2015

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settled

snow with a few gold grass stalks poking through

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

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River Inver

The whitest water I’ve ever seen was at a “minor waterfall” near Mount Fuji in Japan. It wasn’t just the whitest water, it was the whitest whiteness I’ve ever seen, wild and tumbling in a rapid thrash of motion, shattering like diamonds as it smashed round the rocks, poured over, frothed down.

The River Inver is brown in its depths, its spuming foam yellowish as it roars on. But still – the illuminate flashes, the diamond fragments scattering –

River Inver, Assynt, Scotland
28th October 2024

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Siberia

It feels quiet up here, and protected, as if I am insulated within the inarticulate drone of the plane. Above, the air is blue. Beneath, the mountains fold and the plains stretch themselves out, and across them, the landscape is writing itself.

It begins first as one line, an elegant calligraphed curl scrolling out across the horizontal distance; then proliferates, until there are several lines, breaking and branching from each other, scooping and scrawling in liquid loops of sunlit gold.

They look a little like Arabic forms, like continuing sentences, slowly writhing on; scribed and scribbling, delicate yet definite. The spread plains between them are pocked – punctuated – with still water, like ink spilt and spattered and gathering into myriad tiny pools.

As we fly further north, snow softens the mounds and valleys and the curves unwind, becoming thick and white, and finally coalescing into great lakes, held high on the bronze plates of the sun.

It is quiet up here. No-one is talking since most of the plane’s inhabitants are sleeping. But my eyes are alive with this beautiful unspoken language, this secret script of low sunlit water and wide wind-smoothed snow.

Flying over Siberia
21st October 2014