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daffodils

Perth is a snowdrop festival: between the roots of trees in gardens, in the cracked courtyard of a derelict hotel and all along the banks of the Tay they gather, keeping company with the congregations of patchily-plumed black-headed gulls, which swoop and flutter over the river and its offerings of soggy bread.

The snowdrops are shy, or coy, hanging their heads delicately, while the crocuses burst rudely through beside them, pungent purple buds bulging skywards like proud phalluses. I try to prise one open but they’re holding their petals tightly closed, keeping their egg-yolk yellow insides stiffly guarded for now.

One small bunch of daffodils has come out, however – strangely early as they haven’t begun to open anywhere else on the river banks, nor were any open in warmer South Wales when we left yesterday morning on St David’s Day. They stand about nonchalantly in their frilly jaune abandon. And wee kids are out too in bright yellow vests, giggling at the gulls while they’re being shepherded about, enjoying a fluorescent florescence of their own. It’s all happening here. The season curls its yellow lip and coils, waiting to spring.

small clutch of daffodils with yellow-vested children in distance behind

Perth, Scotland
2nd March 2015

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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