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the stream

Out in the world. Glasgow on a Wednesday morning, Victoria Road, Govanhill. Low grey cloud after a false forecast of sun. I wander around trying to reorientate myself. My friend’s vintage clothes shop has vanished. My favourite cafe has become a refugee centre. The record shop cafe has become a yellow diner, complete with smiley American staff. Is it really that long since I was down this end of the street? In Queens Park, the magpies are still there, strutting and flitting in their handsome assured manner. I wonder how long magpies live, if these could be some of the same ones I’ve written about before, sliding smoothly up and down between the grass and the treetops, smart white fans snapping open and closed. I admire their clarity of movement, their crisp definition, their sure self-possession.

Back on the street, the human world seems less certain. It’s as if the street is undergoing an unseasonal moult, changing its plumage in patchy fits and starts. Above several shop fronts, painted signage from previous centuries has been uncovered or recreated, and there’s a lot of new signage which is weirdly old-fashioned. Garish fonts and hues from earlier decades compete with the alternative trend of twenty-first century Nordic minimalism. Of course, the charity shops persist: ‘shop here if you believe in children’, which I do. I saw one with my own eyes this very morning and, as I write this at my egg-yellow table, a gaggle of teenagers stroll past, puffer jackets on backs, mobile phones in hands. They’re much more glamorous than we used to be, with their dyed and straightened hair and polished faces. We saved our make-up for the weekends, for the Saturday nights going ’round town’, cramming in as many pubs and vodkas as we could manage. I heard they don’t drink to excess now, for fear of being filmed and ‘shared’ online. Better for their livers, I suppose, but I liked the forgetfulness of drinking, the possibility of a temporary loss of self and time.

In my own case, I don’t need to drink to get that now. Incurring a brain injury four years ago has done it for me. It hasn’t been catastrophic – I’m not amnesic – but I don’t feel like the same person. New memories fade quickly and old memories don’t always feel like mine. Reality has a different texture and, at a subtle level, it’s difficult to maintain a sense of continuity. All the more important, then, to stay in the stream of things; to not try to capture the moment but to absorb yourself in it. I settle up my bill and step back out into the street.

Govanhill, Glasgow, Scotland
13th November 2024

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halo

silently
for twenty minutes or so
the sun explodes

a luminous shockwave
holding steady
at an angular distance of twenty-two degrees

is it a portent –
an angel or an apocalypse?
or is it all projection

    dispersion
          refraction?

high in the atmosphere
tiny hexagonal columns
          of ice

bending the sunlight
into each of our skyward gazes
beauty in the eyes of the beholden

a 22° halo forming a ring of light around the sun which has a slight shadow around it, inside the halo, and looks as thought it's exploding, with a contrail cutting a diagonal swathe of cloud in front

22° halo, seen from Spidean Coinich, Assynt, Scotland
3rd October 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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carrots

I see them every evening when I go to pull the blind on the side window of my caravan living room. Its frame perfectly frames them, hundreds of white flower heads crowding towards me in the half-light. Each one is a disc, itself composed of a hundred-odd tiny white five-petalled florets, and they seem to me like a miracle, these tall bustling blossoms which appeared all of a sudden this July.

I had to wait until they flowered to confidently identify them – wild carrot – and since the first one began to show its petals, they’ve exploded in number and inflorescence with new ones shooting up or opening almost daily. There are none in the immediate vicinity so they must have come from the native wildflower seed mix I dimly remember scattering in various parts of the garden a couple of years ago. There seems to have been no trace of them until this summer but apparently they flower in their second summer and the first summer grow a basal rosette of leaves which I do vaguely remember noticing last year. They’re a welcome surprise, if a bit bizarre, this lone stand of flowers bristling on the end of the low rise beside my caravan. They’re so high and gangly, they look a touch demented, a cubic metre of feathery flowery madness.

They come into their own in the dusk, their round white umbels like speckled moons floating above the settling darkness, seeming to hold a lucence of their own as the light from the sky seeps away. I stand and gaze at them, entranced, another moon face glowing through the glass. I often end up not closing the blind at all but settling myself down on the sofa beside the window and glancing out at them repeatedly as I write or read, enjoying their floral companionship in the encroaching night.

There’s something compelling about seeing white flowers at night. Once, when I was walking through the New Town in Edinburgh late in the evening, I came upon an arch of white roses woven over one of the gates of the private parks. I assumed there had been a wedding, and was so taken by the image that I carried white roses at my own wedding, in the deep cold of a Canadian winter a few months later.

Eventually the long winter melted, suddenly and rapidly, into summer, and as I struggled with the oppressive heat and blackness of the Montreal evenings, I took great solace in the night flowers. There were many, blooming forth from the tiny profusive gardens that lined the neighbourhood sidewalks, and I found them so sensual, just looking at them was a visual caress. The white ones captured me particularly, their pale blooms seeming to loom at me, almost leer at me, as I’d stroll past on my slow way home from the bar. I’d sometimes trail my fingers against them, the gentle touch of their petals cooling and soothing me as the humid air pressed stickily on my bare arms and calves.

Here, thirteen degrees further north and a few thousand miles east, the summer has been cold and windy and the south-westerly gales that have been battering us for weeks have pushed the long stalks of my carrots over so that they really do loom at me as I approach with my gaze. They lean in to me as I go to the window, and beckon me out, open-handed, into the night.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
16th August 2024

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invitation

sepals spread
   petals parted
      stigmatic lip curling
             stickily
      in wait

close-up of pale creamy petalled iris covered in large clear beads of rain

Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, Scotland
5th June 2024

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Beinn Dearg

It was a long walk in to the mountain, the red mountain so-called, though the stone was mostly weathered a silvery grey. Dark shadowed cliffs loomed up beside me as I wound my way up the glen, a bonny brown burn running beneath them, rushing over boulders and dropping off ledges in frothy white streams. At the foot of the steepest cliff, cradled in a corrie, lay a shallow lochan, its floor half-covered in soft weed which shone a gentle green in the sunlight.

I walked on, zigzagging up to the bealach below the summit, veering off the path halfway up to investigate a huge white stripe in the hillside which turned out to be a hefty vein of quartz. There had been lumps and flakes of quartz dotting the path and slim veins embedded in occasional boulders but this was a whole slab of quartz, a huge shelf of it. Big chunks lay broken loose beneath it, their edges razor-sharp as if freshly splintered. Indeed the whole mass of it looked newly formed, brittle and bright and clean. Its texture was slightly rough to the touch but shiny, like the glassy glaze of congealed snow.

I looked up at the cliffs beneath the summit ridge, which were close now. Another short stripe of quartz cut high up across them and on the grassy slopes above were slung a couple of swathes of snow. Eager for coolness on this hot day, I scrambled upwards, following the improbable stone wall which climbed from a lochan on the bealach straight up the side of the hill almost to the summit before turning neatly to the right to run above the cliffs. As I ascended, the mountain reddened, the grey rock underfoot giving way to a peachy-orange tint where the stones had been disturbed or the ground worn by footfall. I understood its name now but it was the whiteness which most compelled me and after resting at the summit cairn, I headed back to the wall, clambering over a gap to take a handful and mouthful of snow.

Refreshed, I continued alongside the wall. Well-weathered and evidently very old, it was in remarkably good shape, six foot high in stretches and running for several miles with only occasional collapsed sections. I marvelled at it as I followed its seemingly endless length down the westward spine of the mountain: a single skin construction of large heavy slabs stacked mostly vertically; huge slabs, although they wouldn’t have had to carry them far given the boulderfield the wall ran through. I held onto the wall frequently for physical and moral support as I picked my down the horizontal maze of prone stone until finally it ended at a rusted iron fence post, and I scrambled and slid down the steep heathery slopes to join the path again.

Covered in sweat and mud and presumably ticks, I looked for a place to cross the burn and came upon a little scooped pool where the water settled before tipping over a smooth lip. Sheltered from almost every angle, I stripped off and slipped in, letting the water lap over me, soothing my heated, scratched skin as the evening sun slid slowly down the sky.

I watched the white froth of the water entering the pool and felt with my foot the small vein of quartz that flowed through the pool’s floor, and thought of the snow, the memory of it cold on my tongue. What height, what whiteness! If the summit was the peak of the walk, this was its delicious denouement. And yet it was when ambling back down the path and re-entering the forestry plantation at the foot of the glen that I was most utterly enthralled.

To my right, amid the tall conifers, was a walled enclosure. Small ruined buildings edged its southern side but the wall itself was mostly intact and held a small field almost entirely carpeted in bluebells. I walked in and stood in a small clearing in the centre. The sun was leaving and in the cool shadow, the colour seemed to hover, scented, in the air.

I stood there for some time, a contentment settling upon me, and such a sense of peace, of deep blue peace. I could have stood there forever. All the glories of the day gathered there in the evening light, in the frilly blue haze, which was punctuated here and there with small patches of white. I wondered what the white flower could be but on looking closer discovered it was clutches of bluebells, pure white bluebells, the tender curls of their living flesh breathing in the field with me, the softest and finest of all the day’s treasures.

close-up of vertically stacked stone wall with the pale blue sky shining through its gaps

Beinn Dearg, Loch Broom, Wester Ross, Scotland
15th May 2024