yer coats at the door

As they say meaning oot ye gang. Wanna come walk with me - this walking enjoyed in the vast fields and wild places of the imagination. Coat on, hat and scarf? Then let us go.

Dawn is a thin line of pale blue light across the eastern sea. The night unpeels. The first glimmers of light say day is on the way. Outside now and the small bird of prey that was busy in the tufts of grass flies up, disturbed by us. Despite last night's million stars ther is no frost this morning. We are not breaking glass in puddles as we walk. We are following the dirt track that leads round to the beach and stepping out the circulation moves through the body, breath too is filling us with sea and wind and morning. We climb the small track that leads upwards/ We can hear the sea before we see it then we are up tothe rim and there she lies = spread out flat and crinkled and enormous before us. Tide is far out. waves break white onto the stony and sandy beach. Cormorants dive rubbery necks under the crest of a wave. We are breathing fuller now and for your sake a seal breaks the surface of the sea and stares at you. For a second your eyes meet then she is gone but she is playful and curious. She'll follow us along the shore. I look up the hillside where the brae bends like a knuckle and there on the dawn pale horizon stand three young deer. I watch them. They watch us but you are busy watching the seal. Look behind you, I say without making sudden movements, wanting them to stay long enough for their silhouettes to etch themselves on your memory so they will stay with you as the seal will stay with you as the sea and the air and the bright orange sun now rising from the sea will stay with you. The heron is at his perch on the stone in the hillside. For a while we pose no threat. He is still as the rock he stands on, patient as the earth, alert as the day, then he lifts off, suddenly now a thing of movement and air - his slow heavy wings take him away. And a huddle of oyster catchers rise orange beaked and white bellied over the sea, crying their high pitched song. And through a hole in the rock at the side of the cave we spy the sun. May each walk unveil some mystery.

january

The January man he walks abroad with coats of wool and boots of leather



Recalling sunrise on the solstice - that's her, bursting out of the sea.


The January woman on the other hand slips into her purple velvet dress from Phase Eight that once many january's past cost a small fortune. And what for, say the woman of February, March and May? The Burns Supper she hoots adding a fling and a whee at the end of the line, in practise for the twirl in an eightsome reel. Burns and I, I anyway like to imagine, have much in common - we are both born under the idealistic sign of Aquarius and both born into the year '59. Robert Burns is almost exactly 200 years older than I. We both are fired up by the word freedom and like what poetry does to the heart.


So as I prepare to strike my dagger into the heart of the haggis and raise a dram to the people's poet who has meant more to Scottish people than Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth himself let it be his words I give you here and may Obama and the ressurrection of credit crunch be fuelled by that same spirit;


is there for honest poverty that hangs his head and a' that


the coward slave we pass him by, we dare be poor for a' that


for a' that and a' that, our toils obscure and a' that


the honest man, though ere sae poor, is King o' men for a' that





yea see yon birkie ca'd a lord, whae struts an stares an a' that


though hundreds worship at his word he's but a coof fir a' that


for a' that an a' that, their dignities an a' that


the man o' independant mind, he looks and laughs at a' that





so let us pray that come it may as come it will for a' that


that sense and worth o'er a' the earth will bear the gree and a' that


for a' that an a' that, it's comin' yet for a' that


that man tae man the warld oer shall brothers be for a' that.

sea and silence

It's only being away from the sea I realise how constant and loud its crashing, sighing, breaking is. On a calm winter solstice down in the Scottish borders a few of us did a stint of the Southern Upland Way. It was so different to be deep in the hills and what struck me most was the huge silence, almost loud in its complete absence of sound. Which made me cognisant of the fact that, living yards from the north sea, sound is always there, even with double glazing. Now as I sit at the computer, positioned upstairs by the window so I can flit from screen to sea, I am aware of this background of massive watery heart-beat. I wonder what it does to my own?

Sei-Shonagan, Japanese lady of long ago, had a pillow book. In it she wrote things. Things that pass quickly - spring, summer, fall, winter, a sailing ship, youth...things that are red, startle etc.

So - taking a leaf from the lady of Japan - things that breathe - the sea, my duvet, geyser in Iceland, custard boiling, flower turned to the sun, jelly, ink, the quivering arrow, a song bursting into the cathedral, good poetry, the plants after rain, wood in the sun...

wind - gales - whip the sea - hens stagger against it and man and self plus dog take to the hills - an hour later I am exhausted. The Chinese have a name for it - poisoned by wind!

I was once - having lived in London and returned North for a few days. My uncle took me for a walk across the forth road bridge. The wind it did most fiercely blow. Afterwards I felt zonked as though my head was too blown through. I think I had to sit down and recover for hours.

So we are used or unused to breath. In London in them days I was in the habit of not breathing - it was (cycling through the city from Brixton to Regent's Park daily) not recommended. You wrapped yourself in a scarf and tried only to snatch at air but not take it in deeply.

A new year's resolution - to breath more. To open windows. To be part of the great exchange.

Happy wind to you. x

Happy Epiphany
In Russia I believe they are having Christmas. Here the cold of yesterday is less so and the layers needed to brave the elements less than of late. I waddle to the beach, waddle round the harbour, feel slim within all this but so few see! Did I have an epiphany moment? Yes - spent ages setting up a new printer and was about to send it back all righteous and pissed off when eventually saw I had not removed one piece of sellotape that was holding back the whole operation. Ha-ha! We have words. It clicks into action after an hour of incomprehension and it works. Not perhaps much of an epiphany moment in the grand scheme of things. I saw a huge fat rainbow. I learnt that Iris is the Greek Goddess of the rainbow. I saw that my hen with the broken leg (dog attack - not my dog) strayed far today and seems to be getting through this.
Perhaps that's enough of forced epiphanies.
I had a job typing for an elderly lady once. I remember she had hand written something she called the epiphany lectures and I typed them up on an old typewriter in her old house in North London and outside it was icy and she was afraid of slipping on the path and everything smelt old and musty. I wanted to be a writer and I wondered what I was doing in an old women's house typing? But also felt strangely priveledged to be typing up - the epiphany lectures. Like I was playing my part in something rather wise that I didn't understand but at least I was showing up, doing something, and getting paid.
That was an epiphany a long time ago. She was ancient then. Are there still old houses dark with mahogony and thick with moth balls and furniture polish and the slow ticking of a grandfather clock? Life can be so full of coversations, laughter, busy things, doing things, going places, digging gardens, making cakes but somehow methinks when so much of all this fades it will be these vague dream-like images that will remain - you know - the catalogue we each carry of - a bannister sloping into a green hall, the whiff of cinammon, the sudden dash of a white poodle, the splash of water into a tub, the gauze blowing up as the wind steals through the open window. Those things.

Happy New Year Brave World
REd walls, christmas lights, a wooden stable in the window with a little white cloth draped over for snow. I remember the sense of wonder I felt at the shoebox my mother transformed into a stable and cotton wool since then took on the possibility of magic. I'm back in her house - I know festivities have almost past but this bloody cold bug hasn't. I didn't know chests could rattle like a bag of stones shaken in an intruder's face. Though there is the family feeling and the Christmas feeling I hold onto still being here and not four hundred miles north. Almost fifty years old and still needing tae be a wee lassie sometimes. Like Christmas time. And they are moving - my mother's husband contracted (don't know if that's the right word in this context) dementia (after a car crash) and so they are off to a retirement village. Nice place. Community. Hot tub even. Still, here I am, taking things off the wall. Wandering through rooms and remembering. Take anything you want, my mother says. It is like being in a huge shop where everything is free!
Often I see 'stuff' as just that, like a burden. But here, coughing and sniffing and slowing down, packing boxes, I see it isn't that at all. All these pictures, works of art, photos, trinkets, ornaments, souvenirs froms friends and countries make up a home with warmth and character.
And here I am staring at my dear Grandmother looking beautiful in sepia tones at about the age of nineteen when she was in service. It must have been her day off. And she's dressed for the occasion and holding a scroll in her hand which the photographer saw fit. Above this girl is the same woman perhaps seventy years later smiling and looking also beautiful. Beside that there is one more photo of my grandmother, with a cloch hat pulled down and she is walking with my grandfather. He is dapper with a bowler hat on and in the picture he is pulling at his pocket watch. He made watches - and played violin - and drink to excess - and at the time of this photo had a wife elsewhere, of course unknown to grandmother. I have inherited many stories about this errant grandfather - and here he is now immortalised in sepia tones on some Edinburgh street with a wife far younger than himself and forever they will be going down the road and he'll be fingering his watch and she'll be clutching a bag under her arm and throwing him a look.
happy new year - to dead, alive and not yet born x