What a day of darkness! Dog whines, my alarm clock after darling has gone to work, leaving a loving cup of green tea by the bed. I sleep on knowing the dog will not allow this for long. Whine, whine. But Flora, I moan, it's still pitch dark. Even after a bath it was still pitch dark. By eight fifteen I have layered myself sufficiently against December and out we go, into the dawn. It is a slither of tangerine lying over the sea in the east and above it dark clouds. I stand on the sand and speak some words to the morning but it is only half an hour later that the lying down slice of tangerine has seeped the sky. For an hour it is painterly and hopeful then the clouds assail the light and come two thirty the dusk drops followed swiftly by night. For a few hours in this dark day I wrote so at least in this activity, the activity Freud said only creative writers can get away with and still be called sane (that of living in a fantasy world) I inhabited the world of warmth and light and colour.

And I wanted to write about things I saw as I walked out. What did I see in the half light? That they had filled the pot holes in the track. That my neighbour was not in. That a raft of gulls were racketing on the waves, getting tossed about in the wine coloured seaweed. That rain was splatting the stones. That the love heart I had made on the sand from stones last summer is still there - partly. That the wings from oyster catchers that for ages have been lying on the grass in more or less the same place have been moved.

Had I posted this last week it would have been more interesting. A few days ago - as I walked out ( to overdo the thing) I saw the antlers of a deer behind me on the horizon and in front of me, lifting its head from the sea was a seal. Deer, human, dog and seal - all poised for a minute or so, kind of geometrically lined up. As though we planned this line in space and time. Then we all moved on. Life, I thought, is like that. I like to notice this. May your fusions be to the good. x