Friday, 19 December 2008


When you live in the remote Scottish Highlands with only an oil rig to lighten the view from the window, and when you spend most of the day in some fantasy writer's space and when even the real world is edging on the fantistic, being of sea and sand and stone and waves and cliffs and dear and seals, you can get to feel as though the hip, clever, cultural bus is going on down the road and you ain't on it. Ain't even close to catching it. Then the question tugs and challenges - well? And if that hip-street-wise-arty-culture-laden bus you imagine did stop - would you get on? Um!

Yes - if I could get on and off. That's how it seems to sit. Living the rural life, hens out back clucking and waves out front sucking and me in between - mostly liking this life - and then these days when I just have to click on some hip blog and there it is - the world where people live in cities, go to lectures, art galleries, workshops, seem so up there and out there and engaging with the witty and wonderful.

I pull on my wellies, rain trousers, rain jacket, hat or two, scarf a mile long and on days like today tip my head earthwards and strain into the wind. Slosh, slosh, boots hitting down through mud and rain. Three dear startled by dog, turn and become silhouettes on the rim of hill. Dead seal is tossed about by waves, its body blown up, floating but not brought into shore. I see more oyster catchers than folk.

There is something about, or not about, the beach, that makes it hard to bring on the Christmas feeling. Beach in winter, seaweed strewn. I have taken to writing poetry in the sand - scoring words with sticks. Words where you are unsure what will come next, even what letter. They are public art works for the two other dog walkers because the tide has not erased them. So - as we dip into the solstice in the far north accept my poetry from the sand -

poem 1 - scaffold turn into sugar. poem 2 - when the night jumps. poem 3 - such wild holds back the numb and smashes it into life.

As read by gulls and oyster catchers in the far north x happy solstice.x

2 comments:

Reading the Signs said...

- and as read by yours truly,
Reading the Signs
xx

north said...

darling signs - the dead seal I saw yesterday tossed about in sea has now arrived - plonk - right in front of house. A gift of its final resting place?