November gallops. The first fourteen days pass in what feels like a week and the next fourteen last for around five days and then the month is almost spent. Today is the last penny in the purse. It’s the darkest month too. I know that on paper December is darker, but December disguises itself with … Continue reading My November Guest
Look at her, sitting there at her desk in the glow of the screen not noticing the daylight fading. She loves that desk. It will soon be one year old. One year to her. It is much older than that. The day she bought it was a good day: car passed its MOT, she drove … Continue reading Look at Her
I’ve been travelling on trains these last few weeks. First, an early morning train from Antrim to Portrush, the sun not long up, mist lying in patches on the fields. It looks like the land is draped in a soft, white muslin cloth, which makes everything appear dreamy: half-real, half-apparition. A slick of dew coats … Continue reading I Love Trains
They say after every seven years of life, there is a shift. Some might say it is far greater than a shift, it is a transformation. After seven years, every cell of one’s skin has been shed, regenerated, and a new person is born. Seven is the mystical number linked to the idea of completion … Continue reading Every Seven Years
Kate, my niece, is making a Recency-style Spencer jacket; she downloaded the pattern from the internet. ‘It’s spare on instructions,’ she tells me. ‘It says things like – then attach the arm, and not a word more.’ She is a surgeon with fabric, and can, somehow, execute this reverse amputation with minimum trial and error and … Continue reading Unpick and Start Again
It is a letting go time of year. The light and leaves are dropping, the colours are fading, the fruits all gone, the seed pods blown. When I’m out walking or driving east along the coast, I see huge flocks of geese fly in formation, resolute in their destination. They fly so high that the … Continue reading Under the October Twilight
I knew when he set the copy of Good Housekeeping magazine to one side that he had been waiting for me. Not me specifically, but a version of me; someone on their own who would speak and not shrug; someone who would agree with him that it was a day for indoors; someone who thought … Continue reading Encounter
My great-uncle Gerry grew it from seed. He liked to eat apples, must have eaten a particularly nice one on the day he decided to plant the pip and grow his own, which, they say, is a hard thing to do. But he had no knowledge that to propagate an apple tree from seed is … Continue reading Silver Apples of the Moon, Golden Apples of the Sun
“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” Isn’t that a lovely line? It’s from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. It makes me think about reframing awful things in a different way. Maybe this (insert whatever your trouble is) isn’t so bad after all. And if to reframe … Continue reading The Sunset of Dissolution
I had driven to the north-west shore of Edinburgh, still within the city boundary. The tide timetable pinned to a board told us we had a four-hour window to walk out, around, and back from the tidal island lying in the Forth. When I first moved here, I met a man who told me that … Continue reading Cramond Island
My Edinburgh Press 