“I wandered lonely as a cloud” – isn’t it amazing to think that when Wordsworth wrote that line it was new and arresting? As fresh as a daisy, which was once also an original phrase. It’s a tricky thing this word spinning, tricky, that is, to come up with fresh ideas and novel combinations of … Continue reading How Romantic
I’ve not been feeling well lately and so I’ve been moping around, achieving little. At least that’s what I tell myself, whilst successfully discounting those bits and bobs I am getting done between bouts of inactivity. Yet all I can focus on is the inactivity, which is very unfashionable these days, to be slothful, unless … Continue reading What Am I Doing?
Today, I am obsessing about spikes.
Elon Musk has implanted a chip into the brain of a pig. I found the story compelling when I read about it over the weekend. It’s another of his pioneering experiments, this time with a view to having us control phones or computers with our minds sometime in the future. Sounds supernatural, magic, mad! But … Continue reading Are You On My Wavelength?
Yesterday, my friend and I walked the land around Ireland’s oldest linen fabric mill, Clarks of Upperlands, in Mid-Ulster. A section of it is still working after 300 years, but much of it is disused and abandoned, but for a few dog walkers, quiet explorers like ourselves, and more than the odd ghost. We walked … Continue reading Strolling With Ghosts
You would think I would have learned by now to temper my expectations. That, being from these parts, I’d have fashioned my character from stronger stuff. How I wish I had mastered the ability to rise above the suspended ceiling of grey, grim damp haze that has fallen in. By the hour I try in … Continue reading Please Stop Raining
Occasionally, in a charity shop, I will see what, clearly, has been someone’s life collection, and I will pause to nurse a couple of seconds of heartbreak that this is where it has ended up. Thimbles: I saw about sixty of those once, porcelain, in a wooden cabinet all divided into tiny squares, a home … Continue reading Collection
My favourite time of the day has come to be the evening. A fluttering restlessness builds within me and I have to leave the house, take a walk out. Lately I’ve been scheduling my walk to get to my destination on high in time to see the sunset sky burn, then I watch it turn … Continue reading Let Evening Come
The grey heron is back. I have been watching and waiting for him, and finally I’ve been rewarded. Last year he was a fixture on Dunsapie Loch, on the east side of Arthur’s Seat. There he would stalk, or wade, or stand frozen in position like some sort of prehistoric decoy. This year he favours … Continue reading Passing Through
I live in a tenement and I am surrounded by people, often just a few feet away, but they are unseen and mostly unheard behind thick walls – so near and yet so far. They are above and below me, and on both sides of me, and I am reminded that we are all together … Continue reading So Near Yet So Far
