nine scenes from a diminutive notebook, January 2017


Wintering the storm:
it unfurls so silently as she sleeps alone.

(16.1.2017)



Insinuation. The pathway twists toward her,
and disappointment.

(17.1.2017)



A boy on a bike, its stablisers removed;
his dad runs behind.

(18.1.2017)



The frostbitten path,
angularity of ice, shades and shards
like glass.

(19.1.2017)



Outside, the robin rings the twigs
and starts a round of feathered pinball.

(23.1.2017)



Enter the water
and swim, swim into the blue.
You cross a border.

(25.1.2017)



A heron stood there, statuesque
by the roadside.
Slategrey sentinel.

(27.1.2017)



The cemetery stones standing
in granite lines:
vigilant of loam.

(28.1.2017)



A distant thunder,
roiling, brooding, gathering
at the edge of the skyline.

(29.1.2017)


Notes from the Red Moss, 2 June 2023

stillness on the Red Moss
and flax almost adrift
in soft peat:
from lint holes, the memory
of sunbeam on sundew
and a thousand thousand blues above


jade mounds in bracken, stumps,
lighten
lighten but never
still, always different, ever
the same—
the sun on metal hexagons
on wooden walkways


looking to Bavelaw
in the lee of Hare Hill
I think of Stanley Roger Green
searching for that unfound cairn
while Threipmuir glitters


in scenes from a stillway
of pinecone and feather
can I be dappled
by light, by trees?
a trunk’s bend and
branch’s oscillation
a hoverfly lands on this nearly white page



[words and images from a morning walk through the Red Moss of Balerno nature reserve at the foot of the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, and then along the shore of Threipmuir Reservoir, Friday 2 June 2023.]

Orkney notes, 8 April 2022

The stone book
Turns heavy pages still, whereon
The story of Hamnavoe is written.
The hills consider
Sagas unwritten yet, austere and beautiful.

George Mackay Brown, Waterfront, Hamnavoe

The weather threw rain and hail and blinding sun at us this afternoon as we braved Ness Battery.

It’s a fascinating and sobering site. Maybe war will always be a constant in this lifetime, our reminders these concrete and steel remnants.


Later, I walk out on my own, up Brinkie’s Brae and then through the town of Stromness itself. It rains and sleets and hails, but I am happy.

At the top, I say a few silent words to Bessie Millie, the weather witch, for tomorrow’s crossing of the Pentland Firth. I take a small stone from the hill as a keepsake.


This is the last of these self-indulgent diary entries. Thanks to everyone who has read them—and even liked them.

Home tomorrow, from Stromness/Hamnavoe, to colours somehow far less vibrant than these islands’ dicefalls of precious stones.

I really hope to return to Orkney soon. It’s not like anywhere else I’ve been before.

And the chance to spend time in the town where George Mackay Brown lived most of his life has been a joy.

For now, part of me remains here: under the blue skies, under the grey, on the stones of the past or of the near future, under rain and sleet, under sun, but mostly beneath the colours and contours of Brinkie’s Brae.

Orkney notes, 7 April 2022

Daffodils at the door in April,
Three shawled Marys.
A lark splurges in galilees of sky.

George Mackay Brown, A Child’s Calendar

Two views of the Brough of Birsay, taken about 90 minutes apart.

The weather, fickle all this week, is a shawled Mary and she bawls and pulls her mantle around the islands. There are daffodils on every roadside on the way here, wind-whipped but resolutely golden. The gales have put paid to any larks but the seabirds are everywhere, carried on currents of soaring air.

We miss the tides and the causeway remains underwater, but it doesn’t matter. I know I can’t set foot in all of these places. Even at this remove, the colours are magical, unattainable.

And it’s the colours of this landscape which have overwhelmed me with their constant shimmer, whether a reflection of sea or of sky. Perhaps the shifting palette of hues is in reality a mirror of Orcadians and their welcoming nature.

I’ll try to memorise the greens and greys and browns and blues of the Orkney tapestry for when we’ve left, but I know I’ll fail.


Later in the day: George Mackay Brown’s rocking chair in Stromness Museum…

…and a photograph of a photograph (again from the museum) of him ensconced in it in his home at 3 Mayburn Court.

I’m not one for the cult of personality but it feels good to stand quietly for a few moments and imagine him seated there right in front of me; almost, for an infinitesimal instant, to catch the spark and sparkle and sadness of those bluest of blue eyes.

But I know that he would wince at the attention, at the spectacle, so I move away after a minute or so and leave him at peace.

Orkney notes, 6 April 2022

Ten thousand raindrops
Take their gray courses down the window pane,
With gentle pulsings,
With small music on the stones outside.

George Mackay Brown, Rain

Kirkwall: the torrent of waters slides at us horizontally and the winds with it. It’s not exactly April showers and so we look for shelter and for safer (drier) havens.

The crimson sandstone of St. Magnus Cathedral pierces the leaden skies and we make for the vaulted doorway beneath its mass of red.

The sheer size of the building is startling, even if Kirkwall is Orkney’s largest community (although I think it has fewer than 10,000 inhabitants).

Hanging from a pillar in the left aisle of the Nave is a 17th century Mort Brod, a wooden death notice commemorating Robert Nicholson, a Kirkwall glazier. This is noted to be one of the oldest of its kind in Scotland and shows the shrouded figure of Death holding an hourglass and spade.

A casket of bones, thought to be those of St. Magnus, murdered on the isle of Egilsay, were discovered here in 1911 during restoration works on the walls of the Choir.

In the Chapel at the eastern end of the cathedral are many commemorations of more recently departed Orkney souls.

George Mackay Brown’s requiem mass, on 16 April 1996, the feast day of St. Magnus, was the first Catholic service in the cathedral since the Reformation.