Silver Water

A long time since I went out and stood on the edge of the Lees, and gazed at the river. The river that has been described, possibly by Burns, as “the silvery Tweed”. There is something about being under the strictures of this virus that has altered the way I inhabit the world around me. There is some curtailment of freedom that gets into one’s marrow. People being up near each other looks somehow strange. So however lucky we are in our own landscape, in our relative lack of stress compared to so many, all the same, something burrows into the mind. When I am out in my studio, there I don’t feel it. The birds come and go. The blackbird, who flew into our window at night several years ago, and looked so peaky last year I thought she was dying, with all her feathers fallen out where she had hit herself, and her bare back of skull this strange bent shape, almost like the head of a snake, and a miserable ambience about her – well, this autumn, she is back, with a new quite pretty ruff of grey feathers round the back of her neck, and is her usual, sprightly, somewhat forceful self. She is so tame, she never flies off when I open the studio door, but just stays where she is. She knows her name, she comes when I call: Miss Ruche, Miss Ruche.

A Christmas Lion

Deciding to put images on Facebook each day, or as near as possible each day, in the New Year, I decided to start early with an image of some time ago, a Christmas card. Still working on a picture book, Musical Bears, but after this is finished and ready to sent out to potential publishers (two months, three months?), I will go back to painting and to wandering in the countryside of the Scottish Borders, with my camera, looking mostly for small details that catch my eye. Until I inhabited in a place where one could walk where one wanted I never understood how Right to Roam changes one’s sense of where one lives. I thought it was an ancient Scottish custom, but no, it was basically set into law round about the Millennium. The only PRIVATE notices you see are round people’s garden, everywhere else you can just wander. Up the road is the Hirsel, the estate belonging to the Douglas-Hume family. Our local aristocrats are very popular, unlike some…