Winter Sun 2

The landscape changes so fast at this time of year, the sun is so brilliant that I cannot see anything walking towards its flare unless I shade my eyes and look down at the pavement. Being in the car on sunlit days is a continual movement of pulling down the window shades, looking for my man’s dark glasses, squinting and blinking. I have all my life been so comatose in the morning that nowhere in any portfolio is there an image of dawn. My son says when I was at college I got up early, many moons and many suns ago. Sometimes I have worked all night, the night hoodoos me still horizontal, but working at night, there is something calming. It is like being in wild places. One can step off the machine, somehow. I wasn’t going to write anything this evening, I’m tired, I am getting back to doing things instead of moithering, but in the evening I’d quite like someone to lift me up to a high branch and leave me there until morning, slowly twirling in the wind. Not in a knotted noose. No. In a hammock, maybe, a twirling hammock. far up above the earth.

Musical Bears, Page 3

Though this is really Page 1 of the story (words not yet added). I kept starting off with these wandering minstrels going down a road, but did not find the road inspiring, , it was kind of dingy, with bushes behind the bears which formed a barrier did not like, and lanky plants in the front to cover up the grey of the road – so I changed the tune and set them free to walk playing across grassland, untrammelled.

This version of the book is ready to be sent out to try and find its way into the world. Rather like the bears themselves.

What shall I do next? All the things I have been putting off, like painting the outside of the studio with a beautiful Farrow and Ball deep scabious blue. Wonder of wonders, outside paint that is silk not gloss. Oh the horrors of that ancient sticky drippy smelly gloss paint. This blue paint is genius. But still, I have been putting off the task….

Liddesdale

This is from a few years ago, which is not my usual practice. Lockdown has made me look into imagery, emails, letters – I am sorting out correspondence, turning up such a trove from the past. I know that many people throw things away, but I am not one of them. In a big chest, recently recovered from storage, layers of documents lie, and reading them ressurects something of what has vanished, including letters that my mother left behind when she moved down south; they are all higgledy-piggeldy at the moment, but trawling them throws scintillas into the darkness. There are letters from before my son was born. Maybe it is not healthy to dwell on the past, but then we are none of us that healthy at the moment. This photograph is from the place where my soul still lives, Liddesdale. The River Liddel (Liddle) is one of the Scottish/English rivers, though it is the Liddel Burn that marks the Border a few minutes walk from the old house where I used to live. Now I live in Coldstream, on the Scottish side, still a few minutes walk from the Border Bridge that crosses River Tweed. What will happen if we secede from England? Strange days indeed.

Liddesdale

Liddesdale 2

Liddesdale, July

The Little Hill in April

Shadows on the Path

Nostalgia for Liddesdale 1

Gulls in August by River Tweed