Archive

Fairest of fair, a blue sky soaring, circling, winging, singing overhead with just a few light touches of white, spun out and stretched wide, and planes silently leaving their spun trails.  The sun is surprising the houses just beyond and tickling their roofs, and soon it must tumble over and find me waiting here in shadow.  It is so still when yesterday the wind was so fervent.  read more »

September is such a full month, it holds summer flowers and autumn berries and winter leaves.  Everywhere you look there is a feast waiting to be tasted, a full palette of colour, and change rippling through the trees like the wash left behind by summer’s boat.  The horse chestnuts are first to succumb to the pull of Fall, brown crinkling and crumpling the leaves while the conkers tumble  read more »

Journeys take you out of yourself, out of your normal landscape and its often-heard music.  Today I saw poppies, bright splashes of red to surprise the green, growing in patches on verges and here and there, oh joy, in swathes on country fields.  Here and there, too, a cluster of white, elderflowers like large lace buttonholes of clotted cream and swaying wildflowers waving above the grass  read more »

It is July and the sun is sitting heavy on my shoulders, calling up the moisture from the earth so the air is thick and sticky.  In the dappled shade it is delightful if you have nothing much to do but bathe in the heat and turn your face to the occasional ruffle of breeze like a wind-chime in a window.  The sun makes all the colours shine like a bride on her wedding day  read more »

The sun is singing, singing over my head and over the clenched heads of morning-drenched daisies and the few glistening drops of rain that still huddle in the grass.  The week has been windy and cool and we have shut down from the summer and retreated into internal affairs.  But today as I walk distractedly down the garden the sun is calling, calling over my head and welcoming me back  read more »

It is the day of the long sun.  All evening it has been young, it has been early although the clock ticked its time away and now, as I put my house to bed, there is still enough light to linger in the garden and wonder at the pale sky.  When I lived in Scotland it was never black in June, just a hanging grey as I drove home in the middle of the night.  It doesn’t seem right to ignore it,  read more »