The woods, just before 10am

The ferns are mostly green still, some browning, some brown already and mixing with the fallen leaves at the edge of the brook. I think this is what best describes it, barely a stream, but shallow running water. No green algae here. Bordering the fishing ponds further down, are signs warning about this algae but none blooms here. The air has the freshness water gives it, a certain distinct damp quality taking me from here to there, right back to the hillside on the west coast of Scotland I climbed on the summer solstice. Now we are only days away from the winter one. Think of often of how Ali Smith describes the solstice as the ‘hinge and pivot of the year’. I hope she’s right; I am need of an opening as much as I am in need of a closing.

On the west coast, it barely gets dark all June long. It barely even blues in the way Didion describes northern countries, June and the nights are almost white, a kind of eternal twilight blue. It is difficult to describe, but if you’ve seen them, you’ll know. For five summers, I missed these long days, so much that last year, in the late depths of winter, I rented a holiday home for the summer solstice. June and the kids were schlepped back home on trains, a ferry, a bus so small they thought it an ice cream van when it arrived, and they rounded the same bend I had, aged 11 and not at all impressed to be taken back to the village my family came from, or my grandmother’s at least, a village assuming the status of legend in the telling and persistent retelling of its own myth and I did not like Scotland much then. I did not like much then, in the way you like very little when you’re 11. I was especially scornful of the familiar: the hills, the cold, the boredom; I wanted my father’s family, I wanted the Indian Ocean, I wanted to surf, I didn’t want to be freezing all summer long. I didn’t want to be there in the car rounding the corner and oh my god, there it was, the Cowal Peninsula, which surely must be one of the most beautiful places on God’s own earth, spread out below me, the Bute sandwiched between the Kyles of Bute, and Tighnabruaich not visible, not really, tucked all along the shoreline as it is and I don’t believe in love at first sight but this memory exists to contradict how strongly I refute this, and my children take a collective sharp intake of breath the first time they see this view too. I like to think it is because we know, instinctively, we’re coming home, although I am too cynical for that. It’s a good view, that’s all. It’s more than a good view, it’s one of the best, and the viewpoint the bus pulls over into shows it to its full advantage, and even though we are tired and even though we’ve been travelling for the best part of two days, we are excited, the children run around a little, pose for silly photographs, and this is how it is that two days later I climb a steep hill, and write about it after here.

I will not read it again. Not only because I will find the quality of the writing lacking, but because the naivety I possessed when writing it was touching at best. Ignorant at worst. Life moves, when it decides to, swiftly in unexpected directions. A hinge. A pivot. A revelation. Things thought possible are rendered, suddenly, not just impossible, but implausible.

I saw many things I took as signs that week. But presiding over the whole week, a crow. As the light deepened in the evenings I would go outside to a strange bower in the garden and the crow would join me. I wanted to believe it a good omen. I like to think now the crow persisted in returning nightly because I was refusing to listen to what it portended. I hope now, the crow was first a bad omen, and the bad will give way to good, in the way dystopia precedes utopia. I hope now, close to the hinge and pivot of the year that the crow brings something better. I say hope here because this is precisely what I am doing. I hope as an act of will, I hope on the thing that perches within the soul. And to turn that hope to belief, to present tense, to the action of a verb, I will book a holiday in the same place at the same time of year, six months from now, with the same view and days barely turning to night.