I’ve been too busy and too fraught to write in the last couple of weeks– I’ve been stuck on page 107 of my novel since the middle of February, which isn’t great, but I know that these things have their rhythms and you can’t force them. I am almost at the point where the book seems to have a life of its own: I half expect it to have gone on without me when I open up the file again.
The monochrome Moray Firth
This weekend I went to North East Scotland to visit family, spending time in the glittering, monochrome landscape of the Moray Firth. We went for a walk along the coast at Nairn, with the wind so cold it burned us through our clothes. The sea iron grey beneath stern hills; the tide a slow blade drawing out.
Amongst all this, a quick detonation of colour: orange fenders against the harbour wall….
Swans preoccupied by their own sense of mystery…
And fishing boats, almost obsolete now, their function purely decorative.
I came home from the walk made wild by the cold, uplifted and tired. Now I’m sitting at my desk, having parachuted back into my ordinary life and all thses steely images are still glinting in my head.
Categories: Writing |