Since the morning was clear (though freezing cold) we went for a walk on the beach here at the farm. Very pleasant. Blew away a few cobwebs. The countryside is always waiting for us, a solace and an inspiration - we really should get down there more often.
Photography courtesy of Mme la Contesse.
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| Tantallon Castle - if you listen hard, you can hear General Monck's guns from 1651 |
I also include a short movie clip from our walk - note the Bass Rock (not white now - all the gannets went away to Africa or somewhere a while ago) and the threatening hulk of Tantallon across the next bay. The hazy hills over the water are in Fife.
You know, I think it's going to be all right.
******* Late Edit *******
I'd have included this earlier, but I couldn't find it. Ted Hughes is probably not very cool these days (as in "not trending"), and in any case we are a bit early for March, but this is his "March Morning Unlike Others", which I always loved, and which somehow captures the way in which the steady, reassuring passage of the seasons is a source of comfort to us poor humans:
Blue haze. Bees hanging in the air at the hive-mouth.
Crawling in prone stupor of sun
On the hive-lip. Snowdrops. Two buzzards,
Still-wings, each
Magnetized to the other,
Float orbits.
Cattle standing warm. Lit, happy stillness.
A raven, under the hill,
Coughing among bare oaks.
Aircraft, elated, splitting blue.
Leisure to stand. The knee-deep mud at the trough
Stiffening. Lambs freed to be foolish.
The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out into the sun,
After the frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die.
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