The Winter Visitors

A journey north yesterday, a hundred miles to St Helens and the industrial north west. A visit to suburbia, the outskirts of places; Sutton Manor, Cressington, Formby. How to articulate a journey? A list of rivers, road names, a chain of sights and memories?

I had forgotten how in the woods this house seems. I sat at the kitchen table this morning and watched the sky pale before the cold dawn, the light softening through the trees, motionless black silhouettes. The daylight revealed a frozen world, and the weak sun warmed the ground but not the shadows; all day I saw frost-shadows, hidden places not touched by the sun. A wren in the kitchen bushes, puffed up against the cold.

Familiar places have their own beauty. Yesterday I touched the Moss at St Helens/Cronton, and this morning I drove along its coastal fringes. A very flat agricultural landscape, the ground churned to mud in field gateways, water frozen in tractor ruts and dulled to a pale silver. Hedges and distances, the suggestion of Dutch fields, a vast sky. Steam rising from a mountain of Council compost, the highest land for miles. I wrote 20 or 30 short poems for the Mosswalking exhibition and might track them down; the antithesis of the landscapes we now inhabit, the hills and valleys of the Borders.

Cold again tonight, another hard frost. Today is my nephew's birthday so we rang Canada and had a brief talk; they are under a foot of snow, even on Vancouver Island in the Pacific. I remember holding the baby when he was only hours old, so we will raise a glass to the lad on his day nineteen years later. Happy Birthday Benny!