Serving time

Severe weather, gale to storm force winds, high seas in Orkney ... or so I am told. I feel surprisingly bereft not to be there, surprising because my acquaintance with my adopted home is so slight yet my connection with it so visceral. The elements there are so much more in the foreground, they force themselves on your attention, the first thing you notice on rising, whereas here, in Merseyside, they are always in the background and you notice wind and rain only when they scream for attention. That cannot be entirely true, the moon shines high above Birkenhead as it does above St Tredwell's Loch or the Straits of Dover, but somehow it is also occluded and muted, by buildings, traffic and crowds.

Wirral and Orkney, Vikings and Irish priests, plus ca change ...

Today I enter my 63rd year and time and mortality force themselves on my attention as palpably as the elements on Papa Westray. So much to do, so little time, but also an increasing resentment at serving out a sentence, serving the time of the other, petty administration, a series of little tasks that stand in the way of serious work, whose possibility lies beyond the temporal horizon ... but, on the other hand, much of it is behind me and I am starting to accelerate towards the moment of taking thought and submitting myself to its processes, which have a life of their own to which obedience is a necessity.



To Lancaster and junketing