Die Ferien

Two weeks of visits from friends, walking along the beaches and onto the cliffs, talking about metaphor, Coleridge, humanism, old teachers, philosophy, theology, children, old age, death, and then the feasting, the dining out ... and now back to work and focussing on writing, particularly on themes in the philosophy of religion, and the nature of religious language and its relation to reality. I've been asked for a title for a paper to be given in February: 'Spirituality for the godless' may do it ... Yesterday I walked alone and slowly up the cliffs and around the edge of the north east of the island in an eerie mist that covered land and sea, though not enough to conceal the puffins sitting watchful among the thrift:

Charming and peaceable, as it appears, but always watchful, on the qui vive, anxiously alert, which is not surprising when one sees the languid flight of the great skua, whose picture I snatched (I think) as I turned south (a large bird that eats puffins for breakfast and seizes gulls and drowns them under the waves), turned south

this time with a stranger from distant shores who was as surprised by me as I was by him as we both appeared in the mist, and continued then, together, as far as St Boniface Kirk. That was strange: in such a deserted place one hardly nods briefly at a passing stranger: at the edge of the world one pools ones resources. Not at the edge of the world, perhaps, but it felt like that, until the mist started to lift and burn away in the sun which came out brilliantly as we walked south across the petrified mudflats and saw the hills of Westray still half covered in mist