being and doing :: casting and retrieving

Between mountain and sea

Honey and salt - land smell and sea smell,
as in the long ago, as in forever.

The days pick me up and carry me off,
half-child, half-prisoner,

on their journey that I'll share
for a while.

They wound me and they bless me
with strange gifts:

the salt of absence,
the honey of memory.


Norman MacCaig




Approaching the final stages of At The Loch of the Green Corrie, Andrew Greig's dazzling observations and memories of Norman MacCaig, I found myself eking out the chapters as slowly as I could, just to make this beautiful book last as long as possible.

Male friendship, poetry, walking, camping and fishing in the Highlands... troubled writing at times but profoundly moving always. I encountered myself and my own family history in the pages. All this and whisky too.

Reading MacCaig's work again spurred me on to look out - unsuccessfully, so far - the portrait I took at his Edinburgh flat in 1992. The picture is fixed firmly in my mind, but to borrow from Andrew Greig - who borrows in turn from Norman MacCaig - with honesty - I will somehow only feel that I have completed my memory-drawn circle of connections once I retrieve and hold the faded picture in my own hand again.