Coffee scented tendrils of morning reaching through my nostrils in search of the reboot button, crankshafts and cogs grinding towards the day where a translucence of thin milk hangs upon the air, bleaching the daily formation of the world beyond the window.

A walk along graveyard hill, there's a road winds through it, leading to Nangang or Muzha, offering points of access to the long walk over the slightly higher hills and panoramas of the city and of the higher southern hills. And it's odd, the area which it contains is massive, stretching miles along the hillside, layers upon layers of tombs rising up from valley floors to summits. It feels a good place to wander today, caught up in the articles of the faithless this morning and, now, verging upon the contemplative.

On the walk up I pass a few families cleaning some ancestral tomb, other walkers, cars and bikes winding their way along the narrow ribbon. Stopping at a sheltered corner, hills pallid and distant in the haze, framed by trees and a broken wall, a fluttering of wings above, a blue magpie risen from the woods below and sitting upon a wire – even by the standards of the Corvidae it's a stunning creature and one day, I promise to myself as the camera clicks and focusses, I will get a decent photo of one, just not today I reply as I look at what the lens has captured.

At the watershed I find a place to sit in the shade, look out upon the hills floating upon the haze, the city below fading into uncertainty, towers wavering in and out of view as the curtain descends, diluting definitions as streets scroll into the vacuum. It's a good place to think this, to allow thoughts to drift out across moments and their context, these short lived and shifting shapes we wear, the dream of self woven from memories flashing across our brief encounters with time. Along the side of the road, symbols of faith are scattered upon walls and tombs; crescents mark the Muslim, crosses the Christian, characters in various scripts carved into stone, the rags of prayer flags hanging upon fences, bleached by wind and rain while rusting poles stand angled and worn.

Perspectives change surrounded by the unknown dead, their legacies elsewhere and yet their existence honoured here in mausoleums and tombs strewn across the living hills while, down below, the world continues upon its way, grinding poverty and deprivation endemic - life's a sair fecht, as they say. I wonder why it's so different for the living, cast upon the whims of the social pyramid, a sacred relic where the majority of us remain expendable, collateral damage to salve the ineptitude of our leaders, but to what purpose? And here thoughts drift into the ether, another temporary shape fading into the embracing obscurity...

"It's hard wark haud'n by a thocht worth ha'en'
And harder speakin't, and no' for ilka man;
Maist Thocht's like whisky — a thoosan' under proof,
And a sair price is pitten on't even than.

As Kirks wi' Christianity ha'e dune,
Burns' Clubs wi' Burns — wi' a'thing it's the same,
The core o' ocht is only for the few,
Scorned by the mony, thrang wi'ts empty name.

And a' the names in History mean nocht
To maist folk but " ideas o' their ain, "
The vera opposite o' onything
The Deid 'ud awn gin they cam' back again.

A greater Christ, a greater Burns, may come.
The maist they'll dae is to gi'e bigger pegs
To folly and conceit to hank their rubbish on.
They'll cheenge folks' talk but no their natures, fegs!"


Hugh MacDiarmid
From "A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle."