give me sunshine

Why would anyone choose to go abroad in May? It's such a stunning month. Actually I love it so much here in beautiful Scotland that I haven't felt the urge to go abroad since Sarah and I did the Camino in 2021. What about the wet weather and the dark winters? you might be asking..well, I love those too.

And today is one of those perfect days on this piece of the planet: maybe on a day like this one, Alastair Reid wrote this poem:

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’