The Smile of Winter

Looking towards the East before the sunrise © All photos by ASD

 

This is the end of autumn and beginning of winter. It is the season where we witness the departure of the exiles. A perishing wind is blowing. A precocious frost has killed the last roses of the summer in the garden that anyhow would have had to die in December. This green land on the edge of the sea is all stubble now. It is laid flat and bare. Beneath the nipping frost, our lives are one of attrition as if everyone seems to have retired wholly from the world. Our familiar surroundings become unfamiliar in the darkness. Days are incredibly short. When you travel at all in the early hours of the morning on the bus, one becomes curiously amused and excited with occasional glimpses of the provincial towns which seldom show you their names while the bus would bump and rumble along and jerk you into motion.

 

The view of sunrise from my window

Some biggish town would loom up in a pale terracotta sunrise with several churches and its towers thrusting up at the sky. There is a strangeness because the winter months are the months of hallucinations and visions. We see our shadow more than the sunlight. Our realities become too tiring and feverish because we are living in another perspective, inhabited by real and unreal. The long evening twilight not only teases and puzzles us but also makes us brood so that we spend our time in our sullen silence.  

 

 
 

In the meantime, we must breathe and move among the living. Shopping at this time of the year is an orgiastic outing in the baffling battleground for us. It is not for sensitive souls as the capitalist’s notion of life against life and purse against purse are diametrically opposed to the spirit of delicate epicurean positivism. There are times I have to sit on the bus near the shops in the traffic jam, going nowhere, and the only way to pass time is to count how many Scottish flags you can see on the opposite side of the road.

 

Winter sunset in my village

In less than a year, people in Scotland will vote on whether they want to opt for independence or leave to remain in the UK. One of my English friends who is as English as the Cotswolds asked me in a manner of tongue-in-cheek: “Do I need to apply a Scottish visa to come and visit you?” The Scottish nationalism is spreading like dye in the washing. During my recent trip to Edinburgh, I saw the graffiti, on the wall of a public toilet, which said: “Vote YES or dessert”. My first thought was: “Pity he can’t spell desert”.

 

Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland, had seen its own vogue come in and go out like an extinguished flame. Edinburgh, for all its splendid antiquity and civilisation, had preserved a Gothic idea of beauty together with beautifully designed buildings that fit in with the architecture of the town. But alas, it is vulgarised now. The sight and sound of the noise, the vibration and the dirt and the dust from building the new tram routes in the city cannot be hidden under a smoke screen or a thick fog for which the city is famous for. But the life of the old city and its innate grandeur is still there underneath all the undesirable commotion, trembling, yet it is calm, like the voice of a veiled prophet, a voice from a curtained shrine.

 

 

 

The historic perfume or fame of Sir Walter Scott and the poet, Robert Burns are too unmistakably merchandised there; what with many endlessly advertised hotels and bedrooms slept in by the Scottish kings, queens, brave men and fair women of the historic past and the numerous public houses at which the famous authors and poets had their drinks.  

 

Nevertheless, I maintain the belief that the view of sunset behind the Pentland Hills in Edinburgh, away from the loud impertinence of commercial tourism, exudes its own sublimity and beauty with its curious silence, natural elegance, slanting light, which is golden radiance that lies over all the landscape – it is as though every sunset at the Pentland Hills must be the last one.

I now understand why Robert Louis Stevenson called Edinburgh “Hills of home” in his poem, “Song of Travel”. It was to this spot, Swanston, the home of his heart, a small village situated on the lower northern slopes of the Pentland Hills that his thoughts turned with longing and desire from that far-off island home in the Pacific, where his last peaceful years were spent.

 

Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying,

Hills of home! and to hear again the call;

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying,

And hear no more at all.

 

~ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ~ 

 “Song of Travel”

  

Artwork by David Batchelor Flatlands The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh - The exhibition I recently went to see in Edinburgh.    

David Batchelor's exhibition, Flatlands at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.