June in the Highlands: Echoes of Rain and Roots

 

June is the month of expectation – of weddings, of warmth, of golden days tinged with the memory of things half-remembered. The scent of lilacs has long faded, and the light, diffused and lingering, stirs the heart. 

Here, in this northern place, the sky remains low; the air holds its breath. Each day is edged with a chill that lingers even as the light lengthens. Where warmth was longed for, only damp silence answers. And yet, I do not lament its absence. I find solace in the restraint.

 

There is a certain mercy in the gentleness of such weather. The roses in my garden love this kind of Scottish weather. The sky neither blazes nor storms; it simply waits. And in that waiting, I find a mirror. 

My own spirit, having passed through the noise and bustle of spring, welcomes the stillness. After a long spring – a season made harsher by the frantic rhythm of the city – I feel hollowed out, as though stripped of a necessary layer. I long for rest. I ache, quietly, for healing.

 

I find Samuel Johnson’s bold statement: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” perplexing. But perhaps it is not the city itself that exhausts me but its cold, extractive grip: a presence that does not cradle but consumes, reducing the soul to function and the body to a vessel of unceasing labour. 

There is no room there for gentleness, no shelter for the slow-beating heart. Urgency rules; softness is erased. I begin to suspect I am not weary of any one place, but of a kind of life made only for endurance, and never for peace.

“O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.”

 

It has been raining outside while I write this journal entry. And yet, I do not mind the rain. The wetness suits me now, and it feels almost medicinal. I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line: “O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.” 

The words come like a prayer for sustenance. What I crave now is not more radiance; I have had enough of glare and clamour, but water. Water – not in its plain form, but as Hopkins knew it: a symbol, a supplication. A slow, sustaining gift that seeps into parched roots.

 

I think of roots – buried, unseen – reaching not for sun, but for water. They do not ask for glory. They ask only for enough: enough to go on. That is where I find myself. It is not a plea for rapture, for fiery transformation. It is something quieter, more inward. A supplication. Let me be watered. Let something cool find its way to where I am hidden, to where I am frayed. 

It is difficult thing, sometimes, to know what one needs. The world shouts of ambition, of triumph. But I have found, in quieter hours, that the soul does not always hunger for greatness. It asks, humbly, to be met with gentleness. It asks for rest. For silence. For water.

 

A Coastal Summer: Time to Root and Breathe

 

I begin to imagine the summer I long for – a coastal summer, quiet and unstructured. A summer ungoverned by the tyranny of hours but gently ordered by the slow, persuasive turning of the tides, as if the day had learned to breathe in their rhythm.

 

In this vision, I sit on my deck chair with a book resting idly in my hands. G. brings me elderflower lemonade, humming a tune beneath his breath. The salt air mingles with the scent of ‘Boscobel’ roses – my beloveds of all roses from David Austin, blooming in their soft pink blush. All is still but alive. The horizon glimmers. 

‘Boscobel’ roses – my beloveds of all roses from David Austin, blooming in their soft pink blush. Boscobel roses are a birthday gift from G. 

This is the kind of coastal summer I dream of: a time spent in the embrace of familiar things and new discoveries, where art, music, food, and conversation flow as naturally as the tide itself. It is a summer where the past and present mingle, where the weather may be temperamental but the heart is steady, content in the knowledge that some moments are too precious to rush. 

I long for that soft, endless feeling of a coastal summer, when the days stretch into one another, and the world outside seems distant, held at bay by the gentle, timeless rhythm of the sea.

My summer reading

“I intend that my last work shall be a cookbook composed of memories and desires…”

~ Alexandre Dumas, 1869 ~

In such hours, I return to W. S. Di Piero’s writings on art. He writes of painting with a poet’s perception. Where others disassemble art into parts – context, influence, movement – Di Piero attends to what is seen and felt. He asks the reader to see, not only what is painted, but how it lives.

 

Image credit: W. S. Di Piero - Poet, Art & Literary Critic. Photographer: Christine Krikliwy.

Theories may be useful – but they rarely teach one how to see. What I admire most about Di Piero’s writing is that there is something wonderfully humanistic in his approach to art. His essays are reflections, not expositions. He walks alongside the artwork (I am captivated by his writing on Giorgio Morandi), allowing it to reveal its secret slowly, piece by piece. 

He writes with a cultured ease that brings you into the work rather than pushing you through it. It is, in a sense, a kind of humanism, where the art is treated not as an object to be dissected, but as a living, breathing entity, one with which are invited to share our thoughts and reflections. Di Piero reminds me that the act of truly looking, like the act of truly living, cannot be rushed.

So too does Sarah Leah Chase’s books evoke this gentle way of living. Every summer, I find myself returning to the pages of Nantucket Open House, Sarah Leah Chase’s quiet testament to coastal living. 

It is a cookbook – but I have never been drawn to it solely for its recipes.  Rather, it offers a glimpse into a world shaped not merely by ingredients, but by memory, by place, and by the subtle art of human connection. There is, in Chase’s writing, a warmth that transcends instruction – a sense that food, like all true expressions of art, lives and breathes through the hands that prepare it and the lives that surround it.

Sarah Leah Chase, the owner of Que Sera Sarah in the 1980s, a gourmet shop on Nantucket, a place she writes, that "exuded a cross-section of Nantucket's iconoclastic artistic energy." She goes on to explain that, "It was never my policy to hire highly trained professional cooks, as I preferred surrounding myself with an eclectic range of painters, carpenters, writers, designers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs. I found that their interpretation of food as well as their knowledge of passing topics, staved off any forms of culinary drudgery."

Each recipe in this book seems to invite a kind of collective participation in the act of living—a sharing not just of food, but of moments, of memories, of a life lived fully. It is a book that speaks to my heart, one that holds both the simple joy of cooking and the deeper satisfaction of understanding what it means to nourish not just the body, but the soul.

She once owned a small gourmet shop on Nantucket Island in the 1980s – Que Sera Sarah – a place, she writes, that “exuded a cross-section of Nantucket’s iconoclastic artistic energy.” 

It was never her way to hire the formally trained; instead, she filled her kitchen with painters and carpenters, philosophers, writers, and designers – those who brought not just skills, but poetic sensibility. “Their interpretation of food,” she writes, “as well as their knowledge of passing topics, staved off any forms of culinary drudgery.” I read these words and feel something stir – a recognition of a life lived with porous boundaries between art and utility, between sustenance and story. 

 

There is something quietly radical in such a philosophy: to treat food not as a task, but as a gathering point for spirit and imagination. Her recipes do not simply instruct – they recall. Her abiding philosophy is: “Cooking is like love – it should be entered into with abandon or not at all.” 

It is a book that speaks to me and in doing so, it becomes more than a guide – it becomes a companion. G., ever the steady presence in our kitchen, approaches the book differently. He reads Chase’s step-by-step instructions with quiet attentiveness, noting each measure, each method, as if collecting tools for a new season. 

This summer, G. says, he would like to cook ‘Lobster Frittata’ (page 94) from the book.

 

And while I am drawn to the recollections, to the stories nestled between recipes, G. is drawn to the act itself: the preparation, the cooking, the offering. Between us, perhaps, the book finds it fullest expression.

 

Birthday Journal : June in the Highlands

There is a rhythm to these grey June days that suits reflection. The calendar marks my birthday. This year, G took me to Douneside for my birthday. Douneside is a country house hotel in Tarland tucked among the Scottish Highlands. 

The car hummed through the hills as Rachel Portman’s score for The Cider House Rule played gently – its melodies echoing the emerald folds of the landscape. The Highlands opened before us like an ancient lullaby. Peace settled upon me long before we arrived.

 

At Douneside, the world fell away. The clocks seemed to stop. The food was not simply served, but offered – each dish a quiet act of grace. It is a place apart, where the world’s urgency cannot follow. There, I felt something in me begin to soften. To be nourished so, in both body and spirit, is a rare gift.

 

Cornus kousa 'Miss Satomi'

The Weight of an Anchor, The Shape of a Father

 

Back in the village, life resumed with its quiet peculiarities. The harbour master – equal parts raconteur and philosopher – remains one of the village’s constants. His manner is steeped in that old Scottish Presbyterian gravity – a solemn acceptance of life’s hardships, tempered by a wit as dry as the moorland air. 

One afternoon, as I sat quietly in the garden, book forgotten on my lap, he approached with that steady, unhurried gait of a man accustomed to the weight of both sea and sermon.

We had spoken before, though never deeply, and always with the mutual understanding of two men who preferred the company of absence to that of demands. He is, I knew, a man who had quietly turned away from the entanglement of family; not in bitterness, but in resignation.

There is no self-pity in him – only a gentle displacement. He is rooted in who he is, like an anchor long set in the harbour it has learned to call home. 

There is in him a steadiness – a controlled composure – and a manner of speaking that spares no softness where none is needed.

He reminds me of my father – a keen sailor, though not a fisherman, who measured affection in instruction, and sentiment in skill. Teaching you a new practical skill was his love language.

My father rarely spoke of feelings, but he would show you how to trim a sail for wind, or how to read the sky by light and pressure. If a line was poorly coiled or a halyard slack, his correction came swift, sometimes sharp. But his intention, always, was to leave you better prepared.

Love, for him, lived in the precision of action. The sail must be mended without flaw; the rigging made tight before nightfall. He never said I love you, but he taught me what he knew, and believed that should suffice. “Let’s get this done right” – that was his gentlest refrain.

I did not know how to read it then. It felt, in childhood, like rebuke. In later years, I came to see it as a kind of care – dry, spare, and composed. His composure is his shield, and his language of love is instruction.

The harbour master, too, is full of instructions. He shows you the angle of approach, the tension a rope ought to hold, the art of waiting for the tide rather than fighting it. He cannot help but teach. Perhaps it is the only language in which he knows how to add value — not through praise, but through practicality. He believes, I think, that if he leaves you knowing something you did not before, he has kept his part of the bargain.

He is not always gentle about it. If a fellow’s work is slack, or thoughtless, or simply beneath the standard he holds, he will say so — and not always delicately. But behind the bluntness there is a strange integrity, and something like care — not for your feelings, but for the work you might yet be capable of.

And yet — at sea, he loosens. Among the anonymous travellers aboard the cruise ship he boards each summer, he can breathe more easily. He may speak, if he wishes, or vanish entirely without apology. No one expects him to explain himself. He belongs to no one, and in that, he is freer than he would be in any gathering of kin.

No one asks why he travels alone, or what he has left behind. He becomes, for a time, untethered — and in that unmooring, he finds not loss, but reprieve. And that, he believes, is a kind of grace.

On that afternoon, before he turned to go – as he always did, unhurriedly, with no sense of obligation to linger – he paused beside me. He said to me, very softly, as though confessing something fragile, “You know, I packed a pale cotton dress for my cruise.”

I turned to him, uncertain whether I had misheard. But he was not smiling. Only when he added, “Just in case,” did a glint appear in his eyes – not mockery, but something quietly subversive. “If the ship goes down,” he said, “I’ll slip into the dress, become Charlotte, and take my chances with the lifeboats. Women and children first.”

Then, with a pause that made the absurdity almost tender, he added, “It’s ankle-length – spares me the bother of shaving my legs.”

And it was this, more than anything, that undid me. That such a sentence could be uttered with complete composure, with the same evenness one might use to comment on weather or the tide. The remark hovered in the air, ridiculous and strangely touching, like a paper boat set adrift with careful hands.

I blinked. He did not laugh. He said it so evenly, so devoid of drama, that for a moment I believed it wholly practical. And perhaps it was. Beneath the humour was a defiance, soft-spoken but firm – the kind that insists, even at the edge of disaster, on some claim of choice. A name, a disguise, a story quickly stitched together: the means by which he would step sideways from fate and greet it on his own terms.

I smiled – not at the thought of him in such a garment (though the image remained, strangely vivid), but at what it meant. There was something deeply human in it – that quiet, ridiculous plan he had. A pale cotton dress, ankle-length, folded with care into the corner of a suitcase. What a strange thing it was – and how perfectly it suited him. A joke, maybe, but also a gesture of self-preservation.

He vanished soon after, to some errand unknown, his departure as unceremonious as his entrance. But I stayed where I was, held not by the oddness of his words, but by what lay beneath them. 

Some, when faced with the unkindness of the world, learn to slip behind a mask – not to mislead, but to survive. They turn sorrow into jest, solitude into theatre, and in those small, strange performances, offer not deceit, but a tender kind of truth – one too fragile to stand unguarded. 

And perhaps it is through such quiet disguises - measured, deliberate – that the soul, long at odds with the world, allows itself to be glimpsed. Not through confession, but through the careful art of concealment.

 

Parting Thoughts

 

Later that evening, as the light grew long and trembled on the walls, I returned to the dream of that coastal summer. It came not as recollection, but as presence. The house was there, just as it had always been: salt-streaked windows, the scent of sun-warmed stone and seaweed curling through the open door. 

Verdi played – Lucia Aliberti’s voice rising like sea air through the rooms – not imagined, not remembered, but heard, as it had been when my grandfather set the record spinning, always near dusk, always with the same quiet care. He never spoke over Verdi’s music. He would stand by the window, hands clasped behind his back, letting the music fill the space where conversation might otherwise have faltered. 

From the kitchen now, Dawn Upshaw’s voice slipped in – singing Rodgers & Hart with that soft, wistful longing – and Gordon hummed along beneath her, anchoring the tune with his low, companionable sound. Their voices folded into the air, not interrupting the dream, but becoming part of it.

Outside, the sky had softened to pewter, and the first rain had begun to fall – the kind that dapples the stone before darkening it completely. I watched as the garden drank it in. Roots hidden beneath the earth stirred, drew breath, reached further down. This, I thought, was June at its most honest – not in its exuberance, but in its depth. Not in blossom, but in root. Not in the blaze of noon, but in the quiet, persistent work of water meeting earth.

 

And as the garden drank, the music lingered, and the voices in the kitchen carried on – light, untroubled – I felt the old words surface, not summoned, but arriving of their own accord, as natural as breath: O Thou Lord of life, send my roots rain.

G's homemade desserts: vanilla panna cotta with a fresh strawberry topping & Banoffee Pie - both for our deckside potluck supper where we were asked to bring our favourite desserts to the feasting.