How precious everything is. How fragile, and yet how resilient the workings of nature. How delicately tuned. It’s Boxing Day and I’m sitting in my dad’s bungalow in Essex on a magnificent sun-stretched morning. My head still hurts a little. The inside of my skull is a padded cell, and the contrast between the sky and my brain isn’t lost on me. Out there it’s clear and crisp. In here it’s a world of slow drifting mist. A place one drives with dipped headlights.
As I sit in the back room, gazing onto a sierra of pointed roofs and television aerials. I see it’s taking me far longer than usual to write this. But at least I am writing. At least the words are still there. I hug them like the white lines in the middle of a rural road. Too bad I didn’t hug those lines a little tighter a couple of month’s ago.
