Category: Ceaseless Melody

A few memories linger from that winter. The first tiny, tiny flakes of snow that fell tentatively from a heavy sky, then thronged in a graceful dance, and finally cascaded down relentlessly. The unexpected wildness of deep drifts on the steep bank of the playing fields shared by the two schools, the Junior and Senior…

October: time of change in the northern regions, pivot towards winter. Clocks fall back; a sudden, darker onset of evening. And wind. Great movements of air boiling in the Atlantic, scattering the heavy lingering heat of summer from the Iberian peninsula, temperatures dropping from 28 to 16 in the space of a couple of days….

Ullapool is a small settlement on Loch Broom in the north western highlands of Scotland. A fishing port and the largest town in the district, it has a current population of around 1500, which has slowly increased over the last thirty years. Helen Gosch, the ceramics artist who has made her home on Ibiza, lived…

Contemplating the emotions and sensations around our normal reluctance to get going on cleaning the house, brought up some memories of my time as a professional cleaner. Short as it was, there were lasting lessons. The years of travail in mid-1970s Edinburgh partly revolved around the lack of a career plan, but as with current…

There must be some irony in this title, surely? It is an activity perfectly designed for procrastination. I’ll do it tomorrow, or sometime later this week. An activity also started when things are truly desperate; it is, as in chess, a forced move, when the King has no alternative but to move to a certain…

Every childhood winter was spent in a frenzy of longing for snow to fall. Granny said that it would snow if the clouds were tea-coloured. I would pester her: “Granny, is it going to snow?” But sometimes she would say with finality: “No, it is too cold for snow.” What law of nature, what observation,…