impossible.

‘Isn’t it strange how last summer I spent a lot of time wishing this car had proper air conditioning? And how I drove to work most days with the cold air on full-blast – the windows open to let a bit of a breeze in?’

We were driving home, my brother and I, from Glasgow after (an amazing) Olafur Arnalds' concert. It was close to midnight. Sleet was smattering the windscreen.

‘Remember how warm it was?’ I went on, almost talking to myself. ‘How roasting it was in July? It’s hard to remember what that actually felt like...’

I was thinking of bare legs, and painted toenails, and skirts and dresses and sunlight dropping into my lap. There had been days in the café where it was so hot – so stickily, shiningly hot – that, as a special treat from the managers to staff, we were all allowed to unbutton the top button of our shirts. We were allowed to work tie-less for a while. 

If I've not mentioned it already, this winter has been wearing me down a little. The icy rain. The darkness. The whipping wind that makes my mascara run as I bundle down Buchanan Street towards the train station. A couple of weeks ago, the cold air dried out my skin so completely that I felt like I was walking around – counting out change, writing my name – with hands that belonged to a stranger. Cracked skin around my knuckles, scabby scaly roughness to touch. It took half a tube of intensive moisturising cream to rub them back into something I recognised.

‘Summer seems so impossible in the middle of winter,’ I said to Evan. My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. ‘Right now, the summer feels so impossible.’  

He sat quiet, as he often does when he’s thinking. The rain had picked up outside now and streetlamps flashed watery orange light squares across the dashboard. I turned the heating up as high as it would go, trying to angle the air-stream towards my face. And then he said,

‘Summer will come again.’ (Saying the words slowly - as though he suspected I'd been talking about more than just the cold weather.) 

‘It’s not impossible,' he said. 'Summer'll come back round again. It does every year.’

The windscreen wipers squeaked. 

♥

I'm going to try and hold onto those words this week and maybe try and complain a little less. It feels imposssible, but Summer will come again because this coldness isn't lasting. It will come back around. 

It always does.

some things I'd rather be doing right now

I’d like to have a wheely-chair race round this building

I’d like to try on five blue dresses and twirl a few times
I’d like to play music very loud and dance in the kitchen
I’d like to jump on a trampoline (without injuring myself in the process).

I’d like to sit in Kibble Palace and eavesdrop other voices 

I’d like to sift through old postcards and imagine who they’re from
I’d like to write long, long letters without stumbling over syntax
I’d like to draw little pictures and colour them in.

I’d like to get on an airplane for that feeling of almost-being somewhere
Holding my breath as it starts to go down.

I’d like to paint on a banner all the words that I’m liking
Punctuate. Whisper. Consortium. Tulip.
I’d like to eat summer strawberries or bonbons or peaches
I’d like to click open coke cans – but just for the sound.

I’d like, if I could, to get a big feather duster and
break up this cloud lurking, dull, by my head:
              it's 
              turning the shade of my skin 

              grey, and the curve       of my lip     

                 grey, 

                  and the tone of my voice 

             grey,           and my greeny-brown eyes 

                       grey.

But –

I’d better get back to work.

♥

(Ps. I'm looking forward to the Spring. Pps. This isn’t really meant to be a poem. It’s more of a structured list written when I should be doing other things. Ppps. Kibble Palace, if you don't know, is the beautiful lacy glasshouse in Glasgow's Botanic Gardens, pictured: here.

And also: Sorry for the silence on here. I’ll return when the workload allows...

Picture by the very talented: Julianna Swaney. Her pictures always fill me with light.) 

ode to a hat.

It’s been a difficult couple of days culminating in the loss of my very most favourite hat*. When I say ‘favourite hat’ – it’s really the only hat I’ve ever enjoyed to wear. I’m not even sure how I lost it. 

I had it on yesterday morning when the rain was driving down so hard that, by the time I bustled inside, my coat was heavily, spongily wet. I had the hat when I was in the car, tucked inside one of the cup holders behind the handbrake. I picked it up – I’m sure I picked it up – when I was getting out the car, waving goodbye to my mum before stepping in a puddle en route to the the train station.

But after that: no idea. 

It was a nice little hat – thick knit wool in a colour that was somewhere between green, turquoise and teal. The expression ‘it fit like a glove’ would describe it perfectly if it hadn’t, in fact, been a hat. And what I mean by that was it kept my ears cozy without being too tight around my head (unlike the new hat I was forced – by the gnawing wind – to buy this morning. I can still feel it pressed against my forehead even though it’s been sitting beside me on the desk for the past seven or eight minutes). I could wear my hat and not end up with funny hair. It didn’t have any pompoms or ruffles or racoon faces with ears or sequins. It was just a simple hat, and when I wore it with my red coat I felt kind of like a strawberry.

Goodbye hat.
I'm sorry for not taking better care of you.
I will miss you.

♥

(Picture: the last photograph of me and the hat, taken on Sunday, on the Glasgow subway, as my brother and I hurtled towards the West End and our first Christmas turkey of the month

*Note: the hat-loss isn't the most difficult thing, so I suppose 'culminating' is the wrong word. But I'm still pretty sad about it...)

swooning.

The line ‘fill your paper with the breathings of your heart’ came into my head this afternoon... and I’ve been unable to get it out.

(Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

With the breathings of your heart.

Fill your paper) 

I read a while ago that those words belong to Wordworth, but I was reluctant to look them up. I was nervous I'd find out that he said them in the midst of something ugly. Or that the words aren’t his at all... they belong to someone sort've boring called Fred*.

(With the breathings of your heart. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.)

My own words have been coming out quite clunkily today. Too many lists. Too much ‘telling’. Not enough poetry. Too many hyphens, and commas (and parenthesis) and falterings. So eventually I threw down my pen (metaphorically – I’ve been writing on a keyboard) and decided to type the line into Google. "To seek out the source." Why not?

Anyway - that's all a very long explanation to account for why I’m posting the following love letter snippet on here. It made my heart stop for a second. That’s all. The line ('fill your paper...') comes from this closing paragraph in (yes) a letter Wordsworth wrote to his wife, Mary. Here it is:  

‘I have infinite pleasure in the thought of seeing thee again in Wales; and travelling with thee. – I long for the day. Love me and think of me & wish for me, and be assured that I am repaying thee in the same coin [...] Write to me frequently & the longest Letters possible; never mind whether you have facts or no to communicate; fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. Most tenderly your friend & Husband W.W.’

Goodness!

I’m glad I looked. (‘Write to me frequently & the longest Letters possible...)

Beautiful.

♥

(Note: *No offense to Fred, whoever he is. I suppose writing that lovely line would show he has a beautiful soul. And his anonymity doesn’t make his poetry any less valuable than W.W’s. (Yeahyeah. I know.) But I wanted Wordsworth to’ve said this. He wrote so many other great lines – ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’, pretty much every line in ‘The world is too much with us’ – and I just wanted these words to be his also.)

(Pictures: the first is Glasgow and the rest are from around my friend Christi's beautiful light-filled house.)