The light here is ridonculous, changing all the time. I can be not paying attention to the light at all, being as I’m all inside and split with the electric (as they call it up here) and caught in the spot of a standby red or the blue of a fading charger or the flicker of a gas flame, or the sudden of blue eyes, brown eyes, any eyes, any distracting lights. And then I turn to the outside of inside and see it, the change. From a lemony sun to purple, to grey, to blue. The whole place is blue, the hills, the trees, the whateverness. Then, incoming, zeon-neon cycling kits all wrapped around a couple just off their bikes, and I turn in once more to the standby red etc. It’s quite a brain swirl, I’m telling you, although you already know it for yourself. The key, I tell myself, is to keep a hold on the outside light changers because there is definitely something feral and organic about the way it morphs and swingles, evolves and full stops itself. If I was to step out on some mission, like those who ‘conquer’ mountains (Bens, if you want the actual definition) or who do any other conquering nonsense, to what…..capture the light change, get it so right, so perfect, I would be wasting my time. It is enough just to glimpse. Now there’s a clumsy word if ever there was one, although that maybe just in my mouth. You wouldn’t choose to use it in a song. But, a catch, a sudden turn, an eye-capture, that’s it.

Anyway, (never begin a sentence with that word) I’m home now, back from a fun, busy, happy day at the Best Cafe Ever. Loads of laughs and chats and learning that sourdough is a right shit to wash off anything, and that anyone arriving on the other side of the counter feels shy. It thinks me. These grown-ups are suddenly unsure, looking for a welcome, compromised if that welcome doesn’t come quick enough, the light of it. It’s all about light.

Now the fire is lit, the hills beyond the sea-loch have settled into a uniform brown, although, as a painter, there is nothing uniform about brown, nor any another hue. just saying. There is tinder, ochre deep and light, and medium, there is rose gold, there is burnt umber, tango orange, falafel yellow, a skid of drowned lapis, a whitish tense of skinny limbs, bared like my arms in defence, minus the lichen, obviously. I see snaps of old lost grass, a pecker of distant woodland. I see the light of the flooding tide, a slug slide, grey but there is no ‘one’ grey. Everyone knows that.

I’m watching the light right now as the fire breathes and the candles flicker. Out there is more than a closed sky. It always is.