pulsing LED heralds of the solstice and gift-giving. The dark’s still rising but there’s more cheer about than the November slog, Melville’s grimness about the mouth. The days will start to stretch soon, light cracking the blackness before I wake. And people look outside themselves a little. The long nights bring more time at the pages. I find another collection of Orkney tales of crofters and fishermen, yule yarns and candles in the stone-set glass, old men by the fireside. There’s some yearning in me for the natural, living as I do in the asphalted shards of it, the strip of grass I planted, the herbs and spindly organics in the border. Most things under my patch of sky here are designed, straight-angled and hard. It’s taken me a long time to see the art in this designed world, a different kind of beauty that resonates nonetheless. I’m drawn to the magic of the lines, colours and shadows, they have their own rightness. That rightness of music, of craft, of Newton’s mappings, Jack’s confused missives and all human efforts to match the natural resonance. The best of our designed world is no less sublime.
