18 12 07

It’s light but the sun is not above the hills yet. Frost everywhere, from roof slates to the sheep-cropped grass, which is white, no shade of green. I set off across the brittle tussocks which only the highest tides cover. Tide last night was moderate & low was at half past five. I want to find out if the white out on the bay is ice. Coming off the salt flats I step onto frozen sand ridges which the sea has left. Wormcasts are frozen solid. Bladderwrack is frosted white. Any depressions in seabed (that’s what I’m walking on – the point where land is reclaimed by the sea in its continual cycle) are filled with shallow sea ice. At twenty past nine the sun glows at the hill line. At this time of year it’s so far south of east as to be disorienting; I think I’ve gone badly astray, a feeling heightened by the double blinding of the sun & its reflection in the iced sands. Squinting downward, I head directly into the sun, towards the three scattered islands where sometimes stranded sheep sleep in the summer, Eileanan Loisgte, the burnt islands. Another five minutes & the sun is clear of the hill & rising along its low arc. Even a couple of days from solstice where everything hangs & tilts, the brilliance is too much for me . I head into the black gloam of the islands & turn back along my footprints. My shadow , cast ahead, is thirty feet long. At this point, I’m in the middle of the bay among crackling mussel beds & the air’s cracked, torn apart by a roar that goes to my nape; ahead of it goes the Tornado jet itself, which I only catch a glimpse of with its wing missiles. The noise is visceral. It bypasses everything rational & goes direct to the thalamus - seat of primal reaction. I crouch down, vulnerable on miles of open sand. There’s no cover.

It passes. I straighten up & with the jet safely away shake my fist. I curse. Atavism recedes into the reptilian brain & I walk on back across acres of frost & ice, the weight of sky on the back of my neck. The mountains of Afghanistan are not so very far away. Not a bird stirs.