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The Printed Land: April 2013
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Writings on landscape and memory. Tuesday, April 16, 2013. The Hill of the Winds. I have told no-one this before. We heard of one building with a sound roof and a wooden floor, left open as a bothy. It nested in ochre folds of land at the base of a towering, windswept hill, the dark shape like a presence of a benign spirit. Beyond, the knuckled ridges of paler hills stretched to the head of the Loch. We left the bothy later that day; the weather had turned and the last threads of snow had melted from the...
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The Printed Land: A year of words, a cloud of electrons
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Writings on landscape and memory. Sunday, January 12, 2014. A year of words, a cloud of electrons. It feels strange to be here, in the half-light of a northern winter, bent over the glow of the screen again. I draw words from the heavy soil, listen to the roar of the wind in the trees, stand on the step at the front of the house and watch the moon rise over the clouds which are tipped with white, like the edge of an Edwardian napkin. A Sky Full of Rain - Essays and Prose 2013. Sunday, January 12, 2014.
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The Printed Land: November 2012
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Writings on landscape and memory. Wednesday, November 21, 2012. Amongst the stand of spruce trees at the base of the hill, the darkness pools in the way that mist settles at the onset of evening. Woodpigeons clatter from the trees, dark against the darkening sky. Two woodcock are flushed from the thickets of bramble and skitter low to the ground, flexing from side to side, urgent, furtive. Refers both to evening and to a prayer, as though both are sacred in their own way, both mark a transition, a limina...
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The Printed Land: August 2013
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Writings on landscape and memory. Sunday, August 11, 2013. Let me tell you how easy it is to lose yourself. I know now that the land is made from layers of memory; strata of dreams and regrets, romances and discontents, which accumulate over the years like the soot which blackens the walls of the buildings in this small town. I know that there is a strange and tragic history between its streets, and yet I still listen for its stories of hope, its echoes of love. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom). Download 'A sk...
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The Printed Land: Fractal geometry and the river of life
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Writings on landscape and memory. Sunday, January 5, 2014. Fractal geometry and the river of life. A reminder of the force and omnipotence of the weather. From the hillside where I now sit, I can see the gathering dark of storm clouds signalling the arrival of the next weather front. I turn my eyes back to the hillside. My mind retreated into a form of hibernation, dulled by the futility of communication, smothered by the incessant clamour of the trivial. This walk on the local hills,. Gaze to the far.
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The Printed Land: February 2013
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Writings on landscape and memory. Saturday, February 23, 2013. Monday, February 11, 2013. He is calling again from the field below the lane. In the muddied dusk of evening, I hear his plaintive shriek across the surface of the wind; insistent, hopeful: peeoow. I have been watching him for months, trying to understand his days. When the westerly rains shadow the fields, I see him hunched in the tree like an old gentleman in a dun-coloured overcoat, patiently waiting out the shower, folded into himself...
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The Printed Land: January 2014
http://printedland.blogspot.com/2014_01_01_archive.html
Writings on landscape and memory. Sunday, January 12, 2014. A year of words, a cloud of electrons. It feels strange to be here, in the half-light of a northern winter, bent over the glow of the screen again. I draw words from the heavy soil, listen to the roar of the wind in the trees, stand on the step at the front of the house and watch the moon rise over the clouds which are tipped with white, like the edge of an Edwardian napkin. A Sky Full of Rain - Essays and Prose 2013. Sunday, January 5, 2014.
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The Printed Land: July 2013
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Writings on landscape and memory. Tuesday, July 16, 2013. Hoping for a god. The strange litany of their names like an ancient prayer. I am surrounded by noise in the stillness of a summer's evening. Crickets, invisible but for the noise of their chirring. Still into silence briefly as I pass, before striking up again behind me. Black-headed gulls turn and turn in the still air, shrieking this place is mine-mine-mine. To make a happy fireside clime. To weans and wife,. That's the true pathos and sublime.
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The Printed Land: Millstone Grit
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Writings on landscape and memory. Monday, June 9, 2014. Turning across the park, the path is puddled with the aftermath of the spring rain. The smell of wet cut grass mixes with the stale almond smell of the lime trees. Late afternoon sun spills across the skateboard ramps. I think to myself. Almost two-thirds of my life. I am surprised I can remember any of this at all. The summer before I moved to Leeds, I had been reading Glyn Hughes' Millstone Grit;. And his fading copies of Wide World. In 1970. ...
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The Printed Land: January 2013
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Writings on landscape and memory. Tuesday, January 22, 2013. Within the fence, there are almost three hundred buildings, most used for military storage, the central group used for research and administration. In each, the doors are missing, the windows smashed, the floor littered with either animal shit or the debris of vandalism and neglect: peeling tiles, smashed fibreboard walls, rusting light fittings. Sunday, January 6, 2013. I am walking out my inability to write, the words not coming in the way th...
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