I’m writing this on a Scottish winter’s day, still a few days shy of the solstice. My sleep is out of whack and I’m not sure if I’ve woken too early for daylight or slept and missed it all.​​

I have to listen for the crows. Are they shouting at my window for breakfast? It’s morning. Are there only sleepy pigeons bumbling around, confused by streetlights and left over birdseed? It’s somewhere between mid-afternoon and midnight. If we had a fireplace, the ashes would be cold.

The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk*

These are the perfect days to immerse myself in Skammdegi, a discovery set of three scents about darkness.

Flotholt seems like my kind of gloomy**.

It makes me think of walking on the beach near my sister’s old place. That freezing cottage on the peninsula. This was only a river beach but the north sea tides flow through it, and it brought vikings, so it’s still part of the sea roads for all that you can see across to land.

(I really only like cold beaches. A tropical paradise would be hellish.)

The day I took these pictures*** it was summer, allegedly. It was closer to the summer solstice than this winter one anyway.

The fields we’d walked through were shifting from green to gold, but when we dropped down a layer, down a geological era or two to the beach, the summer stopped. There was light, but no colour. Whichever way I faced, it felt like searching for the sun but we had no sunstone to see through the overcast sky. The rattling grasses were salted pale. Even the skeleton trees were stripped and bleached by the wind. 

It wasn’t a roaring wind, but a thieving one. Stealing colour, stealing words, Stealing the flame if you tried to light a cigarette, even huddled inside a coat. 

This whole scent feels like waiting for the light: sunlight, the flash of light on land after a long time away, golden window light as you walk across the fields. It feels like it holds a promise: soon.

* St Lucy’s Day was briefly rather lovely; there was an hour of valiant sunlight in which I managed to walk across to the churchyard and bask on the porch. But I will take any excuse to read more John Donne. This is a snippet of A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day Balance that dark alchemy of grief with the joyous Sun Rising 

** I’ve only lived with Flotholt for a couple of days so far, but it feels like it belongs with the cold quiet northern shores I love of Sel Marin and silencethesea (though perhaps those latter deeper darker waters are closer to Euan McCall’s work for Beaufort. This is quieter and closer, with no gales and nothing dying on the shore. All of them, fortunately, are a long way from both the “blue” marines and sun tan oils. I really need (and want) to wear silencethesea again, especially while I’m immersing myself in the wild waves of the Beauforts.

*** Back in 2004, making photos with a tiny i-zone polaroid camera.

dinonote: The baryonx in the first picture was a creature of wetlands: a ten metre long theropod living in and out of rivers and coastlines, eating fish some 125 million years ago. The first skeleton was found in England, maybe a hundred miles from this beach.