MIDWINTER LIGHT - UNCAPTURED


On this season's much anticipated journey home, I had to take at least three photographs in my mind. This is because I forgot to bring my camera. In fact hardly any of my best photographs have made it on to a format which can be publicly viewed. Come to think of it, it's true of my best music, which is often lost in waking up, and the best thoughts I come across, which spring up in a conversation but are never recorded for later.

First picture. I woke up, hours ahead of everyone else, on Sunday morning at a friend's house in Kilburn. It was just beginning to get light. The window looks on to an area of greenery, but from my sofa-bed I can only see twigs, branches and part of a tree trunk, bare for December. The sun, starting to rise, makes the tree look pale blue with green shadows against the palely lit (cloudless) sky behind. Then, at once, the branches are touched with bright coppery light. It's all framed by the window and looks like a perfect cover for a wintry song collection. But not mine, this time.

Second picture (sequence of films). Seen from a train window. On Monday, the countryside north of London was shrouded in freezing fog. (Still is.) The lines of trees across the fields look like a two-dimensional scene made with (does it still exist?) tracing paper. Each strip of scenery is covered with a layer so that the trees receding into the distance are greying into white and out of view altogether while the ones close to the train are quite distinct. Suddenly as we career past Morpeth, the sun shows, ghostly behind the mist at first. It's teasing, peering, gone again - then suddenly, and this is just as my first glass of wine kicks in, the clouds are gone as we emerge from the fog, and the scene is suffused with golden light, the white layer of frost on the fields accentuating the blueness of the shadows. Later as the sun sinks, it is all Christmas card silhouettes. The smoke and other vapours have turned dark blue against the sky which is still alight, its orangeness reflected by the pools of water (or ice?) on the ground. Now the freezing dark mist is low on the fields and as high as a person, or perhaps a house.

Third picture. Walking along Aberdeen beach putting off a bit of time before the James Bond film. Airbrushed sky (bright orange again, through green, to dark blue.) I can see the impossibly thin neo-gothic spires of Marischal College, the tower blocks winking at Bridge of Don, and a couple of cranes which must be at the harbour. It is all - and I'm not kidding - a keener pleasure, a more sumptuous memorable thing, than the film itself. Or is it only me? We should rate sky scenes and window scenes higher than we do.

Happy Solstice to all light lovers. Tomorrow the sun returns to the cold fields.