I love this time of year above all others. I know I am not alone in feeling the arrival of spring as an almost physical thing- a bubble of goodness deep in my body. All that newness. All of the possibilities that are being made possible again.

Everything is late this year, but all the more miraculous for that. The first bat as flown. Lambs leap in fields. Yesterday, we played the first cricket match.

The evenings are drawing out into those long soft West Highland dusks that seem to go on for ever, as if time itself was suspended. Michaela and I walk the shoreline, allowing ourselves to be hushed to the core.

And I wrote this. Consider it a word-photograph, because I carried no camera other than the one I was born with;

Not-quite-night

The dusk lingers

As if the sea itself, is

Releasing light only

Reluctantly, and

In this no-longer-day

But not-quite-night

I am suspended

Sound is carried,

cushioned by sea,

To land on this shore like mirage

The bark of a seal

An engine, ten miles away

A curlew seems no closer

But the sea itself is silent

In the not-quite-seeing

A bird flies, a black silhouette

Against the pewter sky

Flicks the scimitar tips

Of each graceful wing

Then gone,

Not waiting for tomorrow