Holiday for a week so staying at home!

I'm having a holiday week at home in Westhill. It's been a busy time with end of Semester and end of Session marking and processing, but now everything is tidied up. And before we begin the wind up to next academic year I'm having a week to let the horizons draw back again and look at all the other things in life that also matter, indeed yes, they do!

There's much to see and enjoy on our doorstep – castles and gardens, coastal and hill walks, we are bird watchers and coffee shop connoisseurs, I get to do the cooking for dinner, and if it's raining we have DVD's, the cinema – oh, and rain jackets. Will have a day in Edinburgh to meet some folk and I'll carve out an hour at the National Galleries.

Meantime there hasn't been a poem here for a while. remedied now:

Soloist

Seeing above Glen Lyon a forester

sawing in a shaft of sunlight so far

downwind the sound is drowned

by perpetual lark-song, I am drawn

to that sweltering auditorium decades ago

and Rostropovitch playing Dvorak's cello

concerto; folk melody rising, the soloist

silhouetted in a nimbus of gold dust.

                      Stewart Conn, The Breakfast Room (Bloodaxe, 2010), page 54.

That's a holiday poem, and we will be walking in Glen Dye later this week, if there's a sunny day. I don't walk in rain for fun!

s!