Looking down the track west. Marine skies.
Fat black clouds full of unfallen rain are gently barging their way over Beacon Hill, but it’s late in the day and the hidden sun is low in the sky, so the pure cotton balls behind them are lit like freshly laundered bedding on a washing line in summer. I can’t tell if the sponges soaked in ink are about to stain the chalk behind, or if the white clouds are coming to mop up the spills. They’re not moving fast but they are shape-shifting. Morphing maybe, but in ultra slow motion. This is when the sky is most like the sea.
I heard a story the other day about a woman swimming in the ocean, being followed by a whale. Her description of this enormous creature’s presence beneath her -feeling the whale’s proximity before she could even be sure what it was - came back to me as I stopped and watched these grey cetaceans breach and dive, and disappear without trace.
A clear blue sky is heaven sent, but there’s no drama and no mood. Blue skies, like flat calm seas, are static, but clouds are in constant motion; harbingers of a change. I hear Uncle Monty suggesting a retreat indoors, “Come on lads, the sky’s beginning to bruise…”
I’m not always comfortable with where I live. I came here because there wasn’t much choice, and I miss my home by the sea, but the skies have helped me to lay that discomfort to rest. With my back to the house, there’s precious little sight of human habitation at every point of the compass, bar my neighbours, down a gated drive to the north. There's a steep hill behind me, like presence at my shoulder, but the big vista is to the east, where sun rises over an ancient hillfort. It’s two miles as the crow flies, and that thousand acres is enough space to give two hundred degrees of skyscape. Look up an inch from eyeline and everything is sky. Nothing gets in the way. With that kind of volume, you see the weather coming a long way off.
Big wet rolling marine skies today.