It’s Sunday evening, not yet five, and outside it is dark already. The sea is flat calm and all shimmery. Elsewhere in the country, Storm Angus has been blowing up disasters. Here I quietly sip my tequila tonic and reflect on a jolly good day. I have been quilting all morning, and it was nice being back handling the material, watching the needle and concentrating madly. More tomorrow, there is no rush. John planted three yellow rambling roses. We have high hopes for them, all nestled down in their compost. They had better perform, or else!

I was down in Wales when I heard the news that Leonard Cohen had died.

There was such a feeling of loss, and the songs they played all day on the radio took me back to different stages of my life, when I listened, and tried to make sense of his magical words. I remember ironing to his lugubrious thoughts. Suzanne, Marianne, the Chelsea Hotel… I remember driving over the hill in Glenelg, taking the children to school, and playing ‘I’m your man’ over and over, and even further back when I was about eighteen, in the Kintail Lodge Hotel listening to the Songs of Love and Hate. Ah well.

Natasha, Bonnie and I went to the Cardiff Museum and I was quite taken with their dinosaurs. There is a new dinosaur on display, found in Penarth in 2014. I watched the television a while ago about the massive remains of some mighty creature in Arizona, but this little guy in Penarth is like T Rex’s baby brother.

I have never been that interested in dinosaurs really, they have always been pictures in a book, probably because I had all my primary education in Malaysia on top of Penang Hill where centipedes and monkeys were so much more realistic. I was never a Jurassic Park lover.  Still, I did my thing in my teaching career and encouraged children in their finds and their interests, but it was not until last week in Cardiff that it became real, and actual bones and bits of bones were lying amidst the rocks and stones just down by the pier. Tasha found a piece of ‘backbone’ and the museum dated it to 200 million years. I can see how exciting it must be to put a giant 3D puzzle together.

I have been perusing a book of Scottish poetry, and came across so many treasures of yesteryear. But it was the Twa Corbies  (ravens) that caught my eye. Probably because of all this talk of death and mortality, and bones on beaches and lives lived and forgotten.

As I was walking all alane,

I heard twa corbies making a mane;

The tane unto the t’other say,

‘Where sall we gang and dine to-day?’

‘His hound is to the hunting gane,

His hawk, to fetch the wild-fowl hame,

His lady’s ta’en another mate,

So we may mak our dinner sweet.

 ‘In behint yon auld fail dyke,  (turf wall)

I wot there lies a new-slain knight;

And naebody kens that he lies there,

But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

 ‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane, (neck bone)

And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een.

Wi’ae lock o’ his gowden hair,

We’ll theek (thatch) our nest when it grows bare.

‘Mony a ane for him makes mane,

But nane sall ken whare he is gane:

O’er his white banes, when they are bare,

The wind sall blaw for evermair.’

 ANON

Anyway enough of the morbid, it is nicer to reflect on past journeys. John is comprising an on-line Photobox calendar for us, and is going through his photographs; he is chuckling at pictures of us on Goan beaches and posing in front of the Taj Mahal. How he will select twelve pictures I do not know. But come to think of it, some of the best shots were of crows – fabulous one of crows riding a bicycle, on a boat, and trying to drink beer! They, like their cousins the ravens, are always with us.

My little granddaughters are growing like mushrooms. Bonnie is so enthusiastic over everything she does, gymnastics, dancing, baking, and most of all, Mary Poppins!

And Darcey has learnt to stand alone. She is desperate to walk, and can travel round the room at speed using sofas or chairs or whatever is handy.

And now that my tequila has gone, and smells are coming from the oven, I must get on. But as I look out at the sea with soft glimmering lights on the waves, I will leave with George Mackay Brown’s, ‘Beachcomber’:

Monday I found a boot –

Rust and salt leather.

I gave it back to the sea, to dance in.

 Tuesday a spar of timber worth thirty bob.

Next winter

It will be a chair, a coffin, a bed.

And there is more, but I liked the ideas of driftwood and tyres and all the jumble that ends up on the shore, and I like his take on the ordinary, the everyday.

World politics dominate, Trump is elected, our world is not as we knew it. Changes are on the move, and we wait, what else is there to do, but wait and see? But there is comfort in words, and poems and songs. Goodnight, Leonard Cohen, goodnight:

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.