We’ve had some dramatic weather here on the island – lots of stormy days with high winds, big seas and hailstones! We’ve had some cancelled ferries and tricky plane landings! Today is much better – it’s calm and the sun is shining – so we’re all breathing a sigh of relief. Thoughts are turning to Christmas here on the island. Mine are turning to the words of Dylan Thomas:
‘One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea.’
