Night skies

A thickening sky; a fine Gothic scythe of a moon, slowly, lazily, gathering clouds, that might not amount to much. They are dark grey against dark blue and faded grey at the edges, a colour pattern that reminds me perhaps wrongly of Fuseli; the colour of old paintings of faded nightgowns, soft-faded lead paints, metals and whites and old oils.

The front windows of the house look east, into Wales, and the clouds build up without hurry over the Radnor Forest; they look threatening, snow-filled, angry, but haven't the energy to do anything and dissipate equally slowly, falling apart over the wild hilltops near the Powys Observatory. I love it up there, gentle, massive hilltops, silent fields, sheep and endless winds, even the strange military squares of Forestry Commission timber, like the 'tortoises' of Roman shield-walls, or Zen gardening on a massive scale.

The winds of the recent storms seem to have passed. I feel as if the real force was elsewhere, and that the storms could only reach us with a ghostly, feeble reach, but still strong enough to rattle slates and overturn pots. The ragged edges of the storm, the 'skirts', a phrase that has played with me all day, the idea of a skirt and of something being skirted. Words can be mulled gently for hours or days in a writer's head. The winds last night felt as though they were scouring the sky, the moon looked small and raw, the stars brighter but polished with sandpaper. As if a layer of sky had been rubbed harshly away by the wind; and for the first time since a meteor shower last August I saw a shooting star over the hill behind the house.