Winter time for me in Scotland was a time for walking in the dark. When I lived in Stirling and worked in Glasgow I commuted daily by train. Getting to the train station from home involved a 30+ minute walk, and in Scotland the winter days are short, so I’d set off in the dark and I’d return home in the dark.
My morning walk took me past Kings Park, a park I knew well having grown up not far from it. In the early hours of a January day I could see nothing of the park from the road. But I knew that, at one point, I passed the tennis courts and their club pavilion.
On one particular morning there were lights on at the pavilion. I took this photo. I love this. The pool of light is very limited so what you can see of the pavilion is also very limited. It’s as if it was floating in an inky black world.
Maybe it’s just the way my mind works but I immediately thought of two novels – The Far Pavilions by M M Kaye, and An Artist of The Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Of course the worlds described in those two books are very, very different from the one where I walk past Kings Park on a dark January morning, but that just enriched my experience of that day’s commute.
Does that happen to you? Does a particular place or view conjure up certain novels for you?
I love that human characteristic where perception mingles with memory and imagination and adds layer upon layer to an ordinary moment in an ordinary day…..l’émerveillement du quotidien.
How often, it seems, it’s we who conjure up the wonder in the everyday.
Heroes Not Zombies 
Leave a Reply