The wind blows

Tuesday, 14 January 2003

As I walked home along the canal this evening, bathed in the yellow streetlights, swan-watching (they were paddling hard to keep from being swept downstream, their necks straining against the stiff wind), I realised that it wasn't quite as cold as it had been last week, and I remembered an earlier self, walking this same route in sunny late afternoon (same time of day, different time of year), and it dawned on me that winter, even this winter, isn't endless.

I was thinking about the couple I saw this morning as I walked in the opposite direction: two men strolling townwards, hand in hand, I'd guess not long out of bed with each other, leaning in to minimise the wind's scrape, chatting and laughing. One a bit scruffy-looking, with dark gold hair and red lips, the other natty in a black bowler hat and jacket. Aware, perhaps, of the statement they were making on this Dublin morning. It's the first time I've seen two men hand in hand here, and it made me smile all the way to Clanbrassil Street.

The title above is swiped from a Katherine Mansfield story that I remember loving when I read it in 1996. I'd go and find it if it weren't so late (and if my books weren't still in complete disarray, more than a year after moving into this house). Seek it out if you like densely textured, oblique stories about subterranean turmoil - it's the details that stay with me: the wind blowing through the whole story, washing flapping on the line, everyone shouting to be heard, everything edgy. Brilliant.

Wind blows through my head, makes me think of change. Clichéd, I grant, but surely constant originality grows tedious. (Comfort language is OK in these pages. I have spoken.)

Unfortunately, it's taken so long to set up the administrative sections that I've barely had five minutes to write this entry. We shall do better in future, you and I.

Later: I found The wind blows on the University of Pennsylvania Library site. It's as good as I remembered.

there is no previous | next
January index

about