Category: Music

Trees are cages for them, water holds its breath

Norman Maccaig: stars and planets

Where to look? From the back door, red lights twinkle on cranes neck-stretched above the chastened construction site of Edinburgh’s St James ‘retailopolis’. Builders banned. Animation suspended.  Coronavirus stills and silences city life as we have known it. 

I look up to the night sky. As a child I found that starry darkness a dizzying immensity, struggling with the eight times table my mind was never going to fathom infinity. Still can’t. No, I do know my times tables, but I can still go dizzy with the endlessly intoxicating dazzle of starlight.

That helps on a day when news is far from uplifting. One of our very best baby boomers, Edinburgh Festival (born, like me, in 1947), is cancelled until next year. So, necessarily confined to our own Covid cage, I find comfort in the liberating poetry and music I chose for Sceptical Scot last week. I hope you might too.