Immersed

Another day in paradise - with heavy leaden skies from late morning till early evening. At least that was still early enough to get out for a swim in the sea in the sun. And then we went down for a French meal at the marina end of the place - watching the setting sun, sitting overlooking the comings and goings of the boats.
Earlier I'd been lost to Mike Heron's reminiscences, until at 28% of the way into the book, Andrew Greig took over.
He's an author of a certain age (who writes in his garden shed) and he just transports me - we will reminisce, will we not. This, of his childhood home at Anstruther -

The teachers and kirk elders, the sweetie-shop wifies and drapers of my youth, are all gone. Our parents are all dead, dying or demented. The younger brother who played keepie-uppie in the rain has retired to concentrate on croquet. Phantom fishing boats with names like Spes Melior, Bright Star and Wilhelmina II bob in Anster’s pontoon-crammed harbour. That council house in Fowler Street has been bought and sold, and with it went that post-war world and its welfare state, which surrounded us then, unremarked on and ordinary as air.

Now I sit in a writing shed in our garden in Edinburgh, at sixty-four, listening to the blackbird pour song from our neighbour’s solitary pine. Pale liver spots shift like freckles of rain on the back of my hand. How did it come to this?