Dubs Hut

Still not feeling 100% but after dropping stuff at Keswick Oxfam I wanted to get into the fells so headed up Honister. It’s the first time, having been up there many times, that I realised you can see the sea through gaps in the hills to the right and the Solway, straight ahead and across to the Isle of Man, and to the left, the dazzle of Morecambe Bay and Norman Nicholson country...

Sea to the West

When the sea’s to the west
The evenings are one dazzle –
You can find no sign of water.
Sun upflows the horizon;
Waves of shine
Heave, crest, fracture,
Explode on the shore;
The wide day burns.
In the incandescent mantle of the air.

Once, fifteen,
I would lean on handlebars,
Staring into the flare,
Blinded by looking,
Letting the gutterings and sykes of light
Flood into my skull.

Then, on the stroke of bedtime,
I’d turn to the town,
Cycle past purpling dykes
To a brown drizzle
Where black-scum shadows
Stagnated between backyard walls.
I pulled the warm dark over my head
Like an eiderdown.

Yet in that final stare when I
(Five times, perhaps, fifteen)
Creak protesting away –
The sea to the west,
The land darkening –
Let my eyes at the last be blinded
Not by the dark
But by the dazzle.

Now watching Louis Theroux - not the brightest idea.