October

October starts with a storm.

Wind takes down trees, churns the waters. Electricity is cut. 

It blows me across the North Sea, white-knuckled on a little plane, to Aberdeen for a weekend of mostly hunkering down. In the calm aftermath I go on a trip to London - skies are clear and it’s warm enough to sit outside. It’s the day of a full moon and I make a plan to actually look for it later at night, find it in the sky and see how it looks among the lights of a city. But it’s right there when I emerge from the underground, small and suspended between the buildings like it’s just the head of another streetlamp. I take a photograph but everything blurs and blends - the moon and the lights are stretched into bands of colour - blue, white, red - so they look like exploding stars. 

In between bakery-hopping and seeing a couple of shows, I stroll around thinking about just how many people are here, about how much is going on at the same time.

We are all ants scurrying around, particles colliding. 

On a packed tube it strikes me how intimate it is, standing so close to other people - aware of their bodies and where they are in space. You could see the braids of someone’s hair, the detail of the ring on a finger. We are different shapes and sizes, different beliefs and destinations, but grasping on to the same handle, moving in the same direction. We make room for those getting on, clear a path for those needing to get off. 

Is the underground actually some sort of temporary utopia? Probably not in a sweaty July when you’re delayed on the way to work.

Back home, on a blue-skied afternoon between the month’s drizzle, I go for a swim in the nearby outdoor pool, the first time in ages. The tide is high and the water spills over the edges, lapping against itself. For a few moments I’m connected to what is beyond the walls, pulled out to sea and the horizon.

When I get out I feel the blood rushing across the nape of my neck, down my arms, as it flows back from protecting my core. It is actually my birthday so I am going for a dip for the pseudo-symbolism, something about the sea giving life, about yin and yang…

A couple of hours later a dead shark is found on the rocks around the corner.

There has been strong aurora activity in the last few weeks - nights where acid green and cherry red transform the sky. But it only really looks like this in photographs, the slow mechanism of a lens this time capturing the hidden light - making it sharp, apparent. Stars are pinpricks of white.

I look a little bit into the science of the aurora - what causes it. Gases in the Earth’s atmosphere are lit up by colliding particles that have been pulled into the magnetic fields (different colours are different gases and altitudes). They have travelled millions of miles from the sun, blown from its surface, where they start out in huge clouds, as wind and electricity. 

It starts with a storm.