Last night, here on this island, the clouds were thin and stretched-out, and seemingly racing eastward like they were fleeing from the darkness. The sky went through shades of blue to black, and when darkness came it was starless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The storm blew-in during the night and I realised only then that the.wind-blown clouds had been a warning. I sheltered behind a dry stone wall, under the rotted-out shell of some kind of skiff that I had dragged down from the dunes. The rain hammered the boat all night and the sand below me was wet. On the few occasions that I ventured out to look at the ocean, I saw no lights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the dawn came \u2014 at whatever time that was, as I had no way to know the time \u2014 the beach looked alien in the sepia light, scraped clean even of pebbles. I sat shivering in my damp clothes, hands between my legs, watching the breakers. There were a few scraps of wood here and there, but I had no way to make a fire. And my hat, I realised, was lost to the storm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the margin of sandy grass between the beach and the wall \u2014 what we might have called the machair<\/em>, back when such names were useful \u2014 the small plants that yesterday had had white or pale orange leaves, were stripped to stalks. Nothing moved except what was disturbed by the fresh breeze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here on the western-most edge of this continent, and with nothing else that it seemed possible to do, I sat with my shoulders against the wall and waited for the cold sun to rise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night, here on this island, the clouds were thin and stretched-out, and seemingly racing eastward like they were fleeing from the darkness. The sky went through shades of blue to black, and when darkness came it was starless. The storm blew-in during the night and I realised only then that the.wind-blown clouds had been … Continue reading “Margin”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3311"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3316,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311\/revisions\/3316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}