crocuses daffodils chinooks

another month has flown by …. I sit here in bed with my tea on my 76th birthday, the sun is about to flood into the room, there is ice on the windscreens and frost on the grass, a sudden dip in the generally mild weather. Precious scented baby geraniums are in the greenhouse in a box insulated with wool padding and covered up overnight.

Trying to ignore the jittering of oil prices as lies are told and people are blown up, starved, deported, beaten up by police around the world. I am not quite ignoring it all in my paintings. self portrait with B1 bomber and hellebores.

we had a lot of coming and going of  3 or 4 very loud chinooks on exercise from Leuchars, over Tentsmuir, over Cupar, over Kemback. Around that time I bought 12 hellebore plugs and potted them up in the greenhouse. They are now planted out and I have a hellebore bed, adding to some volunteers which arrived in the middle of the prairie mallow monsters, which I have cleared out, they spread too easily.

this spring I have more than just crocuses in the grass at the front of the house, I levered up the turf and put in 200 mixed bulbs – little daffodils, more crocuses and lots of Glory of the Snow which have duly pushed through the grass and will continue for a while.

some beautiful white ones – and the mice ate the ones I put in front of the greenhouse, so I rescued a couple. And painted them with the chinooks at the top –

I have some lovely news from Graystone Gallery,

they sold my huge (150 x 100 cm) Two Blackbirds painting straight off, despite not being able to have a preview night and other disruptions due to the tragic sudden death of Rob Briggs, Lesley’s behind the scenes partner and husband (of I don’t know how long but I think they were a long time together). Rob was so helpful last summer, he came to take some video of me in the garden and studio for the event at the University of Edinburgh’s Education department, and talked to the audience with me at the event.

Lesley also sold this one in March, so now she wants a proposal for a stunning big painting for the Edinburgh festival ..

I am starting with some watercolour studies, but much else is preventing me going forwards with this, a lot of poetry stuff, and other distractions. There is plenty of time, after all. I restarted a 120 x 100 cm box canvas with a coating of greens in cold wax medium, which will take a while to dry.

There are walks to walk, poems to write, trips to Edinburgh, workshops to take part in, things to do for the pamphlet which looks pretty certain to be published this summer, fabric to make into new clothes …. this is my very self-indulgent hobby. Not always for myself though.

East Lomond hill from Falkland woods, with a dusting of snow mid-March. The Picts who had a stronghold up there must have been tough. I go to Falkland quite regularly for supplies of sourdough bread and a walk.

We had wee Nonna to stay for almost a week which meant no beach walks as that’s impossible with the two of them. L&S went to Zurich so L could take part in a conference of film and media production design.

There have been some good walks along the Eden, in and out of Cupar, when I could let Bims have a run off-leash as no-one else much was walking there. But that ended in a what could have been a disaster as madam went off on a jolly and so now I daren’t let her off there again.

We have managed to catch some perfect mornings at the beach in fact.

If it’s not too windy or wet, if the sun is shining just enough.

Often there’s no one around, or not within a quarter mile, until we get near the car park, i think mostly people get there a bit later.

Walking around town has its pleasures, town gardens seem to be at their best in Spring, blossom trees and bulbs are easy to care for.

yellow and pink are big, with some blue scilla and grape hyacinth. I have pink and white scilla as well!

When Nonna was here I decided I must get up to the top of the Hill of Tarvit again, and there was a fairly non-windy day. I parked in Ceres and we walked through a couple of fields to make the approach a gradual uphill instead of the very steep climb up from the mansion car park. Above is the view from the top over their hickory golf course (the clubs are made of hickory and the balls are old rubber ones).

It’s a spooky approach through this pine clump from which, the first time I came here with L&S, Christmas 2015, in a rain storm, somebody invisible was crying and calling, and we felt like we had heard but not seen, one of those thin places where other dimensions are perceptible, especially as the car clock had not been changed when they went backwards in the autumn and there was a missing hour.

You can just see the top of Scotstarvit tower house in the trees from this point.

Mary of Guise, James v’s widow and Dowager Queen of Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots’ mother, signed  the Treaty of Garlie Bank on 13th June 1559 up here, after a skirmish with the local reformation army.

The views were a bit misty.

Nonna rolled and rolled on the nice clean dewy grass.

The week before, Lucy and I went to the other side of Edinburgh, after delivering the Two Blackbirds painting which we only just squeezed into her car, at 150 x 100 cm it was much too big for mine. We had a really interesting walk in the post-industrial landscape near Livingstone, where oil shale mining in the 1940’s and 50’s has left enormous flat-topped red clay hills or bings, which stand out in the landscape, glowering over suburban housing as if transported from Australia. It was open-cast mining where the soil and overburden was stripped by dragline and bulldozer to expose an 18ft thickness of shale, which was then worked by drilling and blasting with gelignite. The broken shale was loaded by face-shovel into a fleet of six, six-wheeled trucks and transported two and a half miles to Westwood crude oil works.

We walked along the valley of the river Almond and beside a sluice which is a feeder for the Grand Union canal. Here under this  viaduct for the railway line, opened in 1867, which was also used to transport the oil shale to a works at Pumpherston, alongside this valley.

after about 3 miles of following the sluice we ended up at the aqueduct where the sluice joins the canal, much higher up than the river itself, and we had to go down steps to the bottom of the structure, underneath it and then up steps again to get to the canal footpath

which gave us both weird vertigo

high above the river Almond itself.

and back to the start on the other side of the river on relatively flat straight roads through farm land and woodland, the only thing of note being a farm called Lookabootye with this great view!

Spring colours have arrived! this canvas is 100 x 100cm,

this one is 20 x 20 cm on a ply panel, and is part of my anti-war “protest”, Welsh mountain pony with night-flying Tornado fighters.

and that’s a B52 bomber, which is a US aircraft currently taking off from the UK to bomb Iran and take part in war crimes.

waiting for more greenhouse and flower type stuff to be added.