Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: a rabbit, on Eigg.
Orkney / This Life
Andrew Greig
For Catherine and Jamie
It is big sky and its changes, the sea all round and the waters within. It is the way sea and sky work off each other constantly, like people meeting in Alfred Street, each face coming away with a hint of the other’s face pressed in it. It is the way a week-long gale ends and folk emerge to hear a single bird cry way high up.
It is the way you lean to me and the way I lean to you, as if we are each other’s prevailing; how we connect along our shores, the way we are tidal islands joined for hours then inaccessible, I’ll go for that, and smile when I pick sand off myself in the shower. The way I am an inland loch to you when a clatter of white whoops and rises…
It is the way Scotland looks to the South, the way we enter friends’ houses to leave what we came with, or flick the kettle’s switch and wait. This is where I want to live, close to where the heart gives out, ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky where birds fly through instead of prayers while in Hoy Sound the ferry’s engines thrum this life this life this life.
Today's photo with the most hits: a street scene in Victoria, Gozo, Malta.
Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: an oddity.
Herewith a deep Edwardian bath with its original fittings - Kinloch Castle, Isle of Rum, Scotland. The water is sometimes peaty: don't be alarmed 👌🏻
Naxos
John Sakkis
move if you can makeout her mouth sort of miming to B.B. happy birthday and handing him a bottle which is to illustrate the progress of civilization up to the present day that I was there when bought in Greek four packets of Karelia's Virginia and brought back a big bottle fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils knocking the ball against the little house where I was born beginning to see that "two ugly make a pretty" moving upwards of a crooked village road not ten miles from the mud baths we read about as well as a foundry, coal-breaker, machine-shops, and light-house
Today’s photo(s) with the most hits - there taken on a visit to the island in summer, 2009.
Shetland
Helen Mort
Wind-whittled, turned on the sea’s lathe too long, built by a craftsman who can’t leave it alone: the trees scoured off, the houses pared down to their stones, the animals less skin than bone.
We walk to Windhoose, find a barn even the ghosts have left, a sheep’s spine turning on a string, a name reduced to nothing but its sound. Our silences become the better part of us.
Today's Flickr photo with the most hits - the mosaic of the Last Judgement in the basilica of Torcello, in the Venetian lagoon.
The mosaic decorates the west wall of the basilica.
The island is in the north of the lagoon and is sometimes regarded as being parent to Venice itself - it was inhabited from the 5th CE and had a basilica and bishops before St Marks was commenced.
The basilica, founded in the 7th CE, is - as we see it today - largely an 11th / 12th CE Byzantine creation - including the fabulous mosaics.
Today's Flickr photo with the most hits - this view of the Isle of Muck and the mainland from Rum (taken on a hike from Kinloch to Dibidil).
Today's Flickr photo with the most hits - a view of this courtyard dwelling in Monemvasia.
This tiny fortified village is located on an equally tiny island in the south east of the Peloponnese. It was a flourishing trading hub and retains an unspoilt Byzantine character. Atop the sheer cliffs, the upper town retains fascinating relics of its past - cisterns, ruined churches, defensive walls.
An idyllic place to stay.
Today's Flickr photo with the most hits is this shot of Bagh Siar, Vatersay.
This, the west bay, is paired with Vatersay Bay on the east side of the island isthmus.
Vatersay is both the most southerly and the most westerly of the inhabited islands of the Hebridean archipelago. Gifted with glorious sandy beaches and scattered crofting settlements.
A Westray Prayer
John Glenday, composed in memory of Mike and Barbara Heasman.
Let us now give thanks for these salt-blown
wind-burned pastures where outgrass and timothy shrink from the harrow of the sea
where Scotland at long last wearies of muttering its own name where we may begin
to believe we have always known what someone in his wisdom must have meant
when he gave us everything and told us nothing.
Murano
Paisley Redkal
It is not miraculous. Only a handful of silica, fire, and then the blower twirls another knob of gold on his metal pontil, dipping the tip into a pot inlaid with spikes to make the burning globe twist in upon itself as the man breathes out and a thick neck bulges, wreathes into a spiral like a unicorn horn; but we’re bored, he’s bored, blowing and blowing the same shape over. It takes no effort. He stares applauding each development though it has seen the same thing around the corner. We know what will come next. The man reaches into the bright elastic to yank a fat neck forward, to pinch out hair, a shovel- shaped face; to pull out one thin, bent leg and then another, the glass itself now tinged with ash as the fire runs out of it, dimming to topaz, caramel. He splashes water on the irons to make them smoke. It must be dangerous, this material, or why else would we watch? The blower has a bald patch, earrings, scars. He dips his tongs once more into the figure and out come back legs, a tail. The neck twists and now the little face has a mouth that’s open, screaming. The tail’s curled filament starts to thread as the pontil pulls away. You want to say “like taffy,” but don’t. It is not sweet. Only a spark of heat and then the inevitable descending numbness. Someone laughs. Someone takes a photo. For a moment, the room fills with light behind which we hear the scissor’s dulling snap. Our senses return stretched thinner, fine. We can almost feel the shattering of the glass.
The Refuge Box (extract)
Katrina Porteous
At the edge of the Low, the wind blows cold.
A world that is water and not water
Stretches away, reticulate;
Shaken within it, redshank, godwit,
Their scraps and patches of safety shrinking,
Spreading. Miles of sand-flats. Glittering
Streams and ribbons of water, weaving
Earth and sky; between them, the golden
Island, afloat on equivocation,
Or safely grounded there, the tide
Either coming or going around it, the road
Snaking towards it, narrow, human.
You reach the Danger sign, and stop.
You want it, that Island, stretched out like a ship
Ashore on its saltings, adrift in a sea
So blue and endless, you’d think the sky
Had swallowed it up, or else had fallen
Smack down into its own reflection.
Out from the causeway, over the sand,
Guideposts narrow towards the Island,
The mirror-image of their own
Vanishing – an invitation.
The Slakes answer the sky’s question:
Blue?
Blue.
Now, will you
Step out into an unknown element?
Today’s Flickr photo with the most hits - this shot of the castle terrace at Lindisfarne (Holy Island, Northumberland.
A Westray Prayer
John Glenday
in memory of Mark and Barbara Heasman
Let us now give thanks for these salt-blown
wind-burned pastures where outgrass and timothy shrink from the harrow of the sea
where Scotland at long last wearies of muttering its own name where we may begin
to believe we have always known what someone in his wisdom must have meant
when he gave us everything and told us nothing.