Between the moon and me.

Alien being steps out of their spaceship in the middle of Lochend Park and looks around.  Up to their knees in mud and loch floodwater, they start to report on what they can see around them, speaking via a headset to their home planet.  "(translated from alien language) Everything here is grey, brown and wet. There are tall plants hung with flapping black plastic - perhaps idols to this planet's gods? The few beings I can see are slouched and hunched, walking on two legs with their arms attached to smaller, four-legged beings by lengths of fabric. There is a body of water enclosed by cold, hard upright struts adorned with small, black plastic bags similar to the idols in the tall plants. There are strange, four-wheeled things half submerged in the water and wire struts similar to those around the water lying flat against woody undergrowth. There are small, brightly-coloured containers strewn around the muddy land and bobbing in the water. The whole place looks sad, uncared for

I was walking the dog this morning when I saw snowdrops. At first, I wasn't sure they were real. I looked again and sure enough there they were, a small perfection of pearly white and new green against the semi-frozen mud.  My first thought was: "How did something so delicate push through something so hard and ugly?" My second thought was: "I'm crying". After looking around to see whether there was anyone close who might notice and wonder - or, heaven forbid, ask - whether I was alright, I settled in to my head to work out what was going on. And there it was. I hadn't expected this 'normal'. The snowdrops are nature doing normal. We humans can't do much that's normal for us right now and somehow my lockdown brain had expected that the park would remain mud, ice and floodwater in sympathy. How human-centric of me! I usually cry at my first snowdrops because they represent those lives lost in Dunblane back in March 1996, when the community