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...

I wish I had more time to write. If I did, I'd create a river of words that would skelter down the mountainside of life and skoosh away the sediment of boredom that has settled at the base. I wish I had more time to write. But I don't.

I WAS 14. It was a dank day in October, 1977, the kind when you walk under trees and it sounds like it’s raining and you wait for the drip which lands on your head and feels so cold it seems to spread across your scalp underneath your hair. I’d caught the 14 bus into town with my friend Lynne who had always been fatter than me in primary but was now much thinner, with long auburn hair - definitely NOT ginger -  and amazing cheek bones. A little bit of me still thought of her as my fat ginger friend in the blue duffle coat but she was in the past with my Donald and Mickey comics and John Noakes.  In town we met Sally and Tae – short for Tracey – and headed to Debenhams as it was the nearest shop to the bus station. “Let’s go and try the hats on,” Tae suggested. Dutifully, we trudged up the stairs to the first floor. No-one thought to argue. Tae was the 'fun one' who had ideas.  “That really suits you,” said Sally, as Tae grabbed a red beret from under the reachin...

The nursing home beside the park was cooking up a storm this morning - a storm that picked me up, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz ,  and dropped me on planet Nostalgia, circa 1970. Canteen food has that smell. No one ingredient is distinguishable from another and it's rather an olfactory blanket of mush... not pleasant but not unpleasant either. So, back to me being Dorothy and landing in the hall of Croxby County Primary, sniffing the olfactory mush-waft when I was about seven, and looking at the board beside the servery on which each day's menu was posted. It read 'Hungarian goulash'. And I felt anxious and safe all at once because that sounded strange and exotic and I knew I was going home for lunch and wouldn't have to tackle this goulash stuff. Mum's cooking was top notch meat-and-two-veg, and as long as the two veg were carrots and peas then everything in my world was rosy. We'd have a roast on Sunday, leftovers on Monday, beef stew or steak and...

Ellie was snuffling in the grass seeking half-eaten pizza when he stumbled out of the woods asking if I could help him. Hood up, clothes hanging off him, bearded and looking like he'd not washed in a while, he said: "Can you help me?" "What do you need help with?" "It's not drugs...I don't do drugs." "Are you living in there?" I nodded towards the trees. "Yes, but don't tell the police." I looked at him. "I won't tell the police. Can you tell me what you need help with?" "Lost everything. Girlfriend, bairn on the way like..." He started walking away from us, up the path towards the football pitch, shoulders hunched, his head down. "Everything, all gone," he muttered over his shoulder. "Have you looked for help?" I called, as he moved further off. "Aye... there's nothing."

Walking out with the dog this morning it seemed there was a huge grey cloud draped across Arthur's Seat and Calton Hill. The rest of the sky was fine, blue, cold-looking but that's OK for November. And it was only as I walked towards the park, Ellie snuffling around in the gutter for anything resembling food, I realised there was a grey cloud draped inside me. Not on me, but inside me. What is it? What's causing it? How can I describe it, even? An ache, an emptiness but at the same time a fullness too. It's a drab, familiar feeling. I want to go back to bed and skip today. But I won't do that. I'll walk the dog, and chat to the woman who swears her dog is in an amorous mood, and join with her picking up the remnants of someone's fireworks party off the grass and putting it in the bin, and smile and say cheery things. Then I'll go to the shop and buy loo rolls and eggs and all the boring things that others seem to forget about and ignore the woman w...