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| Picture by Ewan Jones |
In other times I travelled north to see the night and day collide in light, where the dark never manages to overtake; the clock on the cabin wall might say midnight but it could have been noon, for the darkness is dispersed elsewhere. I’ve seen the aurora too, between Shetland and Norway, through the porthole of a boat smaller than the trip required; tiny needles of light piercing the glass, a poem puncturing pin holes in the story to let the light in. There was no ship’s cat on board, no purring comfort, just the ringing of the rigging catching the breeze. This could have been a disaster, you said. The weather can change so quickly, we will be lucky if it stays this calm for the whole crossing. It’s coming back that worries me. When the going is good, why go back? I hold that thought close and let the strange time slip by, unjudged.
The picture above was taken by Ewan Jones for Long Way Home Productions and was part of my first ever record company photo shoot. I'm always open to new things, new ways of looking at life and this was certainly that. It got me thinking about John Berger writing Ways of Seeing and what other people see when they see a portrait like this. It's not my portrait, it's Ewan's and I am just the subject. But the poem next to the picture is mine and marrying the two brings its own sense of parallax. John Berger wrote,
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
Each evening we might think we see the sun set, but actually and mostly we take it for granted and assume it does so as we pull the curtains and pour the wine. But as the poem suggests, go far enough north (or south) and there is a time when the sun barely sets at all, and the idea that the 'knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight...' comes to make sense.
I wrote this song very quickly to play at Portslade Railway (virtual) Roots, after 365 days of coronavirus. It had been a whole year and I wanted to tell a story about the kickback from that year. When the world just gets to be too big and the ghosts start moving in, sometimes it's best to take good advice and 'come to bed'.
