Yesterday I was running back home and I saw some cows. Nothing remarkable in that, you might think, and you’d be right. Except it was about 3 pm on one of the most perfect winter days ever. The air was pin-sharp, the sky was a pale icy blue and the low sun had painted golden streaks across the fields. I’d been working all day and after a pretty brutal week in terms of hours served I had decided to take a break, do the school run and get my lardy legs moving and some fresh air into my lungs with a run around the village on the way.
As I ran up the hill, I spotted the cows in a field I pass every day in the car. I’d never seen them before. They were standing in a quiet group on a big mound of hay. Beautiful, big eyed beasts in black and brindle with mop top hair styles and huge furry ears. The sun was setting behind them in a white winter blaze and as we stood and looked at each other transfixed, they quietly breathed perfect puffs of steam into the freezing air.
I took a really bad photo with my scratched old Blackberry. But no matter. It was one of those great moments you just know your brain will clip out and store somewhere special and then keep feeding you in the years to come when you least expect it. Mine does it all the time with the oddest moments, some apparently random and others which you can see coming a mile off before it gets those clipping scissors out. Three of my brain’s favourite photos – the ones it keeps in some brain version of a wallet or a top pocket are:
Walking through the streets of Lisbon with my mum about a week before my Dad died. I’ve fallen behind and stopped on a bridge to look at some cars passing below. My mum is wearing a red skirt and she turns round to hurry me on. The memory for some reasons looks like it’s been shot on film.
Being followed by a large hungry looking dog in Armidale, Australia while nervously humming Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’. And wearing dungarees. Yep I know.
Sitting in the garden at home on a warm summer’s day as my son, aged 2, an adorable baby with the squarest little head tried to eat the daisies he was pulling up off the lawn. It must have been a couple of weeks before his dad was due back from Iraq.
The odd thing was, yesterday’s was the second of these little epiphanies this week. As we pulled out of Bristol Temple Meads on the train on Thursday, one of the best sunsets I have ever seen unfolded out of the window and kept me transfixed for nearly an hour. The setting sun, having soaked the graffitied old car park opposite platform 15 in an extravagantly rosy glow that outshone even the primary coloured houses on Totterdown hill, sank below the horizon and threw the deepest rose backdrop across the whole of the sky. Then, then like Tony Hart creating one of his incredibly simple but ludicrously talented paintings on ‘Vision On’ it began adding new touches. A set of fluorescent orange streaks topped off with a glowing jet trail of even brighter intensity. Odd fleeting patches the colour of tinned salmon and raspberry sorbet. Rows and rows of tiny filigree jet black trees. And then as everything faded to a smoky burning red, huddles of deep indigo blue and steel grey clouds which seemed to draw the last light out of the sky. It was magnificent. I didn’t take my eyes off it until our arrival at Swindon – where the magical West Country ends in so many ways – brought me down with a bump for the shuffle into West London through Reading.
galette 