Ridiculously beautiful evenings

I had a slightly sour weekend. Well, up to Sunday evening anyway. A
‘poor me, I’m an almost fifty year old overweight boring public servant whose life is incredibly tedious and shows no signs of being anything but tedious ‘til Death does me take’ type of sourness.

Actually I was more than a little depressed. I think I may have started the menopause and I don’t know about the rest of womankind but I feel that having periods every fortnight, being exhausted, alternating between excessive sleepiness and insomnia, being cranky and having hot flushes at the same time as one is menstruating is Just Not Fair. So yeah, poor me, nature is ‘a ass’ etcetera etcetera.

Then on Sunday evening I drove to Skerries, a seaside village in North Co Dublin, to attend panto rehearsal. It was a glorious evening and I parked in the public car park along the sea front and sat for a while drinking in the beauty. The sun going down seemed almost staged as it lit scattered cumulus from below, incredible shades of red, gold, deep burnt orange. The boats in the harbour and the lovely buildings along the seafront in Skerries were sharpened in a light that only an artist can capture. To me photographs taken in that light always look staged, false – I always suspect photoshopping. The incredibly deep clarity of the light, particularly at this time of the year, is otherworldly. Everything seems so defined, heightened - you can almost feel, taste, hear the sharpness. The sea’s ceaseless lapping, that infinite rise and fall, the hub bub of children in the nearby playground- a dog barking further away. It lifted my spirits and I forgot about myself for a while. Bliss.

After a thoroughly enjoyable rehearsal -nothing like a bit of ridiculous slapstick to cop yourself onto yourself- I walked back in the early darkness to the carpark. The sun had set and a waning gibbous moon was in command of the sky. This was, if possible, even more glorious than the earlier sunset. I love that sweet low low almost full moon. Its slightly imperfect rotundity, the scarring - its mountains -the shadows that can be seen on its pale surface. It is so far away and yet so near I often feel if I stretched up as far as I could I would almost be able to touch it. The moon strikes me at times as a hole in the night sky, not light – just an absence of darkness.

The fact that last night the moon was reflected on an almost still sea made the sight even more magical. Sound was still as sharp as during the earlier sunset but different, more mysterious, as befits a beautiful night. All that beauty made me modify my objections to Nature in relation to my bodily functions earlier in the day. Modify not completely accept.

‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose’, although I still think having a period and a hot flush at the same time is quite simply taking the piss!