Vancouverlight

Foraged kindling drying on the woodburner, October 12th 2008 - blurred, a notebook memory of time and place and light.

A feeling these last few days - as the light slips away from this house - that the days never get fully light, that in some way we are lit from below the horizon. I remember this feeling in Vancouver, visiting family in 1993, and the phrase has stayed with me. In this house it is literally true; the cottage will lose the direct daylight at the end of October, followed by the cottages at the end of the lane on the Moor, who will get it back earlier next February/March. The sunlight seems to be in the house less and less often, and only rarely does it strike the innermost walls. I will upload two images from last week of sunlight on the hearth-wall, the very centre of this cottage; but it was unusual, and we haven't seen it since. Even if we had no cloud the light would leave this house and slip below the southern horizon, Wapley Hill, but there is always the faintly horrific possibility of not even witnessing the light's final day. There is something sci-fi about such a precise awareness of light and so the movement of sun and planet; it reminds me of Silent Running, where the spaceship survives the meteorite storm on the dark side of Saturn and all the computer screens come back to white-noise life unexpectedly, an electronic representation of returning light. And more recently it reminds me of the Vin Diesel picture Pitch Black, where all manner of flesh-eating monsters are liberated by the long night of the planet's alignment with other worlds, blocking the sunlight. Having lived through a winter here it is not as bad as that, but winters here are noticeably colder and darker than in Presteigne or on the other side of the valley or even 150 yards down the road, where the hill drops and the light is stronger. And so recently the days seem gloomy and shorter; it is light only at 7.30 or so and gets dark between 6.30 and 7pm. This is the other side of autumn, damp and gloomy and cool rather than cold. And Great War images are starting to appear, in time for Remembrance Day.

Sideways light, the hearth-wall, October 12th 2008. Another slightly blurred image - perhaps the camera is dreading the loss of light.