A sea-watching friend has had a coup. A crisp pair of photographs of a near-adult Kumlien’s gull, far from its usual cruising grounds in Arctic Canada. To most, the image will invoke nothing more involved than the phoneme “seagull” which, if you were to say it aloud, would drive Eddie to...

  The taxi driver, he reveals as we turn off the main road, grew up at Glenacopaig, just up the hill from the house. He’s been meaning, he says, to go along the track and see it again some day. I go a bit quiet at this, because the last time I was along, even more of the roof had fallen in and...

If I’d thought quicker, I would have started humming Bolero. We don’t often see snow out here, with the influence of sea on three sides, but when it does come it falls with a curious intensity that borders on malice, the way a lapsing alcoholic might fall on a bottle of malt. There is always a...

  We hardly know each other, but if you’ve even briefly eavesdropped one of these ramblings you’ll know that I suffer from a condition called RSH, or rurally specific humiliation. In essence, this distressing ailment causes the sufferer to do improbable things in the open, on the basis that,...

  A teaching colleague asks what I’ve been up to during the mid-semester break, and looks perplexed and mildly offended by my answer, which throws me in turn. To cover any awkwardness, however unintended, I go on to explain that, while alder isn’t high on anyone’s list of great firewoods...

We might as well be wearing togas, and the long bar of the Dalbuie might as well be the Forum. Ernie and I pace solemnly, speaking Latin. We’re not discussing the relationship between esse and existere, nor (switching ancient tongues) the fine line between homoiousian and homoousian. The question...