Brilliantly pale winter sun is stunning the day since early morning here. I breakfast, shower, dress, tend to some business with students, do laundry, make tea, fill a few notebook pages, visit the cat upstairs, catch up with news of bus crashes, elections, resignations, victories and defeats, have lunch… The sunny day goes on, meanwhile. With me trying from time to time to capture the unspeakably instantaneous and perfect light in words or pictures. I fail, go away, come back, fail, go away, come back, again and again.

Now, past noon, I give up. I have to: Otherwise, I’ll never do a thing but chase the light in vain.

So I return to my writing table.  And there to my left it is, sweet scrap of light slipping through sheer curtains to grace my shelves of books, exactly where and when I wasn’t looking.