In my previous post, I mentioned how we’d spent November misjudging how quickly it was going to get dark on our weekend walks, but looking back through photos, I realise we were doing the same in October. As on this walk at Yellowcraig when the clouds were gathering around us, hanging heavy over the Forth with the promise of rain.
I’ve got into the habit of taking more videos than photos now on these coastal walks – not consciously, but then I come to edit the photos and realise I don’t have as many as I would have had months ago. I’m crediting Instagram reels for this shift. Having been monumentally slow to embrace reels, I’m now veering towards them more and more on the lads’ account, albeit less so on my own. Often that 60 to 90 seconds of video feels far more descriptive of what our walks together feel like, with the lads running ahead of me along a beach or winding along the dunes paths. A still photo can feel like a great view, whereas a reel can feel like an adventure. And sometimes that means we’ll come home and I might only have a handful of photos, as here, after this frozen November walk at Yellowcraig.
It’s a frozen weekend here, and a strange one as I’m home alone with the lads (of course, when I’m with the lads, I’m never alone) and we won’t be able to go out anywhere. And our weekends usually revolve around walks. Regardless of the weather (more or less – we avoid wild, driving rain but that’s about it) we’ll usually be on a coastal walk somewhere.
For all the photos I share from this walk in beautiful light – this post from the start of this year springs to mind – there are also plenty of walks that look like this: grey, sullen, damp, dreich. And it’s easy to look at photos like these and feel that this place is a bit depressing. The fallen woodland of John Muir Country Park looks heavy in this light, in this weather. It feels heavy. And perhaps it begs the question, why share these images?
Just a few photos, as I was mostly taking videos on this walk on Sunday, plus it was so, so cold with the wind chill, my frozen hands had had enough after those videos. But I couldn’t resist sharing these skyscapes.
The transition from the long days of summer to the abbreviated days of autumn (and winter) is always a tough one, right? I miss our evening walks more than I can explain. They were the grounding part of my day, and also the uplifting part. Our time to get outside, to drive down the coast and walk below big skies. To watch the lads run and sniff. To exhale out the day and those tight hours spent at a desk. To let our eyes soak in wide vistas after too many hours at a screen.