Alistair Elliot

Everyone calls it Arthuritis. He has lost the power of bending, the old king father of gods and men, and sits on a low throne by the window, apparently meditating in profile, a memorial coin of sadness as we come carrying our seats.

To me he has never before been Arthur: I saw him through his unused name, so fitting for a father born in a Scottish Eden: Adam. Caught in the unfamiliar foetal...

Here hedges used to move off thoughtfully, at an angle, like green sheep in single file, or seemed to. Now they really have, taking the grass as well, leaving the land stripped to the buff.

What we see is pure substrate, the abstract thing plants grow on, the start-line of a calculation. I think it is a dusty mat someone has spread on the slow ocean of rock. Is this my planet?

The wind is...

When the two youngest Elliots, not yet in their teens, were sent to school at Stoer, they lodged, like the unmarried minister, near the kirk, with old Mrs Mackenzie and her daughters in a house called ‘The Rage of Cats’.

Mrs Mackenzie fed them porridge and milk; potatoes and milk and oatcakes; perhaps a bite of potatoes and herring ... This powered them through four hours of...

The cathedral was not great. You were a better poet Than it was a building. I forgot To look for the graffiti of imprisoned Scots, My possible ancestors – and yours – And stood there in my Sunday best Wondering if it had been spoilt by the restorers Or if it had always looked like red fudge A little mouthed by the weather of the north-west.

Hundreds of us were in our best To...

Somewhere among the roots of England my mother found her rules. Some shy Shakespearean aunt taught her to eat from fairy circles and how to name a tracehorse: Forrest or Homer –

coins from the wordhoard of our tribe buried in the angelic angles around home: in Long Chase, the Top, the Forty-Acre, the Pikel. School spread on this the alphabet and the best lines of Scott,

and a...