Fisherrow

Fisherrow is a CD and Chapbook: Written during the time of Covid. Fisherrow, Portobello Beach, Gullane, Dunbar Harbour, Port Seton, Torness Point, St Abbs Head, are names that walk me along the Firth of Forth coastline of my youth. Edging me towards the wider reaches of the North Sea, all of them bring a nostalgia for a place which really only exists as an echo without certainty. Sea towns, harbours, beaches, coastal beauty, lighthouses, points, cliffs and headlands, their ever presence bring a sense of continuity. Like the shipping forecast, Rockall, Malin, Forth, Forties, Dogger... there is an ever remaining, lovely strangeness which sits on the sometimes shushering, sometimes roaring sea. It is there and not, flitting in and out of dreams and images and a deep feeling of distant rootedness which keeps me attached. This is my Scottishness, my homeliness if I was ever to say where I was going back, and yet forty years after leaving it offers a familiar strangeness. The familiarity is embedded in the experience of my own youth. Coming back always feels like returning to a place which never existed in the first place. The sense of continuities is the illusion all of us carry for the places we leave.