Scotland Street Volume 17, Chapter 12 Small Talk

almost 2 years in TheScotsman

One of the first improvements that Elspeth and Matthew had made to their house at Nine Mile Burn when they had purchased it was to build a raised stone patio immediately to the front, at the point at which a rolling, unruly lawn swept up to the main building. This patio could be reached – or accessed, as their architect put it – through the large French doors that had been added to the kitchen, opening that room to the light from the south-west. And that light, especially in the summer, had a soft blue quality to it; it was a light, as Matthew once remarked to Angus Lordie, that reminded him of an artistic Scotland of the past, because it was there in the work of Peploe and Fergusson, of Gillies and Cowie. And if light can also be present in poetry and in song it was there in the writings of Hugh MacDiarmid, George Mackay Brown and Sorley MacLean, as much as it was in the songs of Jean Redpath.

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