Heading North for Christmas

Whenever I think about TS Eliot, which I often do, lines from the Four Quartets always float unbidden into my consciousness.  They are like a pop tune, heard by chance in a TV commercial, that lodges inside your head and can not be shifted for days.

My plans for heading North to Uist for Christmas have once again acted as a trigger and turned my mind to thoughts about life, the turning seasons and the place of things in space and time; things that Eliot's poem considers.

Still, it's got me to make some posts to Flickr, make this post here and tweet this photo from summer last year. Perhaps doing these things will let me put aside at least two of those maddeningly insistent lines from the second Quartet, Little Gidding:

Dust inbreathed was house –
The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.


Eliot, T.S. (1969) The Complete Poems and Plays of TS Eliot
London, Faber and Faber

(It was also published as a  separate slim volume and was available as a LP record, read by Eliot himself – a treasured purchase back in my student days, the early 1970's.)