AS I WRITE, the light is beginning its comeback. For a lengthening time each day now, it surmounts the hill and shines the river a palest blue or even orange. For the next four months, it will journey northwards through the western sky until June, when the days will be almost too long, and the sky will retain an inky blue through the short nights. Then we will forget about the stars, just as every year at Christmas we forget about the gloaming.
Ours is not a truly northern country, but even at our latitude, we are gifted with light and dark of operatic extremes. You don't need me to tell you this. We know. Our eyes and bodies know. We draw the light into our bones. At the top of the year, doesn't everyone feel a bit over-exposed, as though the mind were not getting enough darkness, enough down-time? At mid-winter, we had to invent Christmas, fairy-lights, shop-windows, to keep us buoyed up through the dark.
Where the sky is vast, and the land low, as on Orkney or the Hebridean islands, the human world is the merest interruption in the long affair between sea and sky; this is a wonder. A different kind of joy is to sit in a pub all afternoon, watching a line of spring sunlight and shadow creep over the granite wall of the tenement opposite; another is to come home from work knowing there are four or five hours of daylight left - enough to go out and then walk home in the gloaming. Also, to get up very early on a summer's morning when the light is shy and private, and the birds are singing. We take it for granted. None of this would be possible if we lived in the tropics. When we travel abroad for the sun, we leave behind the light.
For a brief while in our history, a few hundred industrialised years, we've paid less heed to the light than we ought. If it were up to me, I would forget St Andrew's Day, and instead make holidays of the two solstices. A Day of Light, and A Day of Dark. If we no longer like to think of ourselves as a people of Jekyll and Hyde opposites, well, we should make holidays of the Equinoxes too - calm times of balance and poise. As for the Scottish flag, yes it's blue, but it's the wrong shade of blue. I'd have sky blue, water-blue. Perhaps with a smudge of mauve or the intense western sunset pinks that brings out the worst in landscape artists. Or the furnace-notes of low orange you get in November afternoons, against which bare trees silhouette themselves.
We can celebrate the light, attune ourselves to it but we can't claim the light. It is truly wild. It conditions us, our moods, activities, health, rather than we it. We can't be proud of it, in any daft nationalistic way, as it's not of our making. We can celebrate that which is not us: the sea, the hills, the sky. We live under light and in it. We can't live without it.
7 FACTS
Scots have studied the sky at night for centuries. There are astronomy departments at Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and St Andrews universities, the Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill in Edinburgh and Dundee's Mills Observatory, the UK's only full-time public observatory. Wherever you are, you can glimpse Scotland's sky thanks to four Met Office webcams at weather stations in Aboyne, Aviemore, Eskdalemuir and Loch Glascarnoch. See www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/europe/uk/webcam/Radiance, Glasgow's first Festival of Lights in November 2005, saw some city buildings bathed in light and pieces of art light up the city centre. The Old Man of Storr on Skye was lit up in autumn 2005; for six nights a week, guides led walkers up the Old Man past illuminated rock formations. Scotland's jagged coastline was once guarded by a huge network of lighthouses, the first at Fraserburgh in 1787. Skerryvore is the tallest at 156ft. The final manned lighthouse, on Fair Isle South, went fully automated in 1998. Legend says the sky gave us the Saltire when Scots and Picts saw a cloud formation shaped like St Andrew's cross against a blue sky, the night before a successful battle with the King of Northumbria. The Saltire was seen as a good omen and adopted as the flag. Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, are often visible from Scotland. The aurora occurs when charged particles shoot from the Sun and hit charged particles in an upper layer of atmosphere, the ionosphere.