Nature savours another perfect day

ON Easter Monday, at noon, newly released after a few days in the garage (by which I mean the hospital), I sat on a tussock in a warm spot by the bay and listened to the surf gently break and thanked the gods for being alive on such a day.

The sun shone on my back where I sat protected from the breeze, watching gusts riffle the blue sea and spread out across it, the patterns of wind on water.

Between me and the further shore – and the house where we lived when we first returned to Ireland – white horses broke on a sandbank, more like white porpoises or salmon in shallow water fighting against the current to move upstream.