a room with a view

I had the use of my dad's car for a couple of days and took the kids to York. This morning I had to drive down to Port Glasgow and give it back.
The mist had come down soft. As I drove down to Port Glasgow the sun was starting to burn through (see extras). The view you see here is from the bedroom window where I grew up. How lucky I was, and as I grow older I return more and more to walk, sit or drive within this landscape.
The window that was my bedroom window overlooks the Firth of Clyde, where the river has widened and joins the North Sea. Port Glasgow got its name because the river used to be too shallow for cargo ships to navigate all the way up to Glasgow, so they would offload in the Port. The river was eventually dredged so ships could sail all the way upriver to Glasgow, and there are buoys marking the deep channel that the ships must stay in if they're not to become grounded.
I have a memory of night at that window looking out at the dark Firth. The house was quiet and everyone was asleep. I stared at the lights on the buoys - first a red flash, then green from the other side of the channel; then red then green again; and both flash in unison; then a pause of dark until it starts over again - as they blinked away in the night. I got a sense of the deep channel marked out below: the fish, seals and dolphins slipping through my imaginings fast and free.
The channel ran with the tide, rippling out to the Irish Sea and the world beyond my trace of breath condensing on the glass of the window. In my room, in the dark there was only the blinking code of the buoys' light to decode. There was a message there trying to pierce the ink of the night water and reach me half way up the brae where I lived.
It was a message of leaving, of moving away to follow the flow of my heart out into the deep channels of the world. I went out and found many things. I found my children out there. I found my voice. Yet at some point I got lost. The buoy-lights weren't there for guidance. I became a poor mariner, and so.. and so... more and more often I follow the channel downriver, but not to the Sea. I follow it down to the timber ponds, the rookeries and quilted patterns of field. I follow the deep cut of dark water home - my childhood home- and sit at this window looking. Not searching this time, but simply looking and feeling the depths of resonance right there in the braes overlooking the Firth of Clyde.