the tangled plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, bright dawns dragging him from his bed to take up quill and invent characters like Bottom, the clumsy victim of Puck the prankster, and the sun coming up to end the comic fantasy of the night in the forest. John Masefield had evidently been there too when, eulogising ‘Beauty’, the first lines to flood in were, ‘I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain.’ A Highland spring dawn is also charged with urgency and an impending sense of ephemerality – if you don’t pay attention you’ll miss it. Those of us caught up in this headlong rush at spring know all too well that it is finger-snap brief and that the perverse laws of delight dictate that it has to be repaid ten times over later on. Our ebullient vernal daylight may surge to twenty-three hours in June, but all too soon the darkness and the cloying cold will systematically close us down once more.
For those who choose to keep their windows shut, who draw their curtains tight and ignore June’s electricity, life can pursue its drab routines, but I have never been able to block out ‘the utter clearness of the imminent dawn’ and those first strains of birdsong, whatever time or season it is, nor to remain asleep in the light. My bedside window is flung wide all year round. I welcome all comers – rainstorm, wind, blizzard and searing frosts that slide in and grip the tumbler of water at my side, as well as the great, coal and blue tits, dunnocks and robins that venture in, all unsuspecting and unaware of human presence. I am regularly greeted by tiny, fluttering wings and their not-so-welcome offerings on the bed head above my face.
On the rare occasions I find myself in an airport hotel room, trapped in an air-conditioned, double-glazed box without any means of opening a window, I become a caged animal, stressed and despondent so that all I want to do is curl up and sleep. I have a real need to feel the night air on my face, to spiral skyward with the barometer and relish the flow of negative ions lifting me out of gloom. At home I love to raise an ear at the fox’s rough curse; I smile at the red deer hind’s deep-throated, tetchy cough echoing from the woods behind the house. I wake with the dawn. There is something magnetic about first light, a primal, perhaps genetic connection with our Cro-Magnon ancestors, who had to rise before the sun to hunt. If I stay in bed I feel guilty, somehow letting them down. So, if the weather is fair, I slip out and head off towards the loch. It is always fresh and exciting. At 3.30 a.m. the June air has a tang to it, like cologne; whether the sun is out or not, it is charged.
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