Latitude

West from our garden and out beyond the suburb of Greystones, following an invisible route that hugs Latitude 53°North like a ley line. Over the Porter Brook to the reservoirs at Redmires – thence to The Derwent Valley and out across the wild high moors that cleave northern England. There’s Manchester Airport ahead from which planes ascend like dragonflies, then onward to the low-lying Wirral Peninsula before striking out across The Irish Sea to Dublin. The way is arrow straight over those emerald fields to Galway. In front, The Atlantic Ocean heaves, its waves white-tipped.

Two thousand miles to Canada and below there’s the raw coast of Newfoundland. We travel inland to Labrador City ever westward and on to the southern end of Hudson Bay crossing uninhabited Akimiski Island before striking out over the emptiness of Northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Soon the invisible line cuts across the sprawling city of Edmonton in Alberta before advancing to the mountainous coast of British Columbia and out across Hecate Strait to the Queen Charlotte Islands

And now the immensity of The Pacific Ocean confronts us till the latitude 53°N eventually brings us to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and The Sea of Okhotsk. From Russia to Inner Mongolia and back into Russia again where mighty Lake Baikal imagines that it is an ocean. On and on to the steppes of Kazakhstan thence to Belarus and northern Poland and into the states of Brandenburg and Lower Saxony in Germany. Still like a knife we slice across the northernmost part of The Netherlands and head over The North Sea to the Lincolnshire coast of England.

Soon the line advances to the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire and the word “West” painted on a garden wall. As T.S. Eliot wrote in “Little Gidding”:-

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an 

end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”