When rainy days upon you hold . . .

  . . . remember the rainbow’s promise told. After yesterday’s massive storm, very much our own it seems, this morning has at last brought peace, a sea far less furious and a gradually brightening sky. Overhead now, where Jonny’s wonderful rainbow was just now, there are Simpsons’ clouds and things look settled and feel calm. Sparrows can drop down and dig in to their bread box as the whim takes them today; no more the gobbled bits and pieces snatched in the driving rain, as and when the gusts allowed, yesterday.  Theirs is a tough life, but it is a free one, and they have each other to warm themselves against and moan to when they need a friend. Shortly before daybreak we looked out from the sands on to a grey and still-rolling sea, its white horses charging towards us. I thought about where in all that water the shiny orcas are and wondered whether any might ever – please, o please – come our way, dancing along us as we run by the dunes. We saw in a programme last night how decades ago the first few of these lovely creatures were captured for commercial exploitation: an idea patently ridiculous as well as morally indefensible from the word go. One of the hunters reflected shamefully on his participation in what he now considered the most heinous act of his life, helping to procure intelligent mammals for commercial exploitation and training. It upset and worried me to see devoted babies captured and confined, taken without a thought from grieving mothers – a practice repeated still as breeding proceeds in captivity. They brought a new kind of joy to me: their splendid sets of rounded teeth; their triangular pink tongues; the evening-dress shininess of their bulky bodies. Their massive brains. All cabined in puny watery trenches, patronised and sentimentalised, without a true friend or relative in the world. No wonder their tempers erupt; no wonder, as people weirdly say, they can turn nasty. The true wonder is that mothers bereft of their little ones, mothers who have wailed across the pool confines into the ocean depths all night, still come up smiling day after day. A couple of days ago we all saw the common dolphins by the rocks; just a moment or two of magic, and all we are likely to have for a while, too, until we are fortunate enough to be visited again. We must make do with rainbows and wish the orcas well – wherever they are – and dig deep for our own journey, praying for as much emotional intelligence as they.