A poem, in the mind of its creator, is often closely associated with the memory of a place, or of a time, or of something momentarily glimpsed and then seared into memory. Here is a poem that comes from a scene I saw many years ago in the Western Highlands of Scotland. I was travelling on a remote road and suddenly noticed that hung out on the washing line outside a white-painted croft house, alongside the ordinary items one sees on a washing line—shirts and so on—was a man’s suit. The nearest dry cleaner must have been hours away, and so I should not have been surprised to see a suit being washed. But I was, and the image has remained with me over the intervening decades. It was a bright day, and the sun was upon the green of the fields and the blue of the sea. A stiff wind blew against the washing pegged out to dry, animating it in a strange choreography. I realised at the time that this was something I would remember for a long time—and that is what I have done. If I close my eyes, I see it. And I smell the breeze from the sea, which is pristine in those parts, and I feel regret for what has gone, as we all must do when we think back to times when the world was fresh to us.