Wednesday 31 October 2018

In the dark, time has a different shape: Halloween thoughts


I'm writing this sitting by the woodstove, it's dark outside, the winter's cold is coming, though the wind has stilled, and the day is almost over. I've been reading Sarah Moss's new novel, Ghost Wall, set out on the moors of Northumbria where ancient people made sacrifices in the peat bogs and I'm glad to be indoors. It's Halloween and not a night to be out among the spirits.

I'm not superstitious, but there's a strange change in the way I feel about being out when the light falls early. I was up on the Ashdown Forest this afternoon - it's not a forest in the modern sense, but high open heathland with vast views to both the North and South Downs. The Forest feels as if it goes on forever, though it's only about ten square miles, but it rises above all the surrounding farmland and villages so when I'm up there I feel as if I'm in another world.

By the time I parked at Old Lodge it was almost 3.30 and the sun was already low. I didn't hurry, but when the light began to fade I turned back. The Forest may be small, but it's easy to find yourself further from home than you thought, and when it's dark the heathland feels enormous.

All the time I was there I saw no one, though I could hear cars along the High Road. I saw a buzzard, crows, ponies grazing, a black deer that watched me from a stand of Scots pines. The ground was still dry from the long hot summer, the heather scratchy on my shins when I left the path to explore a lump that might have been a tumulus.

There were iron age people here, before the Romans. They left their marks in hill forts and tracks and burial mounds. When I was a teenager I spent weeks up here excavating one fort, found an ancient nutshell in the midden beyond the fort's walls, post holes, stones carefully laid, the residues from smelting. I smoked my first cigar in the Hatch Inn, drove madly down and off the Forest to collect my A level results, and back to celebrate my leaving.

We were a practical lot, archaeology being almost entirely manual labour - digging, scraping, barrowing huge amounts of spoil. And we lived on site, camping where the Romans must have lain when they arrived, laughing about the legionnaire who walked the walls, whom no one saw or believed in.

It was easy to laugh when it was light, or sat round the fire close together, the Forest invisible beyond our circle of crackling light and heat. But on the long walk up the road from the pub, with no street lights, no houses, no torches, it felt different. It was dark, truly and deeply dark, and time seemed somehow fluid, as if all the people who had ever been here might still be walking among us.

It's a luxury to experience dark like that.

Sometimes, I wait till late, when no one else will be out wandering and I walk away from the lights of the village and into the dark of the woods. If there is no moon I can barely see the trees, except where they are silhouetted against the faint orange glow from the town, so I turn away and walk south and once again I can feel the strange lightness of true dark.

It has no weight, it is limitless. I am untethered and invisible within it. There is nothing to fear.


Tuesday 21 August 2018

When life feels complicated ...



Three fields from my house is a fallen oak. This vast exposed root it all that's left of its hundreds of years of bending in storms, drinking up rain, reaching up to spring sun, drying out in mid-summer heat, sending out thousands of leaves every spring, letting go every autumn, feeling the old leaves rejoining it slowly through the soil, dropping the branch that lightning struck, resisting the beetles and the woodpecker that followed them, reaching out to its companion - an oak its equal in size just along the field path, sharing knowledge and maybe joy, knowing this is the year to make acorns and smother the ground in them, feeling a new tree emerge and start to talk through its roots, hearing the buzz of thousands of insects, the craak of the crows in its top, and finally, very slowly, coming to an end.

This is the oak I used to pass, and it's still glorious in its complexity, its strength and its uniqueness.

One day I want to be an oak.

PS The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben changed my understanding of oaks and all other trees for ever.

PPS Van Gogh definitely looked long and hard at a dead oak root.

Tuesday 3 July 2018

Things I'm not growing out of

A little while ago my Mum and my hairdresser laughed at me (we've known each other a long time).  They thought I was mad because I was excited about going camping in Cornwall.

My Mum said she grew out of camping long ago. My hairdresser loathes all thought of it.

Fair enough, but this summer I've been rediscovering the things I love to do, and they're making me quite inordinately happy. (I wasn't well last summer. Being confined to the sofa made me realise how much I missed these things.)

They don't seem childish to me, and I wonder why we're supposed to grow out of them? Who on earth wants to be grown up if it means no more ...

waking as the sun warms your tent and a robin is singing only three feet above your head
taking your canoe down the river on a sunny day and watching the world float by
lying in a meadow among the flowers and butterflies, hearing nothing but grasses and bees
swimming in the river before breakfast, swallows in the air just above me, fish invisible in the water below.
 If that's being grown up, I think I'll take my time getting there. It's time for a swim ...

Monday 18 June 2018

The Wild Garden: an unexpected poem in a window

Last month Sarah Salway , poet and writer and bringer together of poets and writers, asked me to write something for the Poetry Trail she created for the inaugural Tunbridge Wells Poetry Festival

Sarah paired nineteen local poets with nineteen shops in the old part of the town, giving me the Oxfam Bookshop because I volunteer there for an afternoon each week. It's fertile soil for a poet, with a wonderful collection of customers, and an incredibly idiosyncratic mix of books. 

(Show me a town's charity bookshop and I'll show you its soul. It may not be what you expect.)

I didn't know what I'd write - character sketches don't come easy to me; wit neither. On my next shift I pulled The Wild Garden at random off the Old and Interesting shelf behind the till purely because I liked the colour of its cover. I opened it and the inscription on the fly leaf gave me a little shiver - here was a treasure shared between friends more than a hundred years ago.



The title page sounded a little dry, though:


But the author's preface was pure joy, and my poem was begun.


As ever, the poem was a surprise to me - I never know what's in my head until it appears on the page. I wrote most of it quite quickly over the following week, and edited it among the spring wild flowers of Cornwall:


A week later I came home to see my poem in the window of the Oxfam Bookshop, surrounded by flowers, books about gardens and books of poetry, and felt deeply honoured. I saw people all over the place peering into shop windows at poems of all kinds, and it made me very happy - even happier when I sold two poetry books out of our window in my first hour back in the shop.  


Thursday 8 February 2018

Solitude and writing in Paris








I've just spent a week in Paris, alone, writing and not-writing, and it was difficult and wonderful in equal measure.

I normally write pretty much anywhere I happen to be: I write in my office and in my kitchen, on trains and planes, in libraries and cafés. I'm not bothered by noise much, and I've written stuff I'm proud of while sat alongside my family watching television. So I don't need silence or solitude to write.


But Paris gave me a whole week alone, and I'd been longing for it. It felt wantonly extravagant, and essential.

It was harder than I remembered to be so alone. I spoke to almost no one except to buy coffee and food and one day I didn't speak at all. For a week I had no meaningful conversations: there was no emotional weight to anything that I said or that was said to me.

I missed my family and friends. It was strange and discombobulating to be in a city full of people, not one of whom knew or cared about me.

It might be easy to wonder if you exist if you have to live in such solitude for long.

I can see how appalling loneliness must be.

But for me, this was a brief interlude. And while no one in Paris cared about me, I equally didn't care about them, except in a general kind of way. And it was a huge relief, once I settled into my solitude, to have no responsibility except to myself. How often can any of us say that?

It was a luxury, and I took it seriously. I read, walked, looked at people and buildings and art. I walked more. It felt vital to be out, letting whatever I came across come in.

The very difficulty of being alone seemed to strip the wires of my mind of their usual insulation. I was alert and vulnerable. And being exposed emotionally made me open to the hidden currents of the story I was writing.

I'd been worrying at the story for ages. I knew something was missing, and I even knew what but I didn't know how I was going to write it. On the fourth morning in Paris I woke at five o'clock knowing exactly what to do - an idea came into my mind out of nowhere that transforms and completes the story in just the way I'd been looking for.

I'm sure that extended time alone allows me to find things I don't know are there.


There are small pleasures too that I only see when alone: the rhythms of a café as day turns to night, wisps of song coming down the stairwell as the snow falls in the dark outside, the golden sandals my neighbour left outside his front door.

When I was young, I dreamed of being a poet living in a Parisian garret. I'd have friends, of course, and we'd sit in cafés and laugh and argue about life and poems and friendship, but mostly I'd stare moodily out of my tiny window and write.

This last week, I lived a little of that dream. I didn't look moodily out of the window, because I was enjoying writing so much: that's what I didn't know when I was young. I enjoy writing, as well as finding it terrifying and hard work.

And that's the thing. Last week I felt disconnected from the people around me and alone. It wasn't easy. But I'm glad I didn't spend it in a cosy writer's retreat where I could chat to other writers in the evening - though I've been on retreats like these, and I love them, and would gladly go again. But writing, for me, is also about fear, and risk, and exploration so sometimes I have to get a bit uncomfortable and look at things that aren't beautiful, and to feel a little fear.

As a coda, I found this poem, 'Bryant Park at Dusk', by Geoffrey Brock, which  catches the pleasure of solitude perfectly in his description of a lone woman reading in the park as night falls:  

And what I loved was this:
The way, when dusk had darkened her pages,
              As if expecting a kiss,
She closed her eyes and threw her head back,
              Book open on her lap.
Perhaps she was thinking about her story,

              Or the fall air, or a nap.

The whole poem's up on the Poetry Foundation website.












Friday 26 January 2018

Why we talk about the weather


This morning I awoke to mist. A pale sun shone from behind the swirling grey so I set off straight after breakfast, before the gloom could lift and spoil the effect.

As I set off across the fields I met other walkers, all wrapped up like me in boots and coats and hats, and all but one entirely cheerful.

I knew none of them, but we greeted each other with enthusiasm. 'I think it's going to lift!' 'I saw the sun an hour ago.' 'It's good to be out in it. I'm gardening later so I hope the sun comes out.' Only one said as we slipped towards each other in ankle-deep mud, 'It's disgusting, isn't it?'

I think she was referring to the mud, but if she was, she was bending the English rule: when you meet a stranger, talk about the weather. You don't even need to say you're talking about the weather. 'Gorgeous, isn't it?' can only mean the weather to an English person, no matter how stunning the view.

I've been reading social anthropologist Kate Fox's 'Watching the English': there's a whole chapter on weather talk, and it's revelatory. We talk about the weather because we're so awkward about greetings. We comment to a passer-by on the fog, or the ice, or the sun not because these weather features are fascinating, but because it's a safe way to say, 'I'm friendly, I'm happy to chat a little bit if you are.'

We don't want to chat long - that would be weird. It's fine to exchange just one sentence each and then pass on. But don't we feel better for that short exchange?

I walk most days and pretty much everyone I pass will either comment on the weather, or say 'Morning.' You don't often say 'Hello,' unless you know someone. If you don't want to talk at all (maybe you're deep in thought, or something awful's just happened) it's ok to walk past in silence - but only if you look down and don't meet the other person's eye. And it's not really ok even then.

The weirdest and most unsettling behaviour is when someone walks past you, looks at you, and says nothing. That makes me feel genuinely uncomfortable because that person either doesn't know the rules, or does know them and is consciously breaking them - and in either case, their behaviour is odd, unpredictable and unfriendly.

That's the thing (and you people from towns who laugh at us country people greeting strangers in the middle of nowhere, just listen). Greeting someone means you're letting them know you don't mean them harm. Whether you're a woman walking alone or a group of burly blokes, when you meet on a path in the woods, commenting on the fog helps everyone relax.


An interval between the acts


There's been an interval. I hope you've all been enjoying your favourite refreshment (mine's usually a tiny pot of strawberry ice-cream) and scanning your programme (did  you work out who on earth that woman with the glasses is?). I hope you've enjoyed the play enough to return for the next act.

While I'm not foolish or vain enough to think that anyone has noticed, the length of the interval between my last post and this has bothered me. With every week that's passed I've felt this post needed to be ever more splendid, to justify my absence.

But the thing about intervals is that no one in the audience knows what's going on behind the closed curtains. On the stage the actors and crew may be running about madly shifting sets, changing costumes, mopping the floor of the broken glass from the last scene - but we all understand that it's out of sight, essential for the next act, but our job as the audience is to look away.

And so all I'm going to say is that for the last six months I've been recovering, working a little, writing a little. I've done a lot of thinking. I did a whole load of boring stuff too.

The next act is about to begin, and I don't know what's going to happen any more than you do.

Curtain's up!