Slow water: on writing, swimming and time

This year the world slowed down around me, and I slowed too: my body told me it was time to stay close to home, and by mid-summer I was ill enough that walking half a mile was plenty.

But I was looking far beyond the small fields I could wander in. A piece of luck linked me with the artist Ardyn Halter, 3000 miles away in Israel. Together we were asked to explore the idea of A Common Place,  alongside writers and artists from across the world, brought together by the Eames Gallery and 26.

Our pairings were random - our names literally pulled from two hats and called out over Zoom in late June as the heat rose outside and the roads stayed empty. Though the world beyond our doors was closed we were making connections - and the next day Ardyn and I spoke for the first time.

Ardyn lives in Israel and I'm East Sussex, and we didn't know each other's work before that first conversation. How did we begin to find our common place? I'm not sure I remember exactly, but my notes are scattered across the page ... 

WATER

        read the water

strong waves

                            fear of below

different person each time

                                            LAYERS

coming home

what colour is feeling?

maps

memories

joy and chemistry

                        never entering same water twice

Some current had pulled our conversation to the water we share - my local, silty river Medway, and the Mediterranean where Ardyn swims daily before dawn. Since the beginning of this year I've been slowly travelling down the Medway towards the sea - swimming, walking, canoeing my way down the river I've known intimately since I was a baby, to a sea I barely know. That sea is connected to all sea, just as the land beneath my feet here, miles inland, flows into the river and on to the sea. This time of year - mid-December - I can clearly hear the water in the soil trickling into the tiny tributaries that gather over the fields and carry this morning's rain all the way to Israel, maybe, if it doesn't get distracted.

Water is slow, even when it moves fast - the rivers are filling and moving quickly after a week of rain here, but on every bend, there's an eddy, a nook where water pauses. Early sun lifts mist from the fields, carrying the water back into the air. Air, earth, water, all one.

My route down the river has slowed right down. I'm getting stronger and can walk a handful of miles now, but the world outside is closed again - I've almost reached Rochester, but it's out of bounds. So, like the water beneath my feet, I'm trickling slowly, wandering almost at random in the fields, up the hills and down the valleys where the streams gather.

But just look at the painting that Ardyn made, Sea Swim. Isn't it utterly gorgeous? It has all the emotion and sensation of the moment swimmer and sea come together. I love it.

And I have a poem, Flow, written after a summer of slow swimming in cool water on searingly hot days. My one constraint was that it must be 62 words exactly. It grew from rough notes made on a day after a walk along a tiny stream, thinking about tides, and from every swim I've ever slipped into:

A Common Place is at the Eames Fine Art Gallery until 24 December 2020.

Wild gardening a year on

 
It's the last day of May and I wanted to make a record of our garden because it's bringing me so much happiness.














I'm a lazy gardener - my greatest pleasure is admiring someone else's gorgeous borders instead of sweating over my own. I grow vegetables because they're much easier than herbaceous borders and you can eat them, but the rest of the garden is down to my husband (pruning, path-laying, pond-digging, rock wall-building). Also, I've a strong feeling that much modern gardening is about control and fear of the wild, beyond us and inside. Just looking at all the brightly coloured strimmers and choppers and plastic grass makes me very sad inside.

Until last year we had a lawn. It was a hassle and boring to look at. We wondered what would grow if we didn't cut the grass, so we left it to do its own thing - our own No Mow May but for a whole year. We mowed paths through it partly so that the garden still worked for us and partly so that the untidiness looked intentional, and then because we found that the mown paths grew different wild flowers as long as we didn't mow them often.

The result was a complete joy.




This year it's even better. We have more flowers, far more insects, and more birds too. The newts have been joined by frogs, and a huge toad jumped over the path in front of me yesterday.

House martins are exploring our eaves this year for the first time, and a bat nightly circles the garden. Swifts have gathered overhead, and though they're fewer than we used to see, last year there were almost none so we were overjoyed to see them return. Goldfinches are everywhere, alongside the usual bluetits, blackbirds, magpies, collared doves, jackdaws, dunnocks, wrens and robins. And the bees are in their element. In the quiet of lockdown, we can hear them buzzing, the chicks in their nests, the swishing of the grass in the breeze.

On 18 April I surveyed the wild flowers in the garden, and found 26 species. It's not a fancy garden and it's not huge - maybe a third of an acre, with a chunk of it used for growing vegetables (and drying washing) and another chunk paved - but it was packed with variety. Today, some of those flowers have died back and others have taken their places. I'll survey them this week, but today I'll sit at the grassy table at the top of the garden and enjoy them.

On finishing my novel (spoiler: it's set during a pandemic)

Last week I finished the novel that I started in December 2013. Six and a bit years of ups and downs, loss of confidence, moments of great happiness in writing, and finally a manuscript that I've placed in a folder called FINAL.

Trigger warning: this isn't one of my blogs about walking in the fields. My novel is set during a modern viral pandemic.

Seven years ago I had my appendix out and was pretty ill for a while. I was thoughtful about mortality. I read Pepys's diaries in bed each night and was mesmerised by his telling of living through the Plague in London in 1665.  It first appears there on 7 June:

"This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord have mercy upon us' writ there - which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw."

I'd read Camus's La Peste as a student and the diary brought it back. Camus's telling of a town locked down in desperation sits deep in my subconscious even if I no longer remember it in detail. It's one of those books that changes you invisibly.

How would we respond now to such a plague, I wondered?

My characters were clear in my mind from the start: a mother and her 19-year-old daughter who live on the road in their van. The mother is absolutely sure in her convictions, fuelled by anger about modern society. She rejects it all, refuses to engage with anyone except her daughter. I find such people mesmerising and terrifying: I don't know how to handle such righteous rage and tend to hide from it. I wondered what it would be like to be her daughter, trapped in a van in a wood in winter with love and anger.

I read Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, and my heart travelled with the people who had nowhere to go but were forced to wander from town to town hoping that someone would leave supplies out for them: no one would let them in.

If such an infectious and fatal illness struck us now, how would the people I live among behave? Would they allow my child to come home, possibly bringing sickness and death? Who would I open my door to?

What would happen to my characters, out on the road? So free and yet so vulnerable?

I began to research plagues and pandemics. I filled notebooks and folders. My shelves filled with jolly titles like The New Plagues.

By 2016 I was wading through papers by virologists and epidemiologists.

They had titles like, 'World invests too little and is underprepared for disease outbreak' (BMJ, 2016; 352: i225).

And, 'Seven reasons we're at more risk than ever of a global pandemic' (CNN, 2016).

And, 'The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready?' (National Academies Press, 2005). (The answer is a resounding no.)

I downloaded the UK's public health plans for a flu pandemic. They never seemed to consider a non-flu pandemic in their planning.

At the top of one set of plans I scribbled: 'BUT IS THIS AN UNDERESTIMATE?'

It was utterly plain to me - with my O level in Biology and a degree in French - that our government was horrifically unprepared for a pandemic, even though it identified a flu pandemic as the number one threat to our country, far above terrorism.

Politics kept winning over science. Our politicians didn't want to invest in public health, or strong infrastructure, or relieving poverty so that people and communities were healthier. They shouted about crime and foreigners and scroungers, and they cut funding to hospitals and social care, and they pushed more and more people into poverty.

Pandemic? Who cares, they effectively said. They ignored what scientists had been telling them for years because it would have meant spending money on things they didn't value.

So when the news came from Wuhan at the start of this year, I knew what was coming. I couldn't do anything about it. I felt helpless. Weeks before widespread panic buying I bought flour, pasta, coffee, oil, tinned tomatoes and chocolate and put them in a box under the stairs. I remembered reading a US epidemiologist who said he had two months' supplies at home and was planning to hide out with his family for as long as it took. Now, of course, two months seems laughable.

I watched the news and kept writing. I was in the revisions by now, sorting out plot quirks and clunky dialogue.

By the time we were locked down, I had an almost final version. One of my lovely readers sat with it in the middle of the night while feeding his baby, waking each morning unsure what was real - my book or the news on the radio.

Last week I read it through one last time.

'My' virus is far nastier than COVID-19. It spreads faster and kills more people. It's carried initially by domestic cats, and it starts right here in the UK. It's entirely plausible and judging by the way our government has responded to COVID-19 - and is still responding right now - we'd be utterly devastated by it.

I'm angry. We knew this was coming. No one can 'beat' a virus, but we could have been prepared. We could have saved so many lives and we still need to.

I'm afraid too. My parents are in their 80s. Their domiciliary carers have no PPE (not necessary, says government advice, though one of the carers is off sick with COVID-19). My son is in the shielded group because he has an underlying health condition. It doesn't make him any less my son, any less valuable. If he catches COVID-19 I may never see him again.

This has been such a strange time. People keep saying that, and it has become a cliche, but it is no less true. I have been happy writing and I am proud of my novel. It's about so much more than the facts of pandemics and viruses: it's about people and how they live together even in the strangest times, and it's about trust and hope.

Hope isn't enough to keep us safe, but it's so important. Here's hoping for better times.

One field is all I need

I don't think I'm unusual in having a favourite field.

It's down a short and often very muddy farm track, just past the gate in the photo above and it has a well trodden path through it that could take me in all kinds of directions. But often I don't go much further.

Years ago I'd stop in this field - it wasn't my favourite then - because I didn't have the energy to walk more than ten minutes from the house. Now, sometimes I can walk miles, sometimes I can't.

Sometimes now I dawdle there so long anyway that I never get out even if I did mean to walk over the small hill to the farm beyond, or up to the heathland reserve where the buzzards live.

Sometimes I know I'm going to the field and no further, and that's ok. Today was one of those days.

It's February. It's been raining for weeks so the mud is deep and oozy, red where the iron in our soil has bled. The trees are still bare, but there are shoots, and catkins, and the birds are singing springtime songs from the hedges.









There are sometimes cattle in the field, but not often. It's too small and lumpy and wet to grow a crop in. There's a shallow dampness that's not quite a stream, with marshy plants and ground that never sets hard even in summer.

There's a telephone wire from which a pair of kestrels swoop into the clumpy grass come high summer.

There are huge oaks, cities in their own right, where I'll see woodpeckers later, and saw jays saving their acorns last autumn. Today the trees are splendid, their dinosaur trunks vast and warm under my hands.

There's a stream big enough to paddle in but it's on the other side of the narrow wood that runs alongside the field. Magic happens on this side. The field is only metres wide between the skimpy wood and a rough hedge. Birds leap across the gap between wood and hedge, linking their hideaways and their food and their song perches.







And in high summer every step I take lifts butterflies from the grass and marshy ground like table crumbs from a shaken cloth. It's magical.











Today, I went out in the late afternoon, low sun coming from a high blue sky that turned suddenly black, with a wind that rattled the branches and flung hailstones into my ears, and I couldn't have asked for more.