I’ll be forgiven, I hope, for my tardy blogging. A cold and damp start to the year in my head as well as in the air around me.  Since Christmas I’ve had dreams of seeing and not seeing, of sights vanishing before my eyes waking only to discover that the world is still foggy. I didn’t write throughout January, February or March and now it is almost the end of April, how did that happen? My ‘almanac’ of thoughts and responses to the world around me has been kept inside afraid to come out until it seemed safe to do so. That might be now.

 Almanac (noun)’ an annual calendar containing important dates and statistical information such as astronomical data and tide tables’.

In my almanac, I haven’t been able to see this data, these dates and times of the tide and the movement of stars across the sky for so many weeks now. I know I’m not alone. So many of us have felt this, too many lockdowns too many hours spent trapped with our own private nightmares. As the seasons shift and change and recharge themselves inside my head, I’ve had a word with myself, enough is enough.

I worked long, long hours as the evenings drew in like darkling things unable to tell some days where the day started and ended but then little by little the light started to creep back in always reminded, as Imtiaz Dharker says in her sonnet, ‘The Trick’, that ‘shadows live where there is light’. It was very hard some days to forget this. But then her sonnet was written in response to Shakespeare’s love Sonnet 43 where he declares that ‘When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see’. Only in sleep are his eyes ‘bright in dark directed’.  But wherever there is light, there is shadow and April promises that shadow will be banished if only for a while and, ‘bright in dark directed’, our eyes seek out the light of springtime.

April is a month of sunshine and showers, a cold snap of a month. My real almanac tells me that ‘the Romani name for April means “month of rains”’.  April showers will drop on your head as though someone has opened a bag of ice cold water from the clouds above. I learn that the reason for these frequent cold showers comes from the same atmospheric conditions which caused the bright gusty winds of March which, here by the sea, are as insistent as the tick of time. They insist that winter is hanging on to my coat tails yet promise me that spring is within the reach of a fingertip. April promises more but the bite of the air tells another tale. ‘The sun is hitting the ground at an ever-steeper angle and so the land has started to warm up all around us, but the great thermal mass of the sea lags behind, clinging on to the chill of January and February,’ my almanac tells me. A very dear writer friend gave me this almanac for Christmas and I love it. It explains the seasons to me and helps me to listen to the seasons instead of skimming them. I read about April at the wide awake hour of the morning when Fleur Adcock’s poem ‘Things’ comes to mind with its reminder that: ‘There are worse things/than not being able to sleep for thinking about them’. But at 4 a.m. it doesn’t seem as though there are worse things and there they come ‘stalking in/and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.’ And they keep on coming.

But eventually, you sleep.

In the morning, which is today, the sun is shining and I go out into the garden.  I remember what the almanac urged me to do. The first month, January ‘the month of the snows’, it entreated me to ‘Stand barefoot on the cold earth and think: what is good about this moment.’ I did that, and felt the cold grass, the stirrings beneath the cold crust of earth and deep movement of creeping things, life beneath my feet. Do the same in February it said and March and each time it will feel it just that bit different as if the earth is opening up beneath your feet. I failed to do it in February or March but today I do it again. I discover than in April, the ground springs and dances beneath my feet.  This is why I can get moving, I failed to hear the earth or the sound of it waking up and now it’s started to open its eyes. I almost missed it. The shadow is beginning to come out of the light and off I go.

Adcock, Fleur, ‘Things’ in France, L.(ed) (1993) ‘Sixty Women Poets’. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books

Dharker, Imtiaz, ‘The Trick’, in Crawforth, H. & Scott-Baumann, E. (eds) (2016) On Shakespeare’s Sonnets, A Poets’ Celebration, London: Bloomsbury

Leendertz, Lia (2021), ‘The Almanac. A seasonal guide to 2021’, London: Mitchell Beazley

Shakespeare, William, ‘Sonnet 43’ by , in Crawforth, H. & Scott-Baumann, E. (eds) (2016) On Shakespeare’s Sonnets, A Poets’ Celebration, London: Bloomsbury

Our new house is within a stone’s throw of a walk that leads to the sea. Today, the first chink of sunshine after weeks and weeks of rain we walk into the dunes down narrow pathways fresh with damp underfoot.  Everything is glistening, silver threads pulling us forward through the heavy sweeps of marram grass, the sand slipping from our footing as we struggle uphill and down again.

We take the side path, the one that hugs the perimeter of one of the many golf courses that dot this coastline.  They link the edge of the sea like a joining of hands, home to buzzards, sparrow hawks, oyster catchers and, in the summer, swoops of swallows. In the spring, the chatter of natter jack toads fills the length of them.  It looks peaceful in there, quiet, not even the pock of a golf ball or the swish as it travels through the air which is a beautiful sound in its own way. The fairways stretch like emerald runways towards the points of pine and fern-crowned hills. Silence settles; a leaf falls. The sun shines gold through the beech trees, leaves clinging by finger tips, trembling and I’m minded that Christmas is only around the corner.  I imagine tiny silver and gold bells trembling in the limbs of the trees. The little leaves are bells, hanging on, behind them the trace of a moon in the blue, blue sky. It’s warm, the sun on our faces, glorious and hopeful.  For a moment we forget the outside world in the tight solitude of this closed kingdom. We forget what is beyond the edges of the path, an ever advancing virus and its anger, eager to pick us off one by one.

Here we can escape, here we can be safe.

We see a path to the left, trying to avoid the many dog walkers. Up, up and up we go wading through sand into which our feet sink deeper than deep, good for the muscles and good for the soul. And at the top we’re rewarded by a line of shining sea.  It’s calm today, glittering. We think we can hear it but can we? Might it only be the cars on the coast road, the traffic rumbling, the wind through the high, high pines and maybe, just maybe, the gentle roll of the sea.

We have done two house moves in the space of eight weeks. From our own house and then moving my mother from my childhood home. It took weeks and weeks of packing, of discarding things that were once so precious, reduced to little more than one less thing my mother needed to take with her. The loss is felt keenly by all of us who lived in that house, akin to grief.  Another loss in a year of losses, of choices whisked from our hands like water through our fingers.

But this is the second turn in the year and I am looking for hope. We light candles and fires to bring light into the darkness. It is St Lucy’s Day, 13 December, a feast day placed near the darkest time of the year, a day which in Scandinavian countries is still kept with candlelit processions through the towns and villages.  Christmas is close now, so close I can feel its breath at my ear. The winter is cold and dark but I am searching for chinks of light.  Lucy’s name means ‘light’ from lucere ‘to shine’ which in turn gives us the word ‘lucid’ (clear, understandable) and the exquisite-sounding ‘pellucid’  which means ‘translucently clear’ a state where light is allowed to pass straight through it.    The days are lengthening if we care to notice, the darkness makes it hard to tell but from 21 December, the winter solstice, they will lengthen by one minute each day and light will come in its insistent way.  We need to stay still and notice it.

In her wonderful book, ‘’The Morville Hours’, about the rebuilding of the garden at Morville Hall in Shropshire Katherine Swift describes it like this: ‘Senses grow keener again in the cooling air. There is a return to the transparency of spring. Without the distractions of leaves and flowers, you see the garden as it really is. This time of year,’ she says, ‘the memories come thick and fast as falling leaves.’  Memories can hurt at Christmas, memories of the ones who are no longer here to share it with us can insist more than the memories we build in the present moment.  But we have to try, what other choice is there?

A new start we always say at the end of Christmas and the start of a new year but this year I reject that pressure. Day by day we have to take it. Today’s start was the walk at the turn of our road, and at the end of the winding path hidden by evergreens, Christmas hollies and ivy, we found a wide pond shining for all it was worth, the high dunes reflected in its pellucid water. Clarity of a kind which will do for now.  

Swift, K. (2008) ‘The Morville Hours’, London: Bloomsbury

In the north this cold early evening the lights in the sky are birds flying low across the clouds. Like specks of distant dust in the sky, they move, cutting across the rooftops, over the gardens and away towards the sea. Behind them the pink and red of the clouds are like a dancing girl, swirling her skirts high, her feet on fire flying flamenco on the edge of dusk. Last night I didn’t sleep, woke too early chasing away my midnight worry which has left me exhausted. In my head are the words of the poet Fleur Adcock ‘It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in/ and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse’ and this is how I feel, have felt, all night long. It’s how many of us are feeling right now.

I plod through the day, sludge footed. Work is done, tasks ticked off, meetings attended and listened to, notes taken. The words on the computer skitter across the screen as my eyes try to adjust, catch up with them. At work, I forget ‘the worse things’ and find more and more to do until nothing is left that won’t wait until tomorrow. And when the screen is snapped shut, back they come with their taunts and their unfinished business and when the work day is over, I look out of the window the daylight has almost gone and that’s when I hear them. You always hear them before you see them, the sheer numbers of them, filling the sky and you strain to see from which direction they’re coming, because they seem to come from everywhere joining up last minute in a line that seems to stretch the full length of the horizon.

The geese weave and duck and dive in their triangles and chevrons V-ing their way across the sky, pushing to the front like jostling teenagers jockeying for position.  Every autumn when the children were small we’d go to Martin Mere to see them crowded on the wetlands, too many to count, busy with their tapping feet and sturdy pink legs, chattering as they ate, catching up on stories of their journey which will have been long and hard for those who made it. 500 miles they come from Iceland, guided back by the swell and curve of the landscape – the Ribble estuary, Morecambe Bay, even the M6 will guide them back, a straight line pointing to home.  https://www.wwt.org.uk/wetland-centres/martin-mere/

Like the birds, I too am on the move.  Almost seven years ago:

I  began to dream of a house, pale blue like a blackbird’s egg,
Nestled in wind and mad salt waves, summer’s memory held
In a handful of stars. With my feet on the land and my tail in the sea,
I built my house close to the shore then watched with eager eye
For the strings of autumn geese to come, stretched wide
Like skeins of cotton thread across my northern sky.

I wrote that in 2013, it was published in an anthology ‘Heavenly Bodies’ by Beautiful Dragons Press https://beautifuldragons.net/. I wrote it the last time I moved and I have the same dream this time. It’s always there, hovering. It always seems to be autumn into winter when I move, as though somehow I’m answering the call of these birds, following them homeward.

The birds keep coming, strings and strings of them. They are pink footed Canada geese flying back and forth to WWT Martin Mere. They mark the break in the year – autumn to spring and back again counting the hours out for us between dark and light. Some 18,000 of them on the last count as I write but they can number well over 40,000, sighted on the wetlands, their chatter a cacophony of voices which remind me of something I haven’t heard in a long time.  The sound is a poignant one, the gathering of voices becomes a distant memory of the sound of people together, just talking. They remind me of what is missing in all of our lives right now, but the joy of their gossip and laughter as they fly over is a promise of a better time that will come, as they will come, again and again, as they always do year after year throughout time.

Things by Fleur Adcock in ‘Sixty Women Poets’(1993) ed. Linda France, Bloodaxe Books

So there’s this spider in my garden, well there are lots of spiders in my garden looping the loop across from the buddleia to the apple tree across the washing line and around the bins and back again. It’s become like an obstacle course just getting from one end to the other. Fortunately I don’t mind spiders at all, I quite like them but I am tired of getting my hair tangled in their pretty spinning webs as I make my way through the garden. The threads are invisible unless you view them from the right angle and sometimes one has the impression of a trapeze artist balancing delicate legs spindly on a wire. This week, on the buddleia, I saw a Red Admiral butterfly spinning like a whizzing top caught in one of the webs and rushed out to find a wasp trapped alongside it, battling the sticky fingers of the spider’s world the two of them fighting to escape and becoming tangled in each other’s terror. Unwinding them was easy getting stung by the wasp’s anger less so but somehow I managed it. Off they went, the two them, air-spinning and buzzing, leaving a disgruntled spider to lament their loss.

The spider interests me because I’m struggling most days to keep the writing going. It’s too simple to see the spider patiently rebuild its web as a metaphor for the fact that I must keep going no matter what. So I try and so does the spider. I write here on the blog page, in my journal and in my head, thoughts spilling out like the gossamer string from a spider spinning. I do take comfort from that spider being undaunted by its task. No matter how many times it’s knocked down, up it gets again and starts over.  I don’t see it as a threat, something to be held at bay as the fairy Puck keeps the spider from Titania in A Midsummer Nights Dream: “Weaving Spiders, come not here;/Hence you long-legg’d spinners, hence” he tells them and she protected safe in her bower.

The poet Walt Whitman watches a spider in his poem A Noiseless Patient Spider in its glorious isolation spinning out its web “filament, filament, filament, out of itself,/Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.” He thinks of himself, of his soul, standing “Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,/Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them” waiting for the moment when the “gossamer thread” he flings will be caught somewhere and land and peace of a kind will come to him.

Is this what we are always seeking?

Walking across the dunes some days later across the Autumn crisping bracken, the damp of the land as the sea mists bring the change of the seasons with them, I see them again, the webs. Tiny spinning creatures this time never seen but creating a network of silver trampolines, glistening with mist and dew across the ever-shifting landscape. They look like they are covering fairyland or close enough, if ever there was one. Beside them hopping creatures, frogs or maybe natterjacks but no too small for the rare toads although we do have them here these extraordinary creatures. The frog moves along slowly, cautious beneath the webs which give him cover from our prying feet and eyes.  And on he goes leading us with him across the dunes and grasses and pathways until…

The sea, the vast expanse of it.

But they are deceptive these sands, the dunes that lead to the beach and then to the sea. The grasses and plants that grow here create poetry in the saying of them: Sea-holly, Cat’s ear, Red fescue and Spreading meadow grass. The dune slacks are covered in creeping willow, and I wonder as I always do: how does a willow creep? Slowly it would seem, dragging itself with the wind along the sand along the edges of footpaths where it favours the ones less travelled, the ones less found. On the strand line, the line which separates the outgoing tide from the sand on the beach only highly specialised adaptable plants like Sea Rocket and Prickly Saltwort can survive an environment which is described as ‘inhospitable’ but I never find it so. If something can grow here how can it be so?

We watch the sand and sea that always vanishes the moment you think you’ve caught it hovering on the edge of your eye, the mud banks which lure the unsuspecting walker deep into their quicksand depths. Visitors to Southport see Blackpool across the bay and think they can walk there. It doesn’t look far they think so out they step and find themselves trapped and cornered by the incoming tides. It’s the same up past Sefton along the Fylde coast and on.  Quick sand also called ‘running sand’ is a mixture of sand and water or sand and air that looks solid but becomes unstable when disturbed by stress, like someone walking on it. It looks innocent. But it’s not and that’s the trick of it. I think back to the webs and their fairyland depths and wonder about the magic of it all because sometimes that is how it feels out here, like magic.

I grew up with stories about people being submerged in these quick sands – the best story I remember was about a coach and horses racing across the sands, the entire group swallowed whole, sometime centuries ago. At night, so they say, you can hear the whinnies of the horses, the cries of the coach driver and his passengers screaming beneath the sand. Stories with truth somewhere buried beneath them – the sand will get you but it’s the tide that will kill you, the water not the quicksand, rushing in to claim you.

Now there’s a story worth spinning…

 

Solstice = sol (sun) + sistere (to stand)

Anthony Gormley’s, ‘Another Place’, author photograph

The light becomes thinner each day. Not even a month on from the summer solstice and it creeps up, the darkness in the evening warning me that Autumn is just around the corner a knocking on my door. Where did it go, all the light? During the strange time we’ve just come through, the light was bright and the sun was strong just when we needed it. It was no different this year from any other, I know because I’ve tracked it – a good April and maybe May and then an indifferent summer. In my journal the one thing I note day in day out is the weather. Once upon a time I used to say I would go away for the winter, move somewhere with bright white life-giving light, but I have neither the money nor the time to do this, nor as the years go by, do I want to. I like the pathways of the year through the solstice in summer, in winter, tracking time.

 In 2012 I wrote a prose poem for an anthology written during the hours leading to the summer solstice. Each writer was given one hour, mine was 5-6am a time I knew well because I used to get up three times a week to drive my daughter to swimming training, three very early mornings, three evenings and every Saturday. My poem was written when I was barely awake, the light was starting its early descent from the height of summer towards winter. It was a time of turning that year, for all of us, just as it is this year. At first I hated it, those early, bleary and barely awake mornings, energy dipping and diving with each mile I drove along the coast road, tracked by the world waking up second by slow second even in winter. Each solstice was a time for rejoicing and joy as the sky threatened or menaced or just cajoled me into thinking the world was awake with me when really it was just waiting to see what I would do. Bushes that were bare one minute in late winter into spring would suddenly sprout white blossom, elderflower slipped into berry in the blink of an eye. Then they’d reverse their journey back into the ground to wait the winter out. A blink and I’d miss it.

 Driving along the same road along the coast every day I would notice the way the tide changed subtly. There’s a popular myth that the tide never comes in along the Sefton Coast, particularly at Southport or Formby but that’s untrue. I know because I’ve seen it. Now I know the seasons are changing by the way the sea changes, it gets more angry and listless as the year creeps on. On the morning I wrote the solstice poem the sea was a calm flat line, the sky pinking and glowing. As I was driving northwards, in my sights were the hills of the Lake District, on the way back I was greeted the other way by the Welsh hills; even on a good day you can see Snowdonia although it’s difficult to pick out from the undulating peaks which tip their eyes into the clouds before dipping down again. The distant peak looks like a place filled with story and music and voices calling you back into a past you’ve forgotten even existed. On a calm day you can almost hear them whisper, each time with something different to say.

 The summer solstice sneaked up on us when we were indoors this year, behind our barriers, hunkering down so that when we emerged mole-like into the light over these past few weeks it was disappearing fast into the past taking our hopes with it. Everything has changed and it would be nice to say we’ve all had time to notice it – the flowers opening ever so slowly, the grass growing with no one to cut its unruly hair, the birds now fully fledged allowed to run free. In the past few weeks on my walks as I venture further out into the world I’ve seen: a family of mistle- thrush, a falcon, jackdaws unafraid to venture right up to my hand, a baby magpie its feathers tufted like a duster strutting like a cock o’ the walk and a black headed gull that walked tiptoe across the grass tripping sideways as though it was wearing stilettos in a night club. I’ve walked across fields through narrow pathways with crops teasing their way higher each day, wind turbines beating a rhythm to match the pattern of my heartbeat as I move towards the change that is coming.

• 

• 

All this and more – a family of hedgehogs three babies and an adult zig zagging across our night time suburban lawn. The collective noun for hedgehogs: an array (too dull), a collection (really?) the one I like best ‘a prickle’ because that’s how they look, quivering and prickling their way through the grass knowing we are metres away, looking back for Mum and the cat skipping a heart beat over their heads spooked by the strange shapes making their way across the night garden. In an hour or two the cat will bring in some beauty of a moth for us, and we will shout and say ‘get out’ then look for the poor moth to rescue it while the cat sits pale-eyed with a paw beneath the fridge fidgeting it out from where its prey lies quivering.

Writers notice these things, we all notice these things. One by one, they come to light.

Fair Sweet and Quiet

The sketch of a moon in a dawn sky as the day slips in through a slow drip of cloud turned in on itself like the crease of a drowsy bed. Fair, quiet and sweet she is, this child of mine, and I don’t like to wake her, her face bent with sleep in this morning clad house with its cloak of red, indigo and orange. Her eyelids move, open, parting the light in a flutter of synapse and the impulse of nerve endings, the roots of a fire. Now? she asks with bleary eyes and hands pale in the mandolin of moonlight. She pulls the covers back, her day stretching ahead like a fairyland stumbled on by mistake. I watch her, waiting at the water’s edge, a toe in the water, eager to dive in.

Reardon, J. (2012) ‘Solstice, 24 Hours of Poetry’,  Beautiful Dragons Press

Friday

‘It is raining, and not especially warm. Neither am I feeling at my best. Time for a solitary, soothing supper.  Something mild and gently flavoured. Perhaps even a little bit extravagant. Who says food cannot heal?’   Nigel Slater, Kitchen Diaries

Healing is what we need at the moment.

I queue patiently, the line of us separated by our two metre markers snakes right round the car park but it moves, slowly. I left it a little late today but simply couldn’t face it any earlier so here I am. The cupboards are empty and someone had to come and that someone is me. It’s not raining but it is windy, very windy, and not ‘especially warm’.  The wind gusts up from the sea like a wild thing and has been rasping its breath against the windowpanes all day, throwing the black bamboo against the glass which thrashes its angry fingernails, ‘Let me in’, it shouts, wails, into the night and on into the morning.  I think of Catherine Earnshaw from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights every time I hear it, the terror of her fingernails clawing desperately at the glass from beyond life, wanting to be brought back, desperate to live again. This is how we are all feeling right now. The outside has felt so distant for weeks now, we travel towards the future with hope (some days) but mostly I’ve found myself staring at it, as though becalmed on some great ocean, the future no more than a sliver of land just out of my reach. We are almost there but not quite. Where can a writer find retreat these days, where can any of us find retreat?

The old saying ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out’ feels apt today. In use since at least the 18th century, I’ve always taken it to apply not to the month but clothing, ‘clout’ being an old word for a piece of clothing. But May is contrary, cold one minute and warm the next.  There is one more meaning to this saying – it refers to the May flower or hawthorn which flowers in May and until it is out ie. gone, keep your sweaters on!

On colder days like this I reach for recipe books, reading them to calm me, thinking about things I can cook to bring solace. I always did this, and now I have hope that this small thing will make a difference. I want to make a meal I’ve not made in twenty five years, gathering the herbs and spices around me, sweet and sour things and it feels extravagant because it will take hours to prepare and cook and chop and grind and while I do this I will think of nothing else. Maybe the radio will be on, music probably, Radio 6 Music for the weekend, Radio 3 in the week, music heals as much as food.

It’s been comforting at times over these past ten weeks, using stuff up, making do with whatever was in the cupboard, refusing to join the crush of panic buying and then being surprised by what we found. As a child I loved Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows especially the bit where Rat and Mole come across Mole’s long neglected home in the cold of a December night which he has been unable to locate, Mole’s excitement at finding himself at home, hurling himself through the door only to be greeted by ‘dust lying thick on everything, [and] the cheerless, deserted look of the long-neglected house, and its narrow, meagre dimensions, its worn and shabby contents’. His first thought is food, there is nothing to eat he laments as he collapses into despair. In the cupboard the ever resourceful Rat finds ‘a tin of sardines—a box of captain’s biscuits, nearly full—and a German sausage encased in silver paper’ such a feast that their humour is restored and suddenly all seems right with the world. Whenever I am heart sore I think of this little scene. It’s not just the food but the trudge through the snow and the wild wood to get there, the reward at the end.

Journeys, food, nature, the wild world around us which keeps on growing as we retreat inside.

Wednesday

Another day and the sun burns so bright it seems to have forgotten that it is still Spring and not yet summer but we are grateful for it.

The wind has died down, I take this picture of my apple tree from beneath the branches looking up, the sky a startling blue behind it. The elderflower is out, creamy white and perfect and I have a plan to go out and pick some for cordial.  I think back to the old saying again and remember that you should never bring May blossoms into the house and I’m wondering – does this mean elderflower too? Bringing haw blossom into the house brings bad luck they say.   Siobhan Campbell’s wonderful poem ‘Quickthorn’ reminds us of this, an extract:

‘ Don’t bring haw into the house at night

or in any month with a red fruit in season

or when starlings bank against the light,

don’t bring haw in.’

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49977/quickthorn

So don’t take your warm clothes off until the May blossom is out because cold weather can return during the spring months and don’t, ever, bring hawthorn in. I long to bring elderflower in though and carry armfuls back from our walk, the smell pungent and grassy as earth, I will take the risk and look for memories of better times in its blooms as Seamus Heaney wrote of elderflower in his Glanmore Sonnets:

‘I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,

Its berries a swart caviar of shot,

A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.’

He likens the elderflower to a ‘snapping memory as I get older’ and I will take comfort from it. I add lemon and orange peel, then the juice, and sugar. The memory snaps at me, the scent of the elderflower a remembrance…

My recipe for Elderflower Cordial*:

25 elderflower heads

Finely grated zest of 3 unwaxed lemons and I orange, plus their juice (about 150ml)

I kg sugar

Inspect elderflower for insects and remove them. Place flower heads in a large bowl with the orange and lemon zest. Bring 1.5 litres of water to boil and pour over the flowers and zest. Cover and leave overnight.

Strain the liquid through a jelly bag or piece of muslin and pour into a saucepan. Add the sugar, lemon and orange juice. Heat gently to dissolve the sugar then bring to a simmer for a few minutes.

Use a funnel to pout hot syrup into sterilised bottles. Seal the bottles.

*Taken from Preserves by Pam Corbin, River Cottage Handbook No 2

 

 

Our walks have been limited during this lock down. This means different things to each of us and for me it means the long walks along the coast have gone, with the wind and the brine in my throat, the splash of salt in the air. I miss this very much. We all miss something don’t we?  Instead I find myself taking the same route, skirting the edges of the housing estate in which I live, passing the building site where the shells of hundreds of new houses sit like cages, shuttered down, gated and padlocked, the windows releasing pieces of plastic which flap forlornly in the wind.  A few times a week we walk along the dried muddied paths, detritus and fly-tipping creating the effect of an abandoned world which has gone back to its roots. The new estate is on the back road which has been flooded all year, always has been, one wonders how anyone got planning permission for building there at all. One time it was a field full of horses tattered and tethered, hoof deep in mud.  I think about those horses each time I pass. They seem to belong to a different world altogether, one that is straining to come back.

We take this road because it’s quiet.  The other route through the euphemistically named ‘nature walk’ through the woods is always busy with dog walkers and not really a wood because it’s built on the debris from the original housing estate (where we now live) piled high, grown over reclaiming the wildness of the place it once was or hoped to be.  I can’t grow anything in my own garden because two inches down and all you find is rubble. Most neighbours have paved or concreted drives and gardens, some have astro turf which occasionally I see them hoover! Trees thrive though, hundreds of them.  We’ve seen foxes, rats (lots of them), stoat (sadly a dead one who dared to venture out) and then there’s the buzzard. Always there, stalking, hovering, buoyed up in the warm air currents above the wood that is growing in spite of the hostility of the ground from which it springs. In a few weeks I’m hoping the elderflower will be out although I have a feeling it will be late this year.

What have I learned from these walks? In this cramped and crowded space we have managed to find sanctuary and solitude. We go late at 5.30 when everyone has done their daily bit of exercise, and in the past few weeks and in such limited space I notice the numbers dwindling day by day. I used to walk these pathways before and never saw anyone, I’m sure it will go back to being the same, is it bad that I look forward to this?

There is one place, the last pathway we go through on our way home. It has a bench and it has a stream of sorts where there are two swans, a few ducks. The stream also has empty bottles and rubbish in it. The ducks don’t seem to mind. There’s an allotment I long to belong to, looking calm and tranquil with its little painted sheds and rows of neatly growing fruits and vegetables. A sign that life is continuing there as normal even if it has gone into stasis elsewhere.  Over the past six weeks the pathway has become more and more overgrown. Yellow primroses have given way to bluebells and the leaves have suddenly sprung into vibrant life in lime green sprightly brightness in every shade of nature’s making. From something unprepossessing as a housing estate has emerged this burst of life. We sit on our bench, not many pass at this later hour, we like to count who says ‘hello’ and who doesn’t. Most do. The buzzard alights sometimes in the tallest tree and it’s always quiet, every bird in its individual song. Make the most of this, I think, it won’t last.

I’d always found strength in sea, mountains were second and then came trees but I’ve discovered to borrow from Wordsworth’s Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey:

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear, -both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

Nature forbids that time will stop as we have all stopped. I have one tree that marks this for me. In my mother’s garden is a crab apple tree which is now in bloom and from whose fruit, when the apples have fallen, I intend to make crab apple jelly. I say that now when the fruit is still pretty in its pink and white frill but when they fall and I have to collect them before they rot I will say it’s a waste of time, I’ve so much else to do and I will mean it when I say it.  The apples won’t stop though – they will grow and they will ripen and they will be ready to fall and although I will complain, I will make the jelly and remember this springtime when it was the trees that grew quietly alongside us, easing us along. And in the Autumn I will put the jars of bright jelly to the light ‘as clear and shining/ as stained glass and the colour of fire’* and pray that I will be grateful.

*from ‘Crab apple jelly’ by Vicki Feaver

 

 

It’s something of an irony that at this time of enforced retreat I am trying to write a paper about the relationship between retreat and creativity. I should be an expert by now after almost four weeks of lockdown but I’m finding it harder to write each day. We are all across the world in isolation from COVID-19, a pandemic that is sweeping through our lives. This is an isolation that has been forced upon us and I’ve been thinking about whether a retreat that is enforced is any retreat at all.

The OED defines the noun ‘retreat’ variously as: ‘an act of moving back or withdrawing’, ‘a quiet or secluded place in which one can rest and relax’ or ‘a period or place of seclusion for the purposes of prayer and meditation’ All of these definitions imply silence and solitude. In these dark days, we are all in solitude looking for the light.
But I’ve discovered that the light comes from the most unlikely of places and from the most unlikely of voices and that’s what I’ve decided to focus on in this blog post. Two days before the lockdown I spent what turned out to be an extraordinary day in Liverpool as unexpected as it has continued to be sustaining, remaining in my consciousness as a reminder that there is still a life out there, waiting to picked up again.

It went like this:

I had a free ticket for an afternoon concert by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra performing Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite a piece of music that has long been the soundtrack to my life. I had a row of seats to myself, so many had cancelled because of Covid-19 that the seats were free. I felt the breath of the past on my shoulder as I listened, a tap and a whisper – remember this? I did remember: Peer Gynt was one of the stars of my parents’ record collection and I used to skate around on the carpet in the living room imagining that I was Torvill and Dean, the blade of my skates slipping earth bound on the friction of wool and carpet, the ice palace in my mind became the edge of the limit of my imagination.

At university I discovered Ibsen’s play ‘Peer Gynt’ and used it as the inspiration for my own first play ‘The Wheel’ performed at a Student Theatre Festival in Leicester. The play was about a group of survivors left at the end of the world after a pandemic or a nuclear storm, I wasn’t specific, I didn’t think I needed to be, threat was everywhere. The nuclear disarmament movement was a constant feature of life, I marched for CND and supported the women of Greenham Common, if a nuclear bomb didn’t drop then a pandemic was expected every day. We knew about pandemics because we’d watched them on the TV (in the series ‘The Survivors’) and worried and obsessed by this I put it in a play, but in real life, it had yet to hit us. In the years between then and now we just forgot. More fool us. At the centre of my play was the Button moulder, Ibsen’s harbinger of death waiting at each corner, giving you just one more chance to redeem yourself before being melted down with the rest of the mass of humanity into his great ladle, each of us indistinguishable from the other. I’ve been thinking about the Button moulder these past few weeks, wondering where he is, reminding me that life must not be wasted but that he’s still there lurking somewhere waiting for those who have forgotten that. I don’t want to be one of those.

That same day, the day before everything changed, I went to the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool, from where you can see the city glittering and spread out beneath your feet like a trail of breadcrumbs leading down to the mighty River Mersey. I attended a service in the beautiful Lady Chapel where we were a congregation of three and then, as I always do, I went to the bookshop. The bookshop is where I found Julian of Norwich, or to be precise, I found a perfect little book about Julian of Norwich by Janina Ramirez who paints a portrait of a woman of whom we know precious little other than that she took what seems to us today to be an bizarre decision to be walled up in a cell inside the church of St Julian in Norwich for almost 30 years. Her reason? So that she could retreat from the world and be able to focus on more spiritual matters without distraction, so that she could be ‘in the world but not of it’. Apart from her name (which she took from the church in which she was living) and the fact that her book Revelations of Divine Love is one the earliest surviving books written in English by a woman, we know almost nothing about her. What we do know is that Julian wrote ‘deceptively simple words, which exist outside time and will always ring true whenever and wherever they are read’ (Ramirez, J. 2016, p. 85). Julian survived the aftermath of the Black Death from 1348-9 and the plagues that hit Norwich four times between 1369 and 1387, ‘with death carts trundling down King Street, past her cell, Julian would never have felt far from reminders of the transience of life and inevitability of death’ (Ramirez, 2016, p.25).
I knew about Julian but had never read much about her until that day and then read what she had to say, discovering in the process a book that is ‘singularly optimistic, hopeful and finds a positive path through suffering’ (Ramirez, 2015, p.25). Words in a book that was written in a cell not more than a few metres wide. If that’s not an inspiration for a writer in the days we’re living through now then I don’t know what is.
We need Julian’s words today: ‘All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’.
I’m reading them over and over again.

 

With thanks to my reference:

‘Julian of Norwich’ A very brief history, (2016) by Janina Ramirez

 

 

 

 

The son of a close friend of mine is reading anything he can get his hands on, hungry for books that will open his mind. Keen to add to his education, last summer I bought him three to add to his collection: Laurie Lee’s As I walked out one midsummer morning, Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines and Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. The latter because he was on his way to Cuba.

My friend told me he texted to say that he had been visiting all the sites in Our Man in Havana, all places Greene had visited himself during the 1950’s when he spent time in Cuba.  The book coming alive for him in a very real way, just as I hoped it would. A few weeks later his mother called to say it was my fault he had decided to head down to the south of Spain with his guitar over his shoulder, walking some of the way, hoping for a taste of the life he’d read about in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. He had a destination in mind, a music festival near Barcelona, he’s an extremely accomplished classical guitarist, I felt he would thrive in his intentions (he did) but of course she was worried (I would be). But I’m secretly delighted these books have had this effect on him and besides, Spain is a very different country to the one Laurie Lee found back in the 1930’s and my friend’s son knows Spain, has family there, it’s easier to navigate and survive in. He has a mobile phone and travel is easy, he can get back home in an instant if he wants to. I’ve yet to hear how he found the Chatwin, I wonder if he’ll find his way to Australia…

Jeanette Winterson talks about the salvation that can be achieved through reading.  ‘Inside books there is the perfect space,’ she writes in Art Objects, ‘and it is that space which allows the reader to escape from the problems of gravity’.  Reading allows us to exceed our limitations, to escape and retreat into other worlds. ‘Walled inside the little space marked out for me by family and class, it was the limitless world of the imagination that made it possible for me to scale the sheer face of other people’s assumptions’ (Winterson, 1995).

After giving the book to my friend’s son, I dug my old copy of As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning and decided to re-read it.  I haven’t read I since I was a teenager myself and back then it was one of those early books that opened the world of reading to me – along with Catcher in the Rye (doesn’t stand up to re-reading), Jane Eyre and The Mayor of Casterbridge (both bear much revisiting). My copy of As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning is still in surprisingly good condition with a price of 30p on the back, that’s how long I’ve had it!  Every page turned reminded me of how much I liked to travel when I was younger, full of hope and curiously in these times of great fear, only excitement. On the back of reading Lee’s book the same friend and I caught a flight to Malaga with no idea of where we were going to stay, carrying one small rucksack each on our backs. Our flight was delayed, we met an amazing woman at the airport who said we could rent one of her holiday apartments for a pittance. It was old-fashioned but clean and was part of a complex with a swimming pool. We rented a tinny red Fiat, found empty beaches, ate fish fresh from the sea and lived off beer and olives in our little apartment with Julio Iglesias singing on a rubbishy old tape player we found in the kitchen. In her concern for her son my friend has forgotten that now, it’s easy to forget. Those were very different times. Books remind you.

I would revisit Spain many times after that, the most recent in 2008 when I stayed with two young children in a small hotel, El Horcajo, converted from a farm near Grazalema in Andalucia.  In my journal written while I was there I find notes on gardens left wild running with limes, zucchini, hens and lizards. ‘Whole days here are spent watching’ I wrote that summer, as I sat beside a cold pool where swallows darted across the surface of the water, ‘the blue belly of the bird reflected on the surface of the water like a small slick of oil’. The journal is important because memory alone cannot be relied on – it must be true because I wrote it down. Must it? I try to filter truth from imagining as I read the words, but it seems to be there is truth both in the facts and the interpretation of them.

What I do remember most about that holiday was the town of Ronda, the deep gorge and the bridge above it from where men, women, children would be thrown to their deaths for disagreeing with the state, sometimes for a crime as slight as the theft of a loaf of bread. During the Spanish Civil War it could barely contain the bodies that were hurled down there and in my notebook I find the beginnings of a story I never finished about someone who remembers being told the story of an ancestor who lived in ‘the wrong place wrong time’ and who was thrown down into this gorge imagining for herself what it must have been like and not be able to find the words to describe it. Sometimes things are beyond words. I never wrote that story.

In my notes I find things I’d forgotten, an account of the old town of Ronda with its ‘cobbled streets with white houses and black wrought iron where at one point we found a student from the Music Academy playing guitar in a tiny square draped in bougainvillea’. I’d forgotten that but I remember it now and see the student sitting there on a low wall, the sound sweet and thin in the heat of the square. I think of my friend’s son making his way to Barcelona with his guitar. I learned classical guitar myself when I was younger and reading about it now in my journal, remembering the sound of it in that place taps in even now to a deep sense of longing, of things forgotten and things waiting to be rediscovered. If I close my eyes now I can hear it again. But if I hadn’t made notes about it I wonder if I would remember it at all?

Or is memory something else?  I’m thinking of my friend’s son and his journey to Cuba and to Spain and of the way we remember places we’ve forgotten when we hear about them through someone else’s memories and how they come alive again, as we discover them anew. And I’m thinking about the healing power of art, of music, of writing. It’s different for each one of us.  This healing power ‘cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves’ (Winterson, 1995).

Winterson, J. (1995) Art Objects. Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, London: Vintage

I’m working on two pieces of writing at the moment, both set in or around the Sefton coast. I’ve written about this beach a lot, it was a place of adventure when I was a child a place of secrets as a teenager and now it has become a place of solace and solitude. It’s also a place where today I need answers.  In one piece of writing I’m dealing with dialogue so I have my ear to the ground hoping to catch snatches of conversation caught in the wind.  The other piece is a new novel so I’m trying to do November novel writing month NaNoWriMo and so far (half way through the month it’s working) but today I hit a wall and the beach is my refuge.

It’s the calmest I’ve seen it in months, cold and brittle but also quietly at ease with itself, the tide just inching out leaving eddies and twists of water in its wake. Sometimes we get these tides here, quiet flat water where the silence is a thing of exceptional beauty and today is one of those days.  The bay which stretches out and round and down into the Irish Sea is peppered with wind turbines arcing their graceful arms across the water, the slant of sunlight making them seem like giants who know their place, feet planted low in the water and faces tilted to the sun. A horse makes its way slowly across the slants of sunlight on the sand as a murmuration of starlings hurls itself up and down, twisting and turning beneath them, nature in harmony with technology, a ballet in silence just for me.

The writing I’m doing is about the sand and what it gives and takes away round here. There are myths of course, urban myths about horses and carriages in the 1800’s that vanished in their race across the bay. And it’s easy to get cut off here as the seawater tricks you.  You head out to the sea across the sand as far as you dare and then when you look back you see that something is stopping you and panic sets in easily and quickly and suddenly your link to the land has gone. I remember doing this once, on a winter’s day walking a dog who had no fear of the water and I have a photograph to prove it. I’m smiling in my ruined red leather boots which were my pride and joy.  You can see the rime around the leather, icy seasalt and sand preserved forever in colours which are fading now as fast as the years that frame them.

Beachcombing, I find a bottle at my feet, not glass, green plastic, no label, it glints emerald in the sunlight, scarred by the turbulence of the waves that brought it here.  Beside it in the clumps of seaweed I see spools of blue fishing line, a scrap of red nylon and shells, hundreds of them. At certain times of the year, you see starfish but this is too late in the year. Nothing looks like itself, the detritus of people’s lives washed up here becomes something other. The jumble of objects becomes a modernist painting, the brush strokes rough and textured the colours muted and dark wrapped up in the sand from the mud banks.

The poet Jean Sprackland who knows this coast well wrote in her book ‘Strands, A Year of Discoveries on the Beach’ * that: ‘Here on the beach, the usual significances are lost, the ordinary object is stripped of context and the familiar things made strange.’ And that’s what it looks like I think, watching the water watching the sand.  The only sounds are those one overhears, a snatch of conversation, a line out of place. I’m working on a script for radio so I eat them hungrily like the magpie all writers are. ‘My grandmother was from Oldham,’ one woman says and another says ‘What’s he like?’ and another ‘I’m not going to make it’ even though the beach is only yards away. I see a woman improbably wheeling a suitcase, the kind you see on trains, her friend has a bag of blankets and at the edge of the beach a family are lining the wooden gantry eating sandwiches and sipping hot chocolate in a merry row like seagulls watching the sea. The sun shines down on all of us even though the temperature is little more than five degrees.

I get home and open my notebook.  I write down the sounds and the smells and the glimpses into the gaps in people’s lives and they become something other.  Just over a week and fifteen thousand words into my novel, some lines of dialogue and an idea for the lot that was eluding me, and tomorrow seems a brighter day for writing.

* Jean Sprackland, Strands, A Year on discoveries on the beach (2012) London: Jonathan Cape