Old fleets: Lines of logo-stripped trucks. Hog brush canopy, ballast scrunch under my tyres. A pond with clay red algae that looks extremely toxic. I stop at the accompanying picnic table and flirt with doing some kind of conceptual video work. The daisies here are big as fists. Every spring and early summer wildflower is in attendance, checked off some developer’s list or blown in on the wind. I don’t know which, but it strikes me that the flora here is probably only as old as the warehouses, car parks and arterial roads it punctuates. Everything here was razed then raised at the same time, and it has a newness to it that is familiar and strangely comforting. It reminds me of the American suburbs I grew up in during the 1990s. A permit for every flower head.
- cow parsley
- herb robert
- green alkanet
- foxglove
- bastard cabbage
- dog rose
- buttercup
The evening is lilac, the colour of cloud bottoms over the Cambridgeshire fens three years ago into which I torpedoed headfirst, blind with grief and escaping over the quickest, flattest landscape I could find. Get the wind at your back, make a sail of your sadness. I took with me a list of names: Cottenham, Landbeach, Rampton, Waterbeach and Willingham. The Fen Edge villages. I see that checklist now in the eye of my heart, in that first October of the rest of my Octobers. Unravel, ravel, wind up, slow down. Plot a route, follow it, don’t deviate. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.
Late last night we were by the Severn. F, A, and two of her friends. The tide was as high as I’ve ever seen it, light almost extinguished. But just enough to pick out a silver, snaking quicksilver Severn under a sherbet orange swipe of sky. Then ploosh and a porpoise was there in the inlet we were skirting, regularly breaking the water in a small, curved arc of torso and fin. We watched and filmed for as long as we could before we had to take the friends home. A miniature whale at Whale Wharf, named for the creature that beached there almost a century and a half ago. People travelled by train from as far as London to see it, before it was towed to Bristol for more gawping and eventually processed into fertiliser. Not so long ago I had the barebones outline for a novel based in this part of the country: A chill story of a watery world shrouded in isolation and superstition. Most weekends involved at least one bike jaunt down to Severnland. Can you see my legs working, refusing to stay put. Just as you had hoped.
How do we splice the threads of our lives together? Why even do I feel the need to try and connect, say, Henry Purcell to birdwatching, or folksong with riding a bike to the Severn. To make it all whole?
Today. I am in the grasses peering at newly sprouted yellow rattle and enjoying watching the daisies track the sun across the sky, almost perceptibly whirring their heads around like radar dishes. It rained last night, just enough, and now a wind whips fresh and bright through the fields. My dog meets a retriever, they both lie down before falling-to in glorious, grassy circles. Already this too is a memory chiseled into shape, polished and stored in the wings; scenery to trundle onto stage between acts. In fact, the wholeness of a memory (A Memory) it’s very Objectness, tangible and real (and quite probably far from the actual moment being remembered) has really struck me recently. How fashioned and curated our lives are become in their remembering. All our life, a stage. We both witness and write (and rewrite) the unfolding drama of our days. Act I: A Comedy Ending in Tragedy. Act II: …
Love it, as always.