Bog Myrtle & Peat

It hasn’t been the year I hoped for, and there have been times in the darkness before dawn when I have caught my reflection in the window and hoped that when day came, it would show me somewhere new. But the same horizon always comes up from the night, and the lights of neighbouring farms stand in rigid constellations, suggesting that if stars are lights to guide us, there’s nowhere else to go. I’ve been locked to these rocks for some time, and there’s no glory or glamour in isolation. If I had never written or shared a word of this experience, it wouldn’t have hurt me less. But there’s no low moan of discomfort here, and for all that I’m torn by my attachments, I did make this bed – and I’m afraid that I have to lie somewhere.

Early in the year, I thrilled with the brilliance of snipe which drummed above my bed in the rushes. I lurched towards larks and was impressed by the deep, high-altitude boom of swans on their northerly migration. Then upheld by swallows and the swell of the spring grass, I rode between the blackbirds and a train of shrews which passed across my boot in June. I dressed myself in dog roses and turned the summer’s hay for cows which fattened and yelled in the midnight gloom. Gathering light, my skin peeled for the scorch of it – and I lay for three days in the pitch of crimson agony, slippery with balm. In August, I took a porpoise skull from the bay and adjusted my settings according to the angle of thirty peggish teeth. I watched a child grow large and loud as a dinosaur, then felt the autumn sun warm kindly on my neck like the palm of a hand held open. And I have not been so locked to the place as I sometimes feel; I’ve seen parakeets on Hyde Park Corner, cranes in Finland and the glimpse of a sprite in an old Welsh wood. Even as I’ve loved the world, I’ve also missed it deeply – but if things haven’t gone according to plan, perhaps that’s only a lesson against planning. 

Over the last fourteen years, this blog has sometimes served as a dumping ground for ideas which grew too big to hold in my head. To paraphrase a well-known quote, it’s hard to know what you think until you’ve read what you’ve written – so I take each idea out of my head, turn it round and hang it here like a shred of meat dismembered by a shrike. I tell myself that I’ll come back to these things, but I rarely do – until the end of a year, when I suddenly wonder if there is something in the mess I’ve made, and by hooking this stuff to the thorns for months and years at a time, I’ve dressed a bush quite bonnily. Some things have worked, and others require refinement – but the accumulated mass is more than I realised at the time. I would only say that if you sometimes see a grimness through the smoke and glower of making, it’s not entirely me. I can also play, and while I hope I’m not the focus here, a candle needs a wick to chew – and I is buoyed by We or You.