Being Outside More

Fragments Sometimes the world is too wide, Too big and too difficult Instead we must stitch together a life from Fragments, scraps, glimpses Carpets of snowdrops The first crocus in the garden Hands in the soil A communal sieving of compost Home-made birthday cakes A freshly shaved jaw Coffee in bed Weaving voices in harmony A small cat fighting my pen Invading my notebook Back outside for a close encounter A robin grabs a wobbling worm I have set myself a slightly arbitrary target of writing and publishing something here once a week. The world does seem a particularly difficult place at the moment, so fragments will have to do for today. This piece tries to sum up a week of small things.

Being outside more connects you with the reality of the seasons. On Friday I was hit by this in a very physical way, cycling back from Grow Wilder in a steady cold rain that froze my face, made me curse that I hadn’t packed my big winter gloves or my waterproof trousers. As I gritted my teeth and pedalled on grimly, I was definitely questioning my life choices, thinking wistfully of a nice warm car. All the precious glimpses of early spring I’d been spotting during the week; bulbs blooming, blossom flushing along leafless branches, tight packed buds everywhere, seemed very far away at that point. But I am also reminded that the seasons are contextual, where my damp experience of February contrasted with my husband’s week in Montreal for work. Images shared to the family WhatsApp showed snow all around, here was the deep cold winter of fairy tales, temperatures well below zero, between -15 and -20℃. Back home in Bristol, thawing out by the heater and sharing a cup of tea with my daughte...

When I was a teenager, there was a TV programme called Ground Force, where Alan Titchmarsh and team would descend on a small garden for the weekend to spring a makeover on the surprised resident. An instant garden, revealed with a flourish in a format designed to provoke a flood of grateful weeping from the owner of the garden. Watching other people cry happy tears is apparently good telly. In reality, and in my experience, making a garden is a much slower process, and because it is something alive, it is always changing. We moved into our house over twenty years ago and it has taken time for me to feel confident that this is really my patch. For several years we lived with the garden as it was, mostly grass, a narrow pinched bed at one end with some explosive leggy Hebe. Several tall dark conifers and a tatty garden shed lurked in the sunniest part of the garden. It took me several years for me to feel brave enough to have the conifers cut down, and then to ignore the protests of my h...

There’s a lot of ideas fizzing around my head about walking as a creative practice at the moment. I started the week thinking about ‘walking artists’, the subject of my friend J’s degree dissertation at Bristol School of Art. A talented artist but a mature student feeling a bit wobbly faced with powerpoint slides, she wanted to run through her presentation in front of a friendly audience and so did so at our Monday women’s group. She gave us lots to think about, including walking as pilgrimage, other spiritual practices such as labyrinths. We discussed walking as a political act, and how that links with access to land and nature. J also put in a special plea for the flaneur, one who perfects the art of idly wandering through a city and observing. Although when looking up more about ‘flaneur’ I came across a review of Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin (2016), who asked that age old question, where are the women? Another one to add to my reading list, I already have Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit...