An aside: these letters are addressed to J because of the number of people in my life,
important people, stray people, the people I feel were sent to me, and others who just wandered through, who have names beginning with that letter. JB, Jim, two Jonathans, an Uncle John, Jason, Jackee, a couple of Janes, Julia, Jack, Jackie, Jillian-with-a-J...not necessarily in that order…and of course, there were other people, important people, with other names, but if I am to send out universal letters…allow me to address them to J.
Let J. stand for anyone who might read them.
1st October 2023
Dear J.
Grey and cool. I put the heating on for an hour, mainly to dry the washing. Not cold enough yet to warrant it. I woke with a dream poem echoing…
She’s been quiet a long time
this Glen, with her murmuring
brooks, she is the shsshhh
in the grazing of shins, she
is the me in memory.
~ / ~
Lx
4th October
Dear J
I met Chris as I was getting on the bus. “I thought you’d retired from poetry,” he said. It made me laugh out loud, the very notion that you can. Learning to write poetry requires training the brain to think in certain ways and once it can, it becomes hard-wired, redirecting the brain to look at the world a certain way – or to be open to looking at it different ways – that’s what all writing is about.
There’s an argument for saying all writing is protest – the protest against people not noticing the
life and the world around them. The non-human natural world continues to decline in this country. It continues to be desecrated and those who are allegedly our leaders continue not to care. We as a citizen body continue not to care – or not to understand, which is the prerequisite for caring.
We are told to think of earth as our home, because the idealists believe no-one would treat their home the way we are treating the planet. All I can say to that is that they have never worked in ‘housing’. The degree to which some people will disrespect and destroy their own space is heart-breaking. Perhaps this is because of their backstory, perhaps they have no concept of ‘home’. Who knows? But these are the people we need to bring along with us, and we have no idea where to start.
Sorry. I’m in a desolate mood today…other reasons for that which I’ll share another time. Send me some good news, some hopeful, happy, frivolous news.
Lx
10th October
Dear J.
I’m thinking about our early morning conclave and the poem about bearing witness, the notion that we see the big picture and the very small; we see everything and nothing at all. I’m remembering how moved we all were by Patricia’s sharing of what she would rather not have been witness to, and how she now needs to find a way from that seeing into healing, her own and that of the others.
I’m thinking about what it means to bear witness.
I went to the shack yesterday. And swam on incoming tide. I was swept off my feet by breakers, tall and white and all-power water force, like those we used to play in when we were young. But that, back then, that was Summer and this – allegedly – is not. It is October. That date is not a misprint.
The sand was warm beneath my feet. The water was cool, chilly maybe on first encounter, but not what we would have called really cold. The sky was clear. To push through the breakers to where I could swim, held by the swell, to feel the salt sting in my eyes, occasionally on my tongue, to peel off my swimsuit and pick stray bits of weed off my skin was beautiful and life-affirming.
But then again…there’s something very wrong. This is Norfolk. This is mid-October. We should not be sunbathing and swimming.
Today, we walked along the East Bank in late Summer sun. We cannot call this Autumn. Autumn is damp and mists and the scent is woodsmoke, not sunscreen. The Chinese have a fifth season they call ‘late summer’. Perhaps we need one too.
Then again, the Japanese have 72 seasons, each lasting no more than fourteen days. Perhaps that’s where we’re headed. I fear the loss of ‘seasonality’. I don’t have a favourite season. I love that we have seasons. Or I did, that we had. Now it’s all getting muddled.
The dykes are scummy with weed or algae. Inland the wind is as lethargic as we are. Clouds are high and backswept and pale shades of off-white like swans’ wings or those discarded by angels who have given up hope. Too high to be of use.
We comment on the heat.
Out on the marsh, dark brown cows are lying down, which we know has nothing to do with rain, everything to do with fully bellies and contentment. Time was, we’d be thinking about bringing the beasts in about now, down off the grazing and into the sheds. Unless there’s a sudden change they’ll be out for another month or so yet.
As they say, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. A saving on indoor feed. But it’s a sicker wind still that doesn’t blow at all, that lets Summer linger beyond her due.
The first geese are arriving, but slowly – there’s no rush to head south – much like our Summer visitors who have been in no hurry to leave.
I hear grasshoppers.
Dragonflies still couple on the wing.
The mown bank is heady with the scent of grass becoming hay. Half-way through October.
And we are as wayward as ever, worrying about the sun and the future, and still unable to avoid our visceral reactions. “Isn’t it glorious?!” To take pleasure in the thing we know is harmful – is that the thing that separates us from the other animals? Or is it our ability to recognise it for what it is?
Cognitive dissonance – is that the term? Holding mutually exclusive things to be simultaneously true. Relishing the weather, this late in the year, knowing what it means.
The reeds shimmer, catching the low-angled light, post-equinoctial light, light that believes in Autumn whatever the weather systems are saying. Reed fronds shimmy in their grey and pink down. Goose colours. Feathering their way towards winter. Whispering the wisdom they’ve drawn up from the waters or pulled down from the birdsong, sharing it in one more language that we’re not bothering to learn. The reeds know that it is Autumn by the angle of the light; they ignore the temperature and go their own way, while they can.
I don’t know what the reeds have to say, but in the peace of their presence I come back to this idea of bearing witness. We are all witnesses now, willing or otherwise, but as writers it goes beyond the witnessing…we are called to bear witness…not merely to see, not only to notice, but to bear the weight of witnessing, to bear the responsibility of responding.
What does that mean? I’m not sure yet. I’ll get back to you.
Lx
16thOctober
Dear J.
Travelling hone today, after a weekend in Shakespeare country. I didn’t go to the theatre but tread in the footsteps of the bard in other ways. Those are tales for another day. I spent most of today on trains. I remember when I would often be out before daybreak and get to see the sunrise through a train window. It’s been a long time. I picked a good morning for it. My first really cold morning of the season. Walking up to the station through the silence of the still-night darkness. The town still sleeping.
The platform was all but deserted. Only two or three people. Maybe once, not so long ago, at this hour, it would have been full of commuters. Now they all know the value of an extra hour in bed and more flexible approaches to when and where and how to work. The irony is that most of my previous trips to this neck of the woods were when, technically, I was already working from home. The ‘from’ having more weight than the ‘home’ is the way I remember it. Norwich to Coventry. Norwich to Stratford-upon-Avon. Norwich to Maidstone. Norwich to somewhere every week. I used to say that I lived in Premier Inns. The closer truth is that I lived on trains and in train stations.
That was where I got my first lessons in patience. The trains never arrived any quicker for my agitation.
Today I am on the platform earlier than necessary, because I want to be sure not to miss a train that will get me home early enough to catch another one away.
It is cold.
Pigeons are the first to wake, then an unanswered blackbird.
As we head into the countryside, the sky pales and I remember to look back to catch the first pink fore-shadows of dawn. The fields are white with frost. Winter is on the way, and this year I am ready for it. Looking forward to the dark nights and cold days. Looking forward to the hibernation. A week ago I was revelling in an unexpected extension to Summer, sea-swimming, and now I am delighted by the first tentative steps of winter. I suppose that every year there must be this point where one season yields to another. How rarely we mark it until it’s past.
On my second train, I watch the Birmingham sky-line recede. Growing towers of glass and steel, and taller cranes. The place is a building site. I have never known it otherwise. It could be any city anywhere in the world. Homogenous at this remove.
Beyond the urban centres though, as I head eastwards, back into ‘country’ I realise why we call a nation a “country” using the same word as we do for non-town.
The country-side, the landscape that my train rolls through, unlike the cityscape, could only be England. The patchwork of irregularly shaped fields, with their hedges and once-hedged banks or tree lines, tell the history of the land and the long-gone people. Footpaths cut across the fields, but the lanes and road divert around them. Our lanes wind the way they do, because they followed ancient land boundaries, fields older than transport. The lost hedges can still be seen in the shape of larger fields, or the line of telephone wires, or isolated trees that were spared when the lesser shrubs were grubbed up.
Gently rolling country. Green. A lot of sheep fields that as I head east will give way first to cattle and then to pigs and then to arable.
The trackside blur of trees is already less assuredly green than it was a month ago. It’s smudged with the hips and haws and rowan berries. The chlorophyll is being withdrawn and the yellowing commences, slowly this year when it has stayed bright and warm for so long. I remember the maple farmer in New England who asserted that the depth of colour of the leaves in the Fall correlated with how cold it had been the preceding February. He had nothing to predict when the Fall would arrive.
Fall. We Brits think of that, somewhat disparagingly, as an Americanism, but according to Eleanor Parker (Check out her book: "Winters in the World") it’s actually Anglo-Saxon usage. Fall and Autumn were both common at that time. Who knew?!
Lichen is coming into its moment. As the leaves leave, the branches display their underwear of greys and golds.
There are glimpses of distant churches, grey stone spires.
Where fields have been ploughed for winter planting, the furrows accentuate the curvature of the land.
And then the Fens…the wide watery landscape. The washes are full. High tides and heavy rain. I love this stretch between Peterborough and Ely, where the sky and the land touch each other so closely. Water, as ever, their intermediary. A heron swoops low over the water meadows. A kestrel harries a crow. In one of the cuts, there is a splash, and I wonder if it might have been otter. I don’t think I told you about the otter at Cley last week! Deep joy.
Is it just me, or is there something different about a train that’s taking you home, as opposed to one
that’s carrying you away? Do we look at the landscape through the window differently?
Lx
