Monday
‘Severe weather warning: moderate rain.’
I wonder how both parts of that statement can be true, but you can’t argue with the weather. Despite the warning, every hour from now ‘till sunset is marked with a wind icon in the app. It’s 4 degrees and I want to stay home but I go out anyway.
On the way to the earthworks the ground is so saturated from the weekend’s rain that water is running in rivulets down the path. I wonder how the other park is. Here the water is run-off, but there it bursts out of the ground when the springs beneath start to swell.
I walk back through the wood, and it’s different. More trees are down since I was here last – snapped yes, but also uprooted. It looks like the rain has loosened the roots and the wind has finished them off. I assume it happened at night – imagine the sound of it!
The woodpeckers are pecking as I leave the wood. Still too high up to see.
Tuesday
These are the winter mornings you live for. Sun glowing just under the horizon – invisible, but present – like a benevolent god. A temperature so cold you feel it in your throat and chest. And then it hits: suddenly there’s gold on every wall – thick blocks of it, and when you look again the sun is above the horizon and it actually glitters.
The park is too wet to walk through, so I start the walk to the station via the street. At the bottom of the road I see a man and his tool bag, same time and place as last week. I know he’s the signal not the noise so I slow to a halt and a bus turns the corner and in seconds we’re on it and away.
A few stops up I watch a woman kneel as she says goodbye to her kids. Once she’s on the bus she turns and waves again when they shout ‘Mummy!’. They’re so excited she’s getting a bus. Everything is yellow.
On the train a man next to me unwraps a lozenge and I smell menthol as it starts to melt in his mouth. He sniffs. I think he coughs—but it’s not him, it’s the woman in front and the man opposite her. An unholy, unhealthy trio. This is why you should take beauty where you find it. Because any minute now you’ll be sitting in a plague pit.
I close my eyes and feel grit scrape across a contact lens. In a flash I’m sleeping and in my dreams I watch a man choke on reams of yellow velvet.
Wednesday
As I’m walking I think about the man and the yellow velvet. I can see it like a snapshot. I told someone about a dream I had between two tube stops once, and he said: “Impossible, that’s not really how sleep works. You can’t dream that quickly?”. I look it up when I get back today. Apparently it really isn’t how sleep usually works, but that’s often how it works for me.
While googling, I came across ‘exploding head syndrome’. Much like Charlie horse, if you don’t know what it is before you start, the questions in most FAQs and Google answers are startling.
I wrote notes as I walked too: “Tisha and small batches – all trees planted at the same time.”
Therein lies a problem with auto correct. I think I was worried about the trees on our street. They’re dropping small twigs and branches. As they were all planted at the same time, I assume they’ll all die around the same time too. At some point we’ll be treeless.
Note to town planners: stagger your tree planting.
Thursday
Rain. 29 February – it’s a leap year.
Today, I travel to work backwards. It’s a new-style train, so no one knows where to sit and you can see people pause very slightly in the place they’d expected a seat to be, only to find it facing in a different direction or already occupied. All the standard protocols are thrown.
I’ve sat in this seat before. It’s how I know there’s a moment, when you travel out of Lewisham station, where one line crosses another. And if you look down the other track you’ll see a neat divide. On one side of the track the old buildings of the past – Victorian terraces and large Georgian houses. On the other, the present – hastily built towers with balconies so close could pass a tea cup between them. And you can watch them both recede as you travel backwards into the future.
Other stuff
- I saw someone described as a ‘Substack bestseller’ this week. I did not know that was a thing.
- I shared this page with some good videos about visual thinking with some friends. I re-discovered it recently. The reason I shared it this time was for the first video, Squiggle Birds. I love how much Dave gets into it and forgets to speak.
- “Make sure the ending isn’t at the end.” Flash fiction came up this week. I love this article about how to write it. Maybe flash fiction should be the fiction of choice for content designers? They’d start with the point of course: they lived happily ever after; they all died; he walked off into the sunset and was never seen again.
Walknotes 