Walknotes

Monday

The sun was shining weakly on the path between the fields, so I risked it in walking boots instead of wellies. Terrible idea. I was only a quarter of the way in when I gave myself a pep talk: “Come on – it’s as bad to go back as it is to go forward now”. Although I didn’t believe it. But retreat and defeat must sound the same for a reason, so I pressed on. As I clung to the spaces between the barbed wire I looked at my boots sinking deep into the wet mud and thought, “so this is it then” – and not for the first time.

In the wood the wood anemones are popping up: tiny white heads hanging like bells as they wait for the sun. I was thinking of walking from the wood to the earthworks, but having only just managed to make it through the fields, the path of permamud seemed like a bad idea.

I cut back through the streets instead. These streets are full of trees in blossom and just for a minute there was blue sky and sun. I chose to just look up at the first few instead of taking a photo because I need the vitamin D. But in the end I cracked, because who knows when this will happen again?

It was raining by the time I got home.

The garden is full of lesser celandine. It’s everywhere and I have no idea how to deal with it now. I stared at it resentfully until the sun came out again and then I forgave it for its flowers. Bright yellow stars? You get to live another day.

Tuesday

I’ve been doing a creative writing course for the last few weeks and let me tell you, inventing fiction is hard when real life is so big and so small. My dreams say they’ve been trying to help, but instead they’re playing tricks. Last week they said this is important, remember it when you get up. It was a zoo for animals who love courgettes. Last night they said this is it, this is the story: a new metal tube for cremating people – and then they made me get in.

On the way to the station I pass one of those starry magnolias. They’re in full bloom right now, like a wild eyed, crumple haired relative of the more traditional magnolias. Suddenly I feel seen.

I know I’ve missed the 7:30am train. At 7:37 I’m wondering why people aren’t running for the 7:38. It’s because that’s the 7:50 and the 7:38 is long gone. Keep up. I Merlin the wren again through the open door while I wait.

17th in the queue at London Bridge and it’s too late for six of us plus the woman who pushes in as the door closes in her face. She raps the glass with her knuckles before taking seventh place. 

It’s 8:32am when we leave and on the other side of the station a man uses a loudhailer to talk about salvation. The people sitting next to me and behind me sniff and cough continuously with uncovered mouths and I open a window and wonder if the city fumes will help.

Wednesday

Vernal equinox. Today the sunrise was 6:01am and tomorrow it’ll be 5:59am. 

It’s the start of astronomical spring and it’s wet. The rain didn’t care about meteorological spring, and from the look of it, it’s not bothered about this one either.

Instead of a walk before work I finish a community project because it needs to go to the printers. 

In the evening it’s so light I forget the time and when I go outside there’s a smudgy white moon and the birds are singing at the top of their lungs and suddenly everything feels perfect.

Thursday

There are two paintings, one on a wall I can see from the train, and another on the window of a wine bar in the city. Both are paintings of foxes in the same position: standing, with their head turned to look over their back, tail erect behind them. The one by the station is made of smooth orange shapes, and the one at the wine bar is a line drawing with endless detail in the hair. Every time I pass the one in the city I wonder when the artist last saw a fox. There is so much flowing hair.

By the time we reach London Bridge the sun has broken through. I join one queue while my shadow joins another and my shadow reaches the bus first. I sit upstairs and the man sitting next to me sends his wife a text written in bullet points. I know it’s his wife because I sneak a look and after her name, it says ‘wife’ in brackets. Excellent use of punctuation all round. 

We pull parallel to another bus and I scan all the passengers in the top deck for TS just in case today is the day our paths cross, but it’s not. Instead there are people talking on phones and a woman at the back holding a mirror high to catch the light while she finishes her makeup.

On the way back I look through the office windows one floor up, and wonder what we’d be able to see if we had triple-decker buses or higher. They’d be prone to tipping over, and hard to get up and down, but imagine the view.

There’s a kid on the train wearing a beanie hat and a golden crown from McDonalds. He lectures a friend about the dangers of aspartame: it makes crystals in your third eye he says; his mum told him when he was a child. Then he says he’s never doing acid again without his girlfriend. All the acid told him to do last time was take it with her, so that’s what he’ll do next, and then he’ll never do it again. “Give me bacon and acid,” he says.

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Other things:

I’m still reading Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and Noah’s Compass and I started trying to read Next to Nature, but I haven’t had time to get past the intro yet. However, I liked this which is in the intro, by Richard Mabey:

“…It resemble’s Virigina Woolfe’s ideal diary which she felt should be ‘like some old oak desk… in which one flings a mass of odds and ends’, and then comes back a year or two later to find that ‘the collection had sorted itself out and refined itself and coalesced… into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life.’”