Stories that make sense
Desert Island Discs always sends celebrities off to their desert island with a copy of ‘the Bible’ and ‘Shakespeare’. Scare quotes absolutely intentional. Why? Because they’ll never get around to them otherwise? Perhaps it’s for the company.
This year I went to Lyme Regis, where they are so proud of their ammonites that they incorporate them into the design of the lamp-posts. And I picked one up from the beach at Charmouth. And I thought a lot about spirals, and nautilus, which are living fossils, and about snails, and when I saw this book, with this title, it seemed meant. It’s a delightful book, very readable pop science with some fascinating thought experiments (how can you not love the Imaginary Museum of All Possible Shells?), gorgeous pictures, and good stories. Look at this, for example:
There are even molluscs that use their shells as greenhouses. Heart Cockles are small, heart-shaped and pink, and can be found lying on sandy seabeds near coral reefs. Like other bivalves they sift nourishment from the water, but they also grow food inside their bodies. Colonies of photosynthetic microbes in their tissues harness sunlight to make sugars.In return for a free feed, the shells give the microbes, known as zooxanthellae, somewhere safe to live and a ready supply of light; the shells have small, transparent windows that let the sunshine in.
Spirals In Time (Helen Scales). Thoroughly recommended even if you’re not as hung up on seashells as I am.
I’ve had bicycles on the brain this year. No, I’ve had bicycles on the brain since I stepped out of Woking station one day in May 2011 and found myself in the middle of a cycle race – but this year in particular I’ve been thinking about bicycles, writing about cyclists, photographing bicycle wheels, watching cycle races – and riding bicycles.
This one’s new – well, new to me. I bought it from my brother in July. The great thing about it is that allows me to cycle at both ends of a railway journey, rather than just the home end – which, if I’m visiting someone who lives a fair distance from a station, for example, is handy.
Anyway, there are lots of circles in it, handily depicted on the diagram on the down tube. (Is it a down tube, on a Brompton?) Also in circle news of 2016, I had a poem called ‘Circles’ included in Purple Prose: bisexuality in Britain. And I thought a lot about spirals, about labyrinths, about recurrence, about finding oneself back where one started, about the other sort of cycle. I thought about experience, about how I can compare any experience that I have now to experiences that I have had previously, and to experiences that I can imagine having in the future.
Next year I’m intending to publish A Spoke In The Wheel. I’m going to return to Santiago de Compostela, completing a cycle of a decade. Apart from that? I don’t know, which is unusual for me. By this point in the year I tend to have a good idea of what’s coming up in the next one. As things stand at the moment, I have a very strong sense of having finished a lot of things I’ve been working on, of having achieved most of the goals I identified, of having resolved many of the challenges that arose in my twenties, and not being entirely sure what comes next.
I’ll definitely do some cycling, though.
I’ve taken far more photos this year than I thought I had. What I hadn’t done, up until yesterday, was to tidy them up and upload them anywhere. This one dates from February. I think I’d just missed a train and so wandered around with my camera until the platform was announced for the next one.
This structure is a giant birdcage. It stands outside King’s Cross station, on the north-west side. The picture shows the very top; about half-way down there’s a crossbar from which a swing hangs. It’s a good swing, wide enough for an adult to sit comfortably, and it lets you get really high. Yes, I’ve tried. Of course I’ve tried.
It was possible, fortunately, to get the moon in the middle of the top circle without having to stand in the middle of the road.
Is this picture representative? Not statistically, certainly: the majority of my photographs this year have come from walks beside the Cam. But there do seem to have been a lot of these clear skies – or perhaps I’ve just been looking up at them more; I’ve been paying much more attention to what the moon has been doing; and I do spend a lot of time on trains into and out of King’s Cross.
And the lovely thing about the birdcage is that the bars are wide enough apart that you can just step between them, and perhaps that’s a clue, too.
A book told by a twenty-something male ex-professional athlete first-person narrator will end up with a lot more swearing than one told from the point of view of a nineteen year old evangelical Christian closeted woman.
Turns out.
*Smut, Tom Lehrer
After a week of beautiful, watered-gold sunlight, today has been grey. I went looking for light at the Fitzwilliam Museum instead. I found it in the ‘Colour’ exhibition – the brilliance of illuminated manuscripts – and in the French impressionists gallery (I’ve lived in Cambridge for well over two years now, and I’m still not accustomed to the idea that I can ride my bike into town and go and look at a Seurat or a Cézanne, just like that) and in the foyer.
I’ve been paying more attention to sunlight this year. At work, I moved from the fourth floor – above the canopy of the plane trees – to the second. After a month in the middle of the room I moved again, to sit next the window, to a desk that faced the other way. I bought a daylight simulation lamp for use at work, to complement the one that I have at home.
My body humours me, but it isn’t fooled. Switching the light on will improve my mood almost instantly, but I’m still exhausted at the end of the day. This week of annual leave has been a relief, allowing me to sleep until well after sunrise, to submit to the rhythm that I can never quite conquer. It’s a joy to be wakened by the light.
Light is in short supply this month, and yet – the light that I have been granted has been particularly lovely. Low, slanting sunlight; crisp starlight; the light stolen by artists and captured in gold leaf and crushed lapis lazuli. All mine, for the looking.
They’re not on the table any more. They have been for the last several months; now, with a week off work, I’ve finally got round to turning up and pinning the bottom 55cm of these curtains.
My mother made these to hang in the sitting room of the house where I grew up, a rambling Victorian pile in the depths of the Marches. Two pairs: one to close off the big bay (creating a fantastic den), and the other for the other window. I commandeered that second pair when I moved into an awful bedsit in Guildford; which was also a rambling Victorian pile.
The curtains cheered it up considerably, though they didn’t do much about the dodgy light fitting, the leaking wall, or the mice.
Now I’m adapting them to shut the draught out from two pairs of french windows. Our current flat is about a century newer, and has fewer pretensions of grandeur.
I’ve persuaded myself that I don’t need to cut anything off the bottom; a metre would, I think, be my cut-off (ha ha) point for that. If I ever find myself living in a decaying Victorian mansion again I’ll be grateful for those couple of feet. I’m still a bit worried that they’ll pull the whole curtain rail down, but I think that if there’s a serious danger of that happening then it’ll happen regardless of whether I cut anything off.
Also on the table, metaphorically speaking: a quilt for my godson – which is why Voyages of the Celtic Saints is there with a pencil marking the page with a picture of a Romano-Celtic trading ship, which I’ve adapted for the design. (He’s called Joseph. I’ve put the Glastonbury thorn in there, as well. And some saw-tooth. And a pyramid. And the whole thing is very bright, riffing off the ‘coat of many colours’ theme. I’m not sure which Biblical Joseph he’s named after.) Various pre-Christmas tasks, none of which I’ve really started yet, because it feels a bit early.
And, of course, A Spoke In The Wheel. I’ve finished the first draft and I’m keeping out of its way until January. It’s been an interesting experience, going from zero to 68,000 words in the course of a year, and I’m not sure that I would choose to repeat it. At times it’s felt a bit joyless, nose-to-the-grindstone, arse-in-chair, duty-writing. And that’s even with my fortnights of not-writing in between my fortnights of writing. The next one, I tell myself, I’ll do differently. No, I’m not sure how. Yes, there’ll be a next one. Probably the sequel to Speak Its Name, though I have a few other ideas bouncing around. Whatever it is, I won’t dive straight into it – or, if I do, I’ll give myself more meaningful breaks in the middle of it.
After I finished the first draft of A Spoke In The Wheel mid-way through November I turned my attention to some shorter, light-hearted, frivolous pieces – some of which you may see here at some point – and have enjoyed widening my focus. Because if I’m writing for fun, I want it actually to, you know, be fun.
I’m delighted to report that Speak Its Name appears on QSpirit‘s list of Top 35 LGBTQ Christian books of 2016.
And there are some books on there that I’ll be adding to my own list. I’m in very good company.
A few years ago, back when I first started celebrating the new year at the beginning of Advent, somebody asked me if I was going to move all my December rituals back, as well.
I said no. The whole point was to acknowledge transition as a gradual process. The world doesn’t suddenly change at the moment the sun sets on the last day of Ordinary Time, any more than it suddenly changes at the stroke of midnight between December and January. I’m always changing, and so is the world around me, and this time of year, when it feels as if everything is dead and nothing is changing, is a particularly good time to take stock, to see what has changed over the past twelve months (give or take). Change is gradual, and so, therefore, is my new year. It’s not so much a step into the unknown as it is a step forward into what I can see, trusting that what I can’t yet see will make itself known.
Less like this:
And more like this:
I took my camera out for a walk today. It’s been a bright, chilly day, with golden light and long shadows, and frost on the ground that the sun hadn’t reached. There is less colour now than there was a week ago; the leaves have fallen, and yet – there are red berries in the hedgerows; the sky is a cool turquoise, and the river throws it richer and deeper, and the bare branches are somehow a vivid green. The low sun flatters it all, intensifies it.
People worry a lot about Instagram and Twitter, and what we’re missing, and whether we don’t see things properly when we’re looking through a viewfinder, and sometimes I think they have a point. But more often, I find that looking for a photograph just makes me look, full stop. Looking for beauty helps me find beauty; and often, I forget.
This year, I will take more photographs. I will look for more photographs. Even, perhaps, when I’m not carrying a camera.
Kathleen Jowitt 