Recently I’ve been noticing how very satisfying rich colours are. The deep red on our dining room wall. Cobalt blue watercolour, before you start diluting it. In a box of 40 reels of thread, the magenta one. I like them opaque but not muddy. These leaves aren’t quite as good as my mug from the Women’s Tour, but they’re pretty good.
And getting outside, even just for ten minutes around the block. This little patch of trees and grass and path is just there to baffle the noise from the main road, but it’s a habitat for small joys like squirrels, deer, people on bicycles, people not on bicycles, huge and tiny dogs, sparrows, goldfinches, rosehips, hazelnuts, blackberries, bouncy balls, and exuberantly yellow leaves.
Windpump at Wicken Fen. I am not just trying to indicate that 2024 was the year we got National Trust membership, though this is true.
At one point I got very interested in windmills (this is not one) and fell down several Wikipedia rabbit-holes learning about Dutch windmill code and so on (this appears to be broadcasting something between ‘good news’ and ‘not open for business’).
But the real reason for choosing this photo is the sense of space I encountered at Wicken Fen, which feels emblematic of this year’s emotional shift. Big skies and quietness. This year I’ve begun to make more sense of the world in which I live, I’ve been deliberate in spending more time outside, and (most of the time) there’s been more space and it’s easier to breathe.
While we acquired the cargo bike last year, I was very pregnant at the time, and I only began to be comfortable trying to ride it this May. It’s actually surprisingly easy to get used to, once you’ve got the hang of the steering. For town errands, it’s quite a bit handier than a car: just as well, since I can’t, and (for health reasons) shouldn’t, drive one.
Not on the line, in the station after a stormy weekend, though my next train ended up sitting still for a long time waiting for the next driver to arrive.
… so much stuff belonging to my father. And yet there is still so much left.
I should start by saying that most of the hard work of getting rid of things has been done by my brothers, and I have mostly been saying goodbye at the point of seeing a familiar item in the auction catalogue and going, “oh, yes, that…”
That’s accounted for a lot of the bulky items. Some stuff has gone to the tip. The rest of it…
If you ever met my father, you probably saw one of these stickers. He stuck them on everything – suitcase, diary, camera bag – and had been doing so since the mid 1970s, when his bus was part of the artichoke sponsored Tour de France publicity caravan. There is still a huge stash left.
There is a lot of stuff like that: cool story, no monetary value to speak of, about twenty times as much as anyone ever needed to keep. Or, in some cases, quite possibly some monetary value, if only one could find the person who wants it and work out how to get it to them. Or, of no interest whatsoever except to the family.
My next door neighbour died a couple of months ago. Her son rented a skip. Everything went in the skip. The house is now up for sale.
Could we learn from him? Probably. Except… I myself rescued a chair and two icons from the skip, the icons because it felt sacrilegious to leave them there (they can go to a charity shop) and the chair because it was far too beautiful to be thrown away. So no, I’m probably constitutionally incapable of chucking everything in a skip. Particularly when today I went through the 78rpm records and claimed one of Amelita Galli-Curci singing Julius Benedict’s La Capinera. Or, a rare recording of one of the greatest singers of all time singing an all but forgotten piece by my great-great-great-grandfather. No, it’s not going in a skip.
So we’ll still be saying goodbye to stuff into 2025. But please, please, not much longer.
This is where I am, although not when I am. Only a fraction of this railway network remains; today I joined some family members in riding the part that’s preserved as a steam heritage line.
I am not from the Isle of Wight. We moved there when I was fourteen; before that I knew it as a tourist; I’ve never lived there as an adult for more than a couple of months while I worked out what else I was meant to be doing. Many things would have to change to make it make sense for me to move back. And yet, I realised this year, Ventnor is the closest thing I have to a hometown. There’s a part of me that would love to hang out permanently in the Exchange, writing novels. Or walking along whichever bits of the coast haven’t fallen into the sea yet. Or both.
Every time I go back, something’s changed, something in the natural landscape or the human one, or both. And every time I go back it still manages to feel like home.
How easy the return to work was. Transition back to work was fine, my brain switched gears beautifully, working part time is challenging but helps me keep a sense of proportion, and the infant has taken to nursery better than I ever dared hope.
(Portsmouth skyline not really relevant, unless you want to talk about the Isle of Wight catamaran as a liminal space or something like that.)
Does this thing make the slightest bit of difference? Who knows. I’m increasingly convinced that all baby sleep interventions do is give the parents something to think about and the illusion of control while the baby gets to the point of sleeping in its own bed/through the night in its own sweet time.
This book deserves a longer post, but I’ve lost the evening to a gallbladder flare-up and am feeling too sore/sleepy/shaky to say much more than that it’s good to see someone with the intellectual clout of bell hooks talking seriously about love – something you don’t often come across outside self-help and theology. There’s a bit of both of those in there, but it’s more than that.
In the introduction to my copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Jeri Johnson draws attention to the way that certain pieces of furniture reappear in different settings through the book – the sort of thing it’s easy to do in film, but which requires considerable skill to pull off in a novel. I’ve been thinking of this a lot as I try to assimilate objects and artworks from my late father’s house into my own. Sometimes it’s been a bit of a challenge – twenty-first century walls are not, on the whole, tall enough to give nineteenth century portraits the breathing room they deserve – but this little prayer fits beautifully next our front door.
In Pa’s house (smaller than this one, and certainly fuller) it was clamped onto the end of a bookcase. It hung in the bathroom at the house before. And at the house before that, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know about the one before that; I was only four. Reading it over and over, it’s sunk into my head. I know it by heart, without ever having deliberately set out to learn it.
In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever read this prayer aloud. I would find it difficult to do the play the man bit seriously; when I pray it in my head, which I quite often do when I need a prayer in the morning and can’t remember how the Collect for Grace begins, I can add a mental footnote (‘you know what I mean’). I remember Pa telling me how when he was a child he thought ‘play the man’ referred to a stage role, and ‘perform them’ followed on from that. That’s got me thinking about how nobody (hardly anybody) really gets what ‘performative’ means (me included), but that’s not really the point here.
In my memory I also see it quoted in the visitors’ book – ‘… laughter and kind faces; let cheerfulness abound with industry…’ in the spiky handwriting of a dear departed friend. I don’t remember a huge amount of industry happening in my childhood home (my mother, I am sure, would beg to differ) but it most definitely had its cheerful moments, many of them associated with that very friend.
The angel – you can’t quite see in the photograph of a photograph – is from Southwell. We visited Southwell this summer, but I didn’t think to look for the angel. Nor did we look at the famous Southwell Leaves, which were in a part of the minster that looked a bit daunting to attempt with a pushchair. We did, however, find a memorial to the victims of the Katyn massacre – something we would most definitely have sought out had we known about it, as my husband’s great-grandfather was among those murdered. It brought us up short; we’d only diverted to Southwell to tick another cathedral off the list and find lunch. A surprise – a stop-and-think-for-a-moment – a remembering – keep it alive – keep them alive.
Remembering is an inexact art. Was that prayer really in the bathroom? My memory tried to put it in the bathroom at my father’s last house, too, but I know I unscrewed it from the bookcase myself. I’m getting confused with prayers for washing of hands. Already the family stories blur and swirl. My brother (happy birthday!) went to look for the house where those portraits must have hung, and now it’s a chip shop. Except that was twelve years ago, assuming he went when I assume he did. We write down what we can remember, and then wonder how long the writing survives. Digital decays fast: I shouldn’t be surprised if that framed prayer outlives this blog. As for the memory that goes with it, that’s another question. In the long view, it doesn’t really matter. If the prayer survives, it will be because somebody likes it, for the sake of its associations (my father, me, Southwell, who knows) or for its own. In the meantime, I see it as I put my shoes and coat on and prepare to leave the house:
Give us to go blithely on our business all this day, and bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.
Kathleen Jowitt 