Tag: december reflections 16

December Reflections 9: best day of 2016

kathleenjowittLeave a comment

dscf1508

On my birthday I found a labyrinth in the shape of a diplodocus.

It was a great birthday anyway. I was staying with my family on the Isle of Wight. We visited my favourite second-hand bookshop. There was a picnic on the beach, with stuffed vine leaves and huge chocolate cookies, and my youngest brother bought everyone ice creams. I opened my birthday presents on the beach, and one of them was a book about the labyrinths in the London Underground.

Then we walked up from the beach to look for lizards at La Falaise car park. We found a lizard, and then, a little further up the cliff, we found a lizard of another sort. I’d had fossils and spirals on the brain all year – and what’s a labyrinth but a very particular sort of spiral? And moreover, because of the way that one follows the path of a labyrinth into the centre, and then follows it back out again, it’s a very appropriate thing for a birthday. You can let the last year go on the way in, and welcome the next one on the way out.

Later, my oldest brother treated us to tapas; and we rounded off the day with pink lychee liqueur. It was a fabulous birthday.

December Reflections 8: on the ground

kathleenjowittLeave a comment

dscf1919

On the ground. Grounded. Down to earth with a bump.

This is new ground, or, rather, what is on top of the ground hasn’t been there long. Pavement and fallen leaves; much of the ground in London looks like this at the moment. It all feels a bit artificial: neat, and new, and even the trees have been put there by somebody.

It’s Thursday, and things are difficult again. It’s dark when I get up now, and it’s dark when I leave work, and in between it’s grey. I pour music into my ears and light into my eyes, and it helps a little bit, but not enough, and I’ve got to do it all again tomorrow. I’m taking comfort in the fact that, for the moment at least, I retain enough of a sense of humour to appreciate ‘Greenleaf 1’.

December Reflections 7: five things about me

kathleenjowittLeave a comment

dscf1915

Five people I am:

  1. the Fairy Godmother. I’ve been the Fairy Godmother on and off for years, mostly at work. She’s the one who knows the answers, the one who gets things done on surprisingly limited resources.
  2. the Queen of Hearts. This is a very new persona and I’m still finding my way into being her. She’s the one who lives by love and not by guilt; she’s the one who’s managed to find a balance between living with integrity and not burning out.
  3. Black Pen and Red Pen, Writing and Editing, go hand in hand. I love them both and I’m counting them as one.
  4. the Pilgrim. Always on the way to somewhere, or looking at a map, working out where the next somewhere will be.
  5. the one who looks fantastic in hats, and bright red, and bright red hats, and knows it, and also doesn’t care what anybody else thinks.

December Reflections 6: in the air

kathleenjowittLeave a comment

dscf1912

What’s in the air? Moisture. Cold mist rising from the river and the ground in the morning; warmer, damp fog suffused with orange light from the street lamps at night. It’s colder this year than it has been since we moved to Cambridge.

What’s in the air? Music. This evening we sang You’ll Never Walk Alone in memory of Eric Roberts, and the sound went up to all the high corners and floated back to us. It was the right song at the right moment.

What’s in the air? Uncertainty. I am waiting for X to be resolved before I can do Y. X stands for all sorts of things, and so does Y. This sounds familiar. All last year we were waiting for votes to happen so we knew what was going to happen next. That sounds familiar, too. Now we’re waiting to see what will happen after some more votes. It’s all up in the air.

Having said that, in 2016 I did get fed up with waiting for other people to make things happen. I did make some things happen myself. In 2017 I might do the same again. Or – because some of the things I’m thinking about feel slightly terrifying and too huge to fit into a year – I might set some things up to make some things happen a little bit further down the line. Without waiting for anybody to vote on anything.

December Reflections 5: best book of 2016

kathleenjowitt3 Comments

dscf1907

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.

December Reflections 4: circles

kathleenjowittLeave a comment

dscf1904

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.

December Reflections 3: favourite photo of 2016

kathleenjowittLeave a comment

dscf0465

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.

December Reflections 2: light

kathleenjowittLeave a comment

dscf1881

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.

December Reflections 1: on the table

kathleenjowittLeave a comment

dscf1874

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.