Looking back at 2015 I decided I’d done nothing.
While this was not strictly true I thought it would be interesting to attempt to capture the sense of nothingness in a retrospective piece. Sorry if this seems a little wallowing and indulgent, but it’s January, I’m allowed to wallow. So following the format I used for 2014 and 2013 here’s this year’s shot at a little recap of 2015 in 15 sentences with 15 photos I’ve taken* during the course of the year. If you click on the first image you can read the text alongside the pictures as you scroll through if you prefer.
I began 2015 with a wintery stomp on an unseasonably warm but predictably dull day where the river below Trelissick was a swampy teal under a pewter sky: nothing remarkable, a fitting start, I suppose, for a year in which looking back I thought I did nothing.
Then, coming out of the supermarket in the morning one day before work I caught a sound which cast my glance skyward as I filtered from the sounds of the everyday something to make me look up: two ravens cronking high high up above Mabe.
The extraordinary above the mundane, the something in the nothing.
Whilst reading The Neverending Story in my lunchbreaks I remembered how of all the movie villains of childhood – the witches, the bad kings, the Emperor, the skeksis – none was more to be feared than The Nothing; even as a child I knew who the real enemy was.
We had summer in spring.
I saw deer with new antlers still in velveteen, in the dappled shade of trees hemmed with the green of April’s bud.
I saw the floating ghosts of two barn owls hunting back and forth over a field on a summer’s night, near invisible but for the moonlight reflecting off their wings.
You can see ‘nothing’ at night for the dark, after all.
I saw damsels and dragons in the September sun: living jewellery whose fragile aerial lives last days, weeks.
I saw a heron at the beach like he was on holiday for the day.
I saw goldfinches fiddling in the undergrowth opposite the railway platform whilst I was nothing waiting for a train.
And I saw black headed gulls in winter plumage squealing on Holy Brook, a City Centre sound misplaced from a winter’s low tide back home.
A thinnest sickle moon hung in the morning sky of the new year; the next night its notable absence was another remarkable nothing.
The sun sets.
And the sun rises.
*All images taken during 2015 by myself in Cornwall, Berkshire and Dorset, UK – except the shot of the cave at Holywell which taken by Dave Nobab (that’s me walking in the middle)
Like your new blog twin And us looking like twins in the cave xxx
Kind regards
>
New year’s resolution – write more blogs, stop doing nothing!
This is a lovely retrospective. I would hardly say you do nothing.
That was kind of it, I had one of those moments where I went ‘Arg! an entire year’s over and I’ve done nothing with it!’ but then sometimes I think doing ‘nothing remarkable’ is still as important as doing the big things and having great achievements to look back on and, like you say, it’s not like I – or any of us – actually do NOTHING (I hope), and that’s what I was trying to reassure myself!
Oh, wow. If doing nothing can let you create such lovely poetry as that, I would say it is worth it.
Thank you so much – feeling better about not feeling so productive or creative now after so many kind comments!
I’m glad. 😀 Really happy to have found your blog.
I had to come and find you and I’m so glad I did!
In our house, ever since the girls were toddlers, the most frightening word we could hear was ‘nothing’ – as in ‘I haven’t really been doing something incredibly naughty…’ – it’s now become a code word for ‘something, but I’m not telling you’
Ha ha, yes – also at school when we were distracted/messing about the teacher would say
‘[insert name here]what are you doing!?’
‘Nothing!’
‘Exactly – now get on with some work’