Gylly and Me

Here’s something from the archives with a beachy theme and variable weather conditions – sort of appropriate for the August this year’s meteorology has served us I thought? It’s a series of snapshots of my relationship with my local beach during my time as an undergraduate several years ago now in Falmouth. Perhaps I should do a sequel some time? I’ve even managed to dig out some actual snapshots to go with. Comments and suggestions welcome as always.

I gravitated towards the beach for reassurance: not so much for the comfort of the familiar, but for the solidarity gleaned from feeling that familiarity with the place was imminent. I looked forward to learning what those rocks were, why there was so much seaweed, and why the sand made the soles of my feet so white that my pasty skin looked tanned in comparison.

Retrospective: 2014 in 14

This seemed to work quite well last year so here’s this year’s shot at a little recap of 2014 in 14 sentences with 14 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.

On a blue Monday that sits like a clear bleb in the dregs of January I stay outdoors all day relishing cloudless skies until the sun goes down off Pennance Point and the stars appear one by one then a hundred, like a reverse rash of freckles in the absence of light.

So many things, I think as they seem to appear from feint to sharp whilst I look for them, to be grateful for.

How light is they sky behind the dark.

The closest I get to Valentine’s day melancholia this year is the realisation as I sit planning my future ventures that I will be financially penalised for travelling alone.

But I do it anyway and before I’ve had time to think myself out of it the journey of 100 thousand words begins with a single step, several missed and cancelled trains and a hotter day in mid March than ought to be expected after such a tempestuous start to the year’s weather.

With the sea to my left and a skylark up in my subconscious to my right I map by eye and foot my progress west with the unfurling of spring: each day another flower open from three days before, bluebells spiking up that, next week and twenty miles further round the coast, will be in bud.

A different landscape every day for thirty days, spanning moods and seasons; from bare branches and blackthorn blossom to foxglove waymarkers signposting the path up through the boulders; umpteen unidentifiable green and cream umbellifers, to seedheads and flowering grasses, meadow and field yellowing under the sun.

A defining moment – at Nanjizal, on the south-western brink of the British mainland in early June – shrouded in waterproofs, hood up and drawn in so that my view was limited to a small oblong peeping out into dripping rain as I traverse yet another granite zawn enjoying it as much as any day striding out in the sunshine.

This is who I am now, one woman on a peninsula: read into that what you will.

Far away in the forest five female tawny owls kewick across a valley filled with trees as far as the eye can see.

Then on a cloudy and otherwise unremarkable September day I clamber the boulders of the border shoreline into Devon and pick a pebble off the beach with Piran’s cross in quartz intruding through the slate.

Better the weight of stones in my pockets from a walk on the beach than the weight of worry on the mind.

But before I know it I’ve forgotten that blue Monday in the depth of winter and that grizzled Tuesday on the cusp of summer as the year closes in again and my mind closes down, drugged by the lack of daylight in my life in more ways than one I find it can be hard to recall how far I’ve come, how much I’ve gained through the weeks and months in this sad lethargy of deprivation.

My first Christmas day in Cornwall, absent from the family madness happening somewhere else in the country – not ‘at home’, but somehow at home in the sense that I was where I should be – I look out at dawn from the window overlooking the bay and I see how light is the sky behind the dark as I watch the midwinter sunrise over Gribbin Head.

Retrospective: 2013 in 13

Here’s 2013 in 13 sentences with 13 photos I’ve taken during the course of the year. I don’t know if it’s true that I spent more time in and around Falmouth than previous years, but it’s felt like it, so I’ve chosen to present a retrospective that reflects that. That’s not to say I didn’t go anywhere else or do anything outside of Falmouth and Cornwall, but I thought it would be appropriate to mark the passing of time focusing on the place I invested the most time in. If you click on the first image you can read alongside the pictures as you scroll through them if you prefer.

It began with rain.

After a brief spell housebound and wiping the mould off the insides of the walls I discovered that winter walking whatever the weather was an unacknowledged joy.

I found a wholesome, brown-bread, good-heartedness from the fallen leaves and mud and blood pumping through my veins that was as uplifting as finding the first patch of snowdrops among the treeroots.

Then in March the winds veered easterly and cold and I got my big green coat down from its peg where it had sat all winter, whilst at work in my new job I was given my pick of light spring clothes to wear against the hibernal chill.

The bluebells were late this year.

And the wildflowers that I’d obsessively observed and identified before the end of March last year held off their tangled millefleur tapestry until it should by all accounts have been nearly summer.

June became July then suddenly I was having dinner on the beach and paddling through an incoming tide as balmy as bathwater, getting a salt line on my sundress and barely needing a cardigan even after sundown as the ground released its heat like summer night storage heaters.

I discovered I was learning my way into the local landscape in such a way that I could almost tell the weather by the colour of the sea, and the creep of the seasons by the colour of the flowers.

And then the tourists came, and the parents came, and the weather was as I remember it the first August I saw Cornwall: blue summer that glints jewel-like in the sun; but to my adjusted eyes tired, drained and dried after the fresh colours, new growth and blossoms of early summer.

I enjoyed it though, the best summer for six years, forgiving it for giving way, somewhat predictably, to an overcast September that stayed warm but drew in the damp and the mists.

Though I missed the ‘mellow fruitfulness’ as it had mostly peaked too soon in the August heat and blackberries bloated to mush with the onset of Autumn.

So I got my wellies back out, now permanently ingrained with mud and salt.

And by the time December had sped by again – as always too-fast-too-busy, a four-week whirl of baking and PVA and glitter and wondering how many times it’s appropriate to buy my sister-in-law a scarf as a present – everybody but myself it seemed was surprised to be skirting weather disasters in order to make it home for Christmas and back again to work two days later before the rails and roads were underwater and storm gave way to storm and another year blew in on a downpour.

Death of a Naturalist

I ate my first blackberries of the summer just a few days ago.

I’ve been eyeing them up in the hedgerow since the beginning of the month when they first started to ink up in small numbers, biding my time, waiting for the sweetness, the ripeness to set in.

Pausing on the path up Pennance hill to let someone pass, I saw them, seven, eight, maybe ten black blackberries on the edge of the field. Any thoughts of saving them for my picnic dessert evaporated as the first one hit my tongue, flooding my head with juices and flavours and purple stain, and re-drawing to the surface lines indelibly printed in the back of my mind:

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: the summer’s blood was in it
[….]

___

I was fourteen and I’d never heard of him. It was the end of the summer term, and having finished all our end of year exams we were in a sort of educational limbo between lower school and GCSEs. (But of course I didn’t know the word limbo yet, nor the ‘cold glitter’ and the spark of deep core grief-sadness I cannot dissociate from it.) So they gave us something to bridge the gap, a poem to look at such as we might get to study in the following school year. It was ‘Blackberry Picking’ by Seamus Heaney.

Shadowlands & Reflections

I wrote this a while ago as a sort of joke 2012 retrospective piece, and initially wasn’t going to post it on here at all. However, in the wake of the popularity of my previous post wherein I visited the location of a BBC adaptation of a classic novel, it seems more appropriate. Forget country houses and nineteenth-century romances and read on if you fancy a trip to Narnia by way of the Great British countryside…

Wrapping myself more tightly in my inadequate layers I attempt to minimise the possible gaps in my clothing through which the wind can creep, and peer over the ship’s railings to see if I can catch a better glimpse of our destination. Cee is standing a little ahead of me on deck keeping a weather eye on the horizon. The first hint that there was something other than sea out there appeared about an hour into the voyage, a smudge on the border between sea and sky that disappeared almost as soon as it had arrived, leaving us in doubt as to whether it had been visible at all.

The Snowmen and other stories

Last Monday it snowed. I thought that might happen if I specifically posted an article about it snowing everywhere else in the UK apart from where I was. I’d like to claim that’s why I did it, but in truth I was so delighted with the sunshine I couldn’t have wished for any other weather there and then. It didn’t snow much, just an inch or two stuck on the roofs, fences and our garden table. A quick walk proved the landscape to be underwhelmingly under-snowed-under, with no frost to rime the trees and little more than a sugar sprinkling left on the fields and farms of the surrounding hills. I came back home and scraped up all the snow in the garden to make the biggest snowman that I possibly could. Ten minutes later he developed a lean and his hat fell off. Before half an hour had gone by he’d broken in the middle.

Under Londerground

Anyone outside of London who has not logged in to Google today may not have realised that it is the 150th anniversary of the London Underground. Then again almost every website I’ve visited has had some sort of Tube related slideshow, top ten, or did you know going on so, I thought, why not jump on the band waggon, or perhaps slip through the air-powered sliding doors of the red and white carriage (the last manual doors on the Tube were phased out as long ago as 1929, didn’t you know) and pull up a long overdue Underground blog post whilst it might be deemed mildly topical.

When writing about place you inevitably end up discussing travel, and whilst roads and railways are by definition very placeless the London Underground has a very definite sense of identity, not least its graphical-visual one exemplified by Harry Beck’s 1933 map which has become a cultural icon both for the Tube itself and for London.