2015 in 15: Nothing Remarkable

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’m doing 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 in the morning sky of the new year; the next night its notable absence another remarkable nothing.

The sun sets.

And the sun rises.

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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.

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.