Clarty dazzling
and better even after three drenchings for being a new month
So I’m taking today’s foul weather as a sign of an early Spring. As Celtic folklore would wish. And since bright weather did not shine rays on us here on this first February day, and the Cailleach, she has not arrived to stretch out our winter any longer, I have lit a small candle. Leaning in towards this liminal time to smell scented light next to my clicking keyboard hands. With limp, still wet hair laying cold against the nape of my neck. I’m scraping the slippery tangle up off skin and into a knot now. And with an excited shiver.
January even sounds like the longest month when we speak its syllables aloud. Although by literal character count with nine letters the longest month in name is September, January with only seven letters seems somehow to extend even further and in a visceral felt sense. Is it the sheer number of times we’ve absorbed it, the voiced moan of the word over our lifetimes perhaps? Or are we simply resistant to any low that comes behind the sparkle of a high? The dark long shadow cast by any bright thing?
Imbolc doesn’t sound great but Imbolc is what today is. A mid point between winter solstice and spring equinox, neither of which I knew particularly much about in earlier decades but have become belatedly a bit more aware of. The word stem is ancient - i mbolg in old Irish translation in the belly - and the sound evokes a very guttural, involuntary noise that you might make if your digestion were really upset.
But nonetheless, Imbolc I’ll take you. To escape the four hundred and twelveteen damp days of drear that are January. Imbolc, you’ll meet with no resistance here from me.
Our house sits just below road level so, the first hint of the day’s weather all last month was often the intermittent swiiieeeeeysh sound of passing cars hitting my ears in my bed. This morning, new month but not new noise; same same swiiieeeeeyshing.
Dragging myself out three times for three separate drenchings today, I noticed how none of these soddened states felt not quite as bone cold uncomfortable as the others so far this year have done up until this point. Today, there was slightly more jaunt and lightness in being weighed down by so much water.
We’ve danced through another dazzling doorway on the calendar and also in spirit I think. And trudging through clarty mud slicks on the climb up the hill out back of our house after coffee with the dog, I was struck by a sense of being uplifted. By the heft of saturated woodland around me and all the intersecting forces at play within it.
A thick, passively slushed weave of wafery, leaf bronzes pushing down and blanketing the unseen of below. Vivid green shoots spiking upwards through gaps; such upright spears of intention. The delicate, whimsical dangle of catkins offering tender, muted green quiver and promise; knobbly tree gherkins for the warblers, wood pigeon and finches to snack upon.
Catkin goes with nutkin in my mind. Nutkin which I don’t think is a thing beyond the notorious mischief-making squirrel who lost his bushy balancer.
Incidentally, I got thoroughly lake water sodden recently in the very place Beatrix Potter spent ten summer stays and where she wrote that particular story.
Icy wet through followed by sauna scorching, a brilliantly thrilling pairing of sensations. The Lingholm Estate also features the walled kitchen garden which inspired Beatrix to write the other kind of tale about the rabbit in the blue coat. If you ever find yourself near Keswick, definitely pay a visit. It’s lakeland glorious all year round plus Laura’s sauna.
Today even the dog seemed lighter in mood. On our second soaking, he got thoroughly buzzed zig-zagging across the stream banks loudly yelping. Some call this behaviour the zoomies; I just looked up zoomies as it’s not an expression I understood before now and only laughed along at. Turns out there’s an alternative expression, informative though not perhaps quite so catchy; FRAP stands for frenetic random activity period. Here’s a video of him with the FRAPS and me snickering along. He’s four and I’m still amused each time he does this.
Two wet turns around the field with Mr FRAPs and a cycling soaking with my eldest daughter pedalling for a lunch reward have generated a large swell of lumpen clothing and now the washing machine has a belly full. A sloppy stew of mud-spattered garments are fermenting like a giant cloth kombucha.
The laundry can wait; tomorrow’s light is coming, I’ll sort it then.
It’s occurring to me as I type this, think I sometimes get the FRAPs too ...
Other things
stuff I’ve recently enjoyed …
Being proxy thrilled by the daily bracing cold water immersions taking place in Yorkshire. Amy Liptrot has been buzzing and high on her own supply throughout and bearing witness to this on her insta stories has felt exhilarating. I especially connected to the time lapse clips of her striding into the submerge, cutting breast stroke circles to reemerge all glossy. They remind me how fast my mind moves negotiating a dark body of water against skin.
Vacuuming with the lights off. During dark unlit hours of January days, this domestic chore becomes a study and a fascination of fluff. The Shark™️ has actual headlights, something I initially remember ridiculing but have come to get off on. Watching white tumbleweeds of dog dander - he is basically a canine dandelion clock - being disappeared within a narrow, dramatically bar lit section of floor whilst loud dance tracks blast through inky air into ears. Premium winter kicks. I recommend. Quirky but satisfying. Did you think it was going to be a sexual thing? Ha.
Adolescence. I’m not good at trending so haven’t yet succumbed to cinematic Hamnet but did finally tune in to episode one of the disturbing psychological drama and promptly didn’t barely blink until the end. I found myself profoundly moved and effected by the performances and noticed that no one single character was villainized. A powerful exploration of not only the incel threat but also male violence and how this plays out in seemingly ordinary families.
What is sanity and what is madness. I read this piece by Anna Wharton and reflected on it all day afterwards. Externalisers V. Internalisers; when I first learned of this categorisation I genuinely remember feeling a sudden whoosh of oxygen into the furnace within the boiler room of my understanding of things! It is such a helpful lens through which to view and recognise behaviour patterns.
I skipped back to read it four times in total Anna Wharton and that Richard Scarry illustration?! The most brilliant image to depict our inner life challenges and the multiplicity of control centres which somehow have to communicate, connect, collaborate and steer us onwards across such at times turbulent, angry, crashing oceans.
And also, when it comes to the word insane, there is I think grounds oftentimes to reinterpret that little in- prefix to describe within rather than not and to read and understand the word insane as meaning healthy within rather than not healthy. I can think of many occasions in my own experience where it made complete sense to flip this meaning given the circumstances and the waves.
Always Home, always Homesick, by Hannah Kent
Reading a whole book between a pair of sunsets last weekend, that is not a normal thing for me to do. I’m such a slow reader and sometimes think this down to only having only one eye which can properly focus and see. Muscle fatigue must, I suppose, play a role especially deep into midlife.
But this book grabbed and held me, I was so taken with the stories and foretelling within the pages of this hardback. An Australian teenager, Hannah, in all her intrepid boldness, arrives in Iceland to spend an immersive year being hosted by Icelandic families in a remote northern coastal town. She’s battered by the elements and by elements within the community. She also finds welcome and acceptance in other people and spaces during her stay. Years later, she leaves Australia again and returns to Iceland and to excavate a story which had long haunted her, in doing so uncovering the truth of young woman named Agnes‘s lived experience and ensuring her fullest remembrance in death beyond that of a witch archetype. Agnes was the last woman to be executed (by beheading) in Iceland.
Within the text at one point is the beautifully translated Icelandic adage;
Seldom is the estuary what the river source dreams of.
Isn’t that a wonderful saying? I’ve written down these words on a post it.
Always Home, always Homesick is a book which hauled me back to teenage overseas adventures of my own. Not in Iceland although that is a rock which calls like a siren from the icy north and one day I would love to visit. But to a country which required that I too learn a language quickly to survive and to spend huge amounts of time alone and feel some of the initial loneliness that Hannah describes.
Reading it reminded me of the joyous sensation that distills from a prolonged overseas experience like that. Not from a mere holiday in a place, that’s an eye blink, but from a rooted settling into a new postal address, an almost new skin and identity. A day in, day out lived experience in a foreign place, where every activity must be learned afresh and which years later calls you to question, as Hannah does, whether you’re more yourself in that land than you are in your native land.
Otherings
stuff I’ve recently endured …
My daughter. She’s at it again berating me from across the kitchen counter. Pulling rank and calling my cooking skank. Bemoaning the relentless move and replace of objects necessary to clear space enough to cook. I laugh along with and humour her and she roasts me back with her hands clagged in brown crabmeat gesticulating. A pair of irate snappy claws, dissing my storage solutions. Fuck, but does it ever smell good what she’s got sizzling in the pan over there and yes, yes, she does indeed have a point about the clutter. And yes I do wish there was more negative space. and that I guarded it better. But here we are. And having her living here is such an unexpected pleasure and it won’t last much longer and that is how it should be but oh will I bloody miss her humour. And her criticisms are all constructive, well-founded and also wielded with supreme wit and she is a complete joy to share a home with and aren’t I the lucky one to have had her company all this time.
No skin on my middle right finger from the knuckle to the nail for five excruciating weeks. After an incident with a shopping trolley in a car park which should never have happened. But nine year old me made herself known suddenly and impulses. I can attest to there being a whole lot of nerve endings within the yellow, fatty meat of a finger exposed to the elements. And I’m checking my privilege in writing these words with a running water tap only metres away and in the warmth of a brick house. During a today scroll I saw a tiny Gazan child bandaged neck to ankles after blast injuries and quivering from the agony of her pain. My own morsel of skin so minuscule in contrast to her whole body horror. I donated something here.
Lovely writing Sarah as always. Such a gift to have this delight of a window into your moments ✨