Photo by Wallace Bentt on Unsplash

High summer in Herefordshire, and the land is holding its breath. The verges have gone lion-coloured, the fields were cut early and no aftermath has followed, the clay in the gate-gaps has opened into crazy-paving, and the Wye is running so low that it has started to show its bones — gravel shoals where there is usually a river. Eight areas of England are now officially in “prolonged dry weather”, the polite phrase for the stage before drought, and central England is in its longest run of dry days since 1995. It is a hard season to love and an extraordinary one to look at — because a dry year takes things away from the land, and everything it takes away discloses something. All three of this week’s finds know that.

1. A poem to enjoy — Alice Oswald, “Dunt: A Poem for a Dried-up River” — Oswald took as her starting point a small Roman carving of a water nymph found in Gloucestershire, and set her the impossible task the title announces: to summon a river — the little Dunt — out of dry limestone. The poem proceeds by failure; again and again the nymph tries and the instruction comes back to try again, and the river arrives, when it arrives at all, as barely a trickle in a ditch. It won the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2007, and it reads this month like reportage.

2. Art work of the week — Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking (1967), Tate — In June 1967 a 22-year-old art student took a train out of Waterloo, got off in the fields, and walked back and forth in a straight line until the pressed grass caught the light. Then he photographed it and went home. That is the entire work, and it changed sculpture: the land itself as the recording surface, a mark made of nothing but repeated attention. I have thought about it all week, because a dry summer turns the whole country into Long’s field. The ground has stopped forgiving. Every footpath is scorched into the grass; every desire line across the park is written in brown; and from the air, the parch marks are coming up — Roman foundations, lost gardens, filled-in moats, ghosting through the stubble as the grass above them starves first. The land in drought remembers everything that was ever done to it. Long’s line lasted a few days and survives only as a photograph; what the drought is showing us has waited under the fields for two thousand years for a summer dry enough to be seen in.

3. Music I sat with this week — Gustav Holst, Egdon Heath: Homage to Hardy (1927) — Holst walked Hardy’s Dorset before writing this, and put on the score a sentence from The Return of the Native describing the heath itself: a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature — neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly … but, like man, slighted and enduring. The music is as dry as the ground it honours — a slow tread of muted strings and lonely brass, no pastoral sweetness anywhere, fourteen minutes of land that owes you nothing. Hardy died on 11 January 1928, three weeks before the premiere in New York on 12 February; a passage from the novel was read aloud in his memory before the orchestra played, and Holst conducted the British premiere the next day in Cheltenham, the town where he was born. The public never warmed to it; Holst maintained to the end that it was the best thing he ever wrote. This is the season to hear why. It is not music about the land at its loveliest. It is music about the land when everything easy has been taken away — slighted and enduring — and it sounds, this month, like the fields look.

A question for you — what has the dry weather uncovered where you are? The ghost of an old path across the lawn, the pond’s true floor, a river showing its gravel, a mark in a field you’d never noticed? Reply and tell me — I read every one.

A thought from me — a poet praying for rain at the root, a walker whose art existed because grass remembers pressure, a composer honouring ground that endures being slighted. What the three share is a hard kind of respect: none of them asks the land to be lovely. A dry year is the landscape’s via negativa — it tells you what was always there by taking away what usually hides it. The river shows its bed, the field shows its Roman bones, the poem shows the prayer under the argument. The toll is real, and I don’t romanticise it: the fish are struggling and the farmers are counting the cost. But if attention is the one form of keeping we’re allowed, then this is a summer that rewards it strangely well. Look at the land while it is telling the truth. And hope, with Hopkins, for rain.

Adam

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For a while now I have kept a second publication, a few streets over from this one. It is called The Cutting Room, and its business is the reach that does not hold — specifically, the failure of poems to reach what they want to say. Each week I put a draft on the slab, almost always one of my own, name the exact mode by which it fails, and make the cut. Readers who found me there know nothing of this place. Readers who found me here may not know that place exists at all. I have kept the two apart for these first months, and I have started to suspect that the keeping-apart was itself a small concealment — the very thing I diagnose in poems most weeks, practised quietly on my own working life.

A poem reaches for depth and produces the appearance of depth without arriving at the thing itself. There is the abstraction reaching — the draft that writes grief where it should have shown the cornflakes underfoot. There is the easy resolution, the closing line that broadens into a proverb so the poem can feel finished without having earned the finishing. There is the borrowed cadence, someone else’s music carrying lines that have no pulse of their own. And there is the one I fear most, because it is almost impossible to catch from the inside: the buried subject — the poem that is secretly about something the writer has not admitted to himself, and so writes around, fluently, at length, and never towards.

A few weeks ago, in that other publication, I changed the question I ask a poem. Not what is wrong with this, but what was it reaching for, and where did the reach fall short. I owe the reframe to Glyn Maxwell, who retires what is wrong with you in favour of what happened to you, and insists all the while that this is no softening. The standard does not move. What moves is that you read the poem as a creature reaching for its life in the little time it has, rather than as a defendant with a case to answer.

What I did not say, when I made that turn public over there, is where I had first learned to need it. I learned it here. I learned it in the years this publication is named for — the solitude I keep insisting is a place you pass through rather than a position you take up on a hill. The truth is duller and harder than the masthead. For a stretch of years I was a man reading his own life the way an anxious editor reads a poem: noting, framing, standing at the correct distance, declining to enter.

The easy resolution. The account I gave of a marriage ending was clean, and had a moral, and let me feel the chapter closed. It broadened, in its last line, into something that sounded like wisdom. It was a proverb. A proverb is what you reach for when you cannot yet bear the particular, and it lets the poem — or the year — feel finished without having been lived through. I had ended on the wrong line. The repair, in a poem, is nearly always the same: cut the consolation, and sit with the plainer thing underneath it.

The speaker contemplating instead of acting. This is a failure mode I can name in four seconds in a stranger’s draft — the poem whose speaker stands at the window and observes, beautifully, and never once crosses the room. I did not see, for a long time, that I had built a life in that grammar. I watched. I described. I was excellent company at the window. The poem does not come alive until the speaker moves, and neither, it turns out, does the man.

The buried subject. The hardest, here as on the page. For years I wrote around a thing rather than towards it — around the shape of a life I had not yet let myself want, the making of a home, the people who stayed when they had every reason not to, a new house with no memory of its own that I walked into carrying all the memory it was ever going to have. I was fluent. Fluency is how the buried subject hides. The poem that will not arrive is usually the one still circling the thing it most needs to say.

Here is the principle both publications are actually built on, stated once and then left to do its work.

Behind the whole taxonomy sits a single conviction I drew from Heidegger’s Aletheia and named, years ago, in the title of an as yet unpublished collection, What Storms Disclose. Bad poetry conceals; good poetry discloses. That is the sentence The Cutting Room exists to enforce. What I had not let myself notice is that it is not a sentence about poems. It is a sentence about attention.

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A life lived with attention discloses. The knife I take to a failing draft and the attention I have had, slowly and late, to bring to a failing stretch of my own years are not cousins. They are the same instrument. I only ever owned one.

That is why the two publications are, from today, openly the same room. The Cutting Room is where I turn the practice on the draft: the named failure, the reversible cut, the line I protect at all costs. Beyond Solitude is where I turn it on the ground under the window — landscape, inheritance, the small mechanics of a life being remade in a country that has always been between two others. Different objects. One reading. If you came for the craft and you have ever suspected that the way you revise is the way you live, the door to the other room is open. If you came for the essays and you have ever wanted to see the method with its sleeves rolled up, likewise.

I am not going to tell you the reading is comfortable. It was not, on the page or off it. But it is the only one I have found that treats the thing in front of you — the draft, the year, the house with no memory — as a creature reaching for its life, and asks the single useful question there is to ask of anything still reaching.

Not what is wrong with it.

What it was reaching for, and how to clear the way.

— Adam

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Photo by Charlotte Fosdike on Unsplash

There is a kind of solitude you choose, and I have written about it before — the room, the closed door, the good hour the world is asked, politely, to wait for. You go in on purpose. You come back up with something. This essay is not about that kind. It is about the other kind, the kind nobody chooses, that arrives without asking and finds you unequal to it.

We were high on a mountain, the two of us, a long way up and a long way from anywhere. I will not say which mountain. It had been an ordinary day of walking — the good tiredness in the legs, the light going long across the tops — and then it was not an ordinary day at all. My friend became unwell. It happened quickly, the way these things apparently happen, wrongly and all at once, and within a few minutes the person I had been talking to was unconscious on the ground.

I knelt over them. I said their name. I did the small useless things the body does when it has run ahead of its knowledge — I checked for breath, I tried to rouse them, I looked up and around for anyone at all. There was no phone signal. There was no other walker on the path, no farmhouse, no moving speck on any slope the eye could reach. I was, in the plainest sense of the word, alone. And so, in a different and far more frightening sense, was the person lying in front of me.

I have grown up, like most people raised on the English-speaking side of things, on a quiet gospel of self-reliance without ever having to name it. Emerson wrote the hymn to it in 18411. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. It is a magnificent essay and I have loved it for most of my life — the sufficiency of the single self, the refusal to live after the world’s opinion, the man who “in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” That last line is the one I would have said I believed. Independence carried intact through any company. The self as a thing that is, at bottom, enough.

On the mountain I found its floor.

Because the urge to help was total, and it was overpowered — completely, humiliatingly — by the depth of my own ignorance. I did not know what was wrong. I did not know what to do. Wanting to save someone and being able to save someone are two different countries, and I stood at that moment on the wrong side of the border with no way across. This is a species of solitude I had not catalogued before. Not the well you lower a bucket into and haul something up from. Not solitude as discipline, or vocation, or the difficult good Rilke meant2. This was solitude as insufficiency — the condition of being the only one there and knowing, with total clarity, that you are not enough.

And then the thing I keep turning over. My friend came back — not by my hand, not through any competence of mine, but on their own. Consciousness returned the way weather returns over a ridge, and with it, slowly, speech. And the first thing they did, still grey, still barely there, was to direct their own rescue: to tell me where the medicine was, and what it was, and what I should do with it. The most self-reliant act I witnessed on that mountain was performed by the person who had just been unconscious on the grass.

Except that it was not self-reliance at all, and this is the whole of what I brought back down. It was two people, each supplying exactly what the other lacked. Their knowledge and my hands. My presence and their instructions. Neither of us, alone, was equal to that afternoon. Together, and only together, we were. Emerson’s iron string is real — I do not want to sound as though the mountain taught me to distrust myself. But it taught me that the string is strung between two posts, and that a self held up as a closed and sufficient system is a myth the flat ground lets you believe and the high ground takes away.

If I reach for one word for it, I reach — as I do when I’m stuck — for Heidegger, and for being-with: the idea that we are never first alone and then, secondarily, joined to others, but are woven in with them from the start, so deeply that we mostly forget it3. The emergency did not create the bond between us. It disclosed one that the daily fiction of self-sufficiency had let me mislay. I had thought I was a man who could look after himself on a hill. What I actually was, it turned out, was one half of the only unit that could get us both down.

And down we went. Slowly, very slowly, testing each step, one of us watching the other for the smallest sign of the thing coming back. It took a long time. The light I had admired earlier went out of the tops while we were still on them.

Down in the valley, with my friend recovered enough to sit and drink something warm, we were able to talk about what had happened — to lay it out between us and turn it over, the way you can only do once the danger has become a story. Time went on passing, and both of us were still in it. That is the sentence I keep. Both of us, still in it. The room upstairs I go into to work, I go into on purpose and I come out of when the hour is done; that solitude is a door I open and close. This other solitude did not knock. It came for me, and what it showed me, before it dissolved, was its own dissolution — that the self runs out, that there is a floor under self-reliance, and that finding it is not a failure of the self but the plain shape of a life lived among the people who happen, on the day it matters, to be standing next to you.

I opened the door on the mountain the way you open any door: by discovering, hard, that there was one. Then I went back out into the rest of it — down into the valley, into the warm room, into the conversation — where the rest of it, as it turns out, is other people.

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Half-way up the Langdale Pikes, Adam Cairns, 8th July, 2026

I am writing this from the Lake District, a few days of borrowed time among the fells — the bracken high and greening over, the becks still loud after June’s rain, the light not properly gone until well past ten and the valley going that deep slate-blue that isn’t quite dark. Walk out late enough, away from the village, and the sky here does the thing it can no longer do over most of England: it fills, edge to edge, with stars. Which is roughly how this fortnight’s three arranged themselves — a poet, a painter and a composer, each caught in the act of looking up, and each finding that to be alone under that much sky is not at all the same as being lonely.

1. A poem to enjoy — William Wordsworth, “A Night-Piece” (1798) — You cannot walk these fells with a book in your pocket and not have it be Wordsworth’s; he is the presiding spirit of the whole district. This poem is the one I always remember on a dark-sky night. A “pensive traveller” is treading a “lonesome path” with his “unobserving eye / Bent earthwards” — head down, going nowhere in particular — when the cloud splits and “above his head he sees / The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens,” the “multitudes of stars” wheeling in their vault. Nothing is added to the man; something is simply uncovered above him, and it changes the walk. It is the plainest account I know of what solitude is actually for: not withdrawal, but the clearing of the eye until more of the world can get in.

2. Art work of the week — Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819–20), Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden — Two figures stand with their backs to us at the edge of a wood, the one leaning on the other, watching a thin crescent moon and, just trailing it, the evening star. Friedrich paints them from behind on purpose, so that we stand where they stand and look where they look. It is the exact companion to the Wordsworth: solitude, but shared — two people alone together under an enormous sky, which is perhaps the truest picture of this publication’s title I have yet found. The older figure is thought to be Friedrich himself; the younger, his pupil August Heinrich, dead at twenty-eight only two years after it was painted. Even the stars here are kept company.

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3. Music to sit with — Max Richter, “To the Stars,” from the Ad Astra soundtrack (2019) — Richter wrote the score for James Gray’s film about a man who travels to the outer edge of the solar system in search of his lost father — about the loneliest journey the movies have imagined in years — and “To the Stars” is its opening breath: slow strings, a wash of electronics, and, woven into the fabric of it, actual signals transmitted home by the Voyager probes still drifting past the planets since the 1970s. It is the same gesture as the poem and the painting, scaled up to the cosmos: the small self under the vast dark, and the discovery that the dark is not empty but full of signal. Put it on late, with the lights off. Per aspera ad astra — through hardship to the stars.

A question for you — when did you last stand somewhere dark enough to see the whole sky? Not a glimpse between streetlights, but the real vault, stars down to the horizon. Where were you, and what did it do to you? Reply and tell me — I read every one.

A thought from me — the name of this publication is Beyond Solitude, and I have spent time this week walking these fells, trying to say what the beyond is. I think these three have said it for me. Wordsworth’s traveller, Friedrich’s two friends, Richter’s voyager: each is as alone as a person can be, and each finds that looking up is not an escape from the solitude but the far side of it — the point where being by yourself opens out into being among everything. Solitude isn’t the opposite of connection. Entered properly, in a quiet enough place, it is the way in.

— Adam

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Oxeye daisies in the field outside my window - Adam Cairns, 2026

There is a quality to the heat this summer that I have started, against my better judgement, to read as mood. It isn’t the heat of a good July — the kind that dries the hay and fills the orchard with wasps and sends everyone, sensibly, into the shade by two. It is a heavier thing than that. It sits on the fields the way a bird sits on a clutch of eggs: close, patient, unwilling to be moved. My garden is barely a garden yet — a square of new turf laid last autumn, the soil under it still builder’s soil, a blank green canvas I have not begun to make anything of. But it looks out onto fields, and between the lawn and the farmland there is a strip of wildflower meadow, and even in this heat the meadow is doing what the meadow does: oxeye daisies gone slightly papery at the edges, vetch scrambling through the grass, a dozen things I am still learning the names of, all of it loud with something at every hour of the day. Beyond it the ground under the far hedge has gone the colour of ash. The buzzards still work the field margins in the long evenings, but low, and without much conviction, as if even they can feel the thermals have turned against them.

To brood is to sit on eggs and keep them warm until something living comes out of them. It is also what we do with a worry that will not leave — we brood on it, we turn it over, we let it heat. The word carries both, and I have caught myself this summer thinking the two meanings have quietly fused. The planet is brooding. It is warmer than it should be, held at a temperature it did not choose, by us; and what is incubating under all that patient heat is not, any longer, only life. It is something closer to grief.

I am wary of writing sentences like that. The register of the ruined planet is a register I distrust, in myself most of all — it flatters the writer, it makes weather into portent, it borrows a grandeur that belongs to the thing and not to the person describing it. So let me stay with the particular, which is the only ground I trust. The papery daisies. The vetch. A blackbird panting in the shade of the fence with its beak open, doing the only thing it knows to do about a heat it has no name for. These are small facts, and they are true, and they are connected to each other and to a hundred thousand things I cannot see, by a web so fine and so total that we have only lately, and only partially, learned to notice it is there at all.

That is the thing that stays with me. Not the heat itself, but what the heat reveals: that nothing out there is alone. The oxeye depends on the hoverfly and the hoverfly on the aphid; the swift depends on the column of insects that rises off the warm grass at dusk, and the insects on the damp the drought is taking away; the oak in the far hedge feeds the jay and the jay plants the oak, and under all of it the mycelium moves sugar and warning from root to root in a traffic we are only beginning to eavesdrop on. It is relation all the way down. That meadow is not a patch of separate flowers; it is a conversation, and an old one. To stand at my new fence in the heat and look at it properly is to understand that solitude, out there, is not the human condition or any condition at all. It is simply not on offer. Everything is holding hands with everything else.

Everything, that is, except us — and here I have to be careful again, because it isn’t that we stand outside the web. We don’t. We are in it up to the neck; we eat it and drink it and breathe it. It is that we are the one strand of the web that can see the whole of it, hold a picture of it in mind, grasp what it costs to pull a thread — and pull the thread anyway, out of wastefulness, out of appetite, out of a kind of species-wide capriciousness that treats the whole intricate apparatus as a backdrop to our own weather. We are the only creature that could choose, and mostly we choose the way you choose to leave a light on in an empty room: not out of malice, out of not-quite-attending. That is the part that keeps me up in the heat. Not villainy. Inattention, at a planetary scale.

I came to this house last autumn, out of an older and harder-worn one — the house where a marriage ended, where the worst of the dark years were sat through, where I had also, in the slow way these things happen, tried to build a life among people I hadn’t chosen and a town I didn’t yet know. Some of that took: a climate group I gave a couple of years to, a handful of good people, the hard yards of arriving somewhere as a stranger and asking to be let in. I left the group behind with the house. What I did not leave behind was a thing one of the older men there said to me once, almost in passing, about the curlew — that a bird can go from common to gone inside a single working life, and that the last of them do not know they are the last. They simply call across a field, in spring, and wait, and nothing calls back.

That is the solitude I did not have a name for until this summer. Not the solitude a person enters on purpose and leaves in the afternoon to go and be among people — the door, not the wall, that this whole newsletter has been trying to describe. The curlew’s is a different order of thing. To be the last of a kind, calling into a field that has forgotten how to answer, is the only true solitude there is, because there is nothing on the other side of it to pass through into. Extinction is solitude with no morning after it. And it is precisely that — the final, unpassable version of the thing I have spent two years insisting is only ever temporary — that we are, uniquely and at speed, manufacturing for the curlew and the lapwing and the eel and the swift and a long, lengthening list of our neighbours on this warm rock, most of whom we will never trouble to learn the names of.

Looking down onto Ledbury - Adam Cairns, 2026

The move itself was quieter and gladder than any move I’ve made. I had been coming to Ledbury for years before I lived in it — for the poetry, mostly, and the poets, who were friends before they were neighbours — so that arriving to stay felt less like landing among strangers than like finally admitting where I already belonged. It is an odd, undramatic feeling, belonging. It arrives without ceremony. But I notice it more each week, and I notice it most standing at this fence, which is perhaps why the heat and the meadow have got so thoroughly mixed up in my mind with the question of home. I have found, late, a place I want to keep. And I have found it just in time to understand that keeping it means keeping more than the house.

I don’t know how to end an essay like this without lying in one of two directions — either into despair, which is just brooding with the lid down, or into the brisk false comfort of ten things you can do before Friday. Neither is honest, and neither is the practice this newsletter has been feeling its way toward. The practice is smaller and harder than both. It is attention: the willingness to stay with what is in front of you and not look away — the ash-coloured ground, the panting blackbird, the field that used to hold a bird it no longer holds. It is the same discipline poetry asks for, the refusal to let the thing become a symbol of something more flattering, and it turns out to be a moral discipline as much as an aesthetic one. You cannot care for what you have not first consented to notice. The web becomes visible only to the attention that slows down enough to see it, and it is only once it is visible that leaving the light on in the empty room starts to feel like the choice it always was.

So I look at the blank green square that is my garden, and for the first time I am glad it is blank. A patch of new turf and nothing else is not an absence; it is an invitation. I can let a corner of it go feral and loud. I can plant it toward the meadow rather than fence the meadow out. I can put a swift box under the new eaves for birds that may or may not find it. None of it is equal to the size of the problem. All of it is a way of making a home that keeps faith with the web it sits inside, rather than one that merely takes its view and shuts the gate.

This evening the heat has come off the day at last, the fields going blue and soft at the edges, the oxeye daisies turning grey and then invisible in the dusk. High up, later than I expected, there were swifts — not many, a loose handful, screaming round the new roofs the way they have every July of my life. I stood at the fence between my blank canvas and the crowded meadow and watched them until I lost them against the dark, and I made myself do the harder thing, which was not to turn them into a hope or a warning or a line, but only to see them: alive, and here, and not yet alone. Screaming. Feeding on the warm air. Holding, for one more summer, their small end of the thread.

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Midsummer has tipped over and the year is holding its breath at its fullest — the light long, the hedgerows heavy, everything arrived and nothing yet going. This fortnight’s three turned out to share a single thread: the held minute. A stopped train, a soaring violin, a poem read slowly. Two of them were made in the same summer, on the very edge of something.

1. A poem to enjoy — Edward Thomas, “Adlestrop” — It has to be this one this fortnight, because Thomas wrote it out of a train that drew up, unwontedly, at a small Gloucestershire platform on 24 June 1914 — a hundred and twelve years ago to the day. Nothing happens. “No one left and no one came.” And then a blackbird, and behind it “all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire,” two whole counties opening out of one stilled moment. It is the quietest of the great poems and the most attentive — a lesson in how much an unbidden pause will give you, if you only let it.

2. A Substack to follow — Sixty Odd Poems, by Mike O’Brien — One poem at a time, read slowly and companionably, with footnotes that wander off down the best sort of side-roads. I came to it through his piece on The Lark Ascending, which sets the music beside “Adlestrop” and notices they were made in the same year, doing the same thing: the natural setting, the widening view, the moment caught just before the world changed. If you like being walked through a poem by someone who plainly loves it, this is a good table to sit at.

3. Music to sit with — Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending — Begun in 1914, the same summer as the train at Adlestrop, though not heard in full until after the war it seemed to foreshadow. The solo violin doesn’t describe the lark so much as become it, climbing its own thread of sound “without a break” while the orchestra keeps the landscape low and still beneath. Find a quiet quarter of an hour for it — any of the well-loved recordings will do. It is the sound of looking up.

A question for you

When did you last let a minute simply stop — no phone, no next thing — and notice what came into it? I’d love to hear what you found there.

A thought from me

What strikes me about all three is that the held moment isn’t empty; it is the opposite. The train stops and the birdsong of two counties pours in. Paying attention isn’t a way of leaving the world but of letting more of it reach you. Late June is generous like that, if you stand still long enough to be reached.

— Adam

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Photo by Suho Media on Unsplash

There were swifts over the rooftops last night — a low, screaming party of them, six or seven, scything the air above the lane in that way they have, as if the evening were a thing to be cut into ribbons. I stood at the gate and watched until the light went. They had come up from the south of the town, over the orchard, and they turned at the church and came back, and turned again, screaming the whole time, that high thin sound that is less a song than a kind of friction. I have been waiting for them since the first week of May, when one arrived and then was gone, and I half-thought I had imagined it. Now there is a colony of them, and the evenings have their proper noise.

It is the middle of June. On Sunday the year reaches its hinge — the solstice, the longest day, sunrise at twenty past four and the light not gone until nearly ten. We talk about it as a peak, and it is one. But the thing nobody tells you as a child, and the thing I find I keep having to tell myself as an adult, is that the longest day is also the day the light begins to go back. The solstice is not the top of the hill with a plateau beyond it. It is the top of the hill and then the path down. We have built our highest summer festival, our bonfires and our standing stones at Stonehenge, around the precise moment the days start shortening again. There is something in that I have never quite got to the bottom of.

The swifts know it before we do. Or rather, they are arranged around it so exactly that to watch them is to watch the turn of the year happen in front of you.

A swift is in this country for about three months. It comes late — later than the swallows, later than the warblers, arriving in the last days of April and through May, when it is sure the air will be thick enough with insects. And it goes early. By the end of July the screaming parties begin to thin; by the second week of August, in most years, they are gone, lifting off one warm night and not coming back until the following May. They winter in Africa, below the Sahara, and they get there the long way, and the round trip is something like fourteen thousand miles. For a creature that weighs less than a small bar of chocolate, this is not a journey. It is a way of life that happens to pause, briefly, over Herefordshire, so that the young can be raised in the eaves of our churches and the gaps under our roof tiles.

So the swift that is screaming over my lane tonight has perhaps six weeks left here. It arrived a fortnight before the solstice. It will leave a fortnight or so after it. Its entire English summer is hung, like a small loud bracket, around the very day the light turns. I find I cannot watch them now without that arithmetic running underneath. They are most here, most numerous and most vocal, in exactly the window when the year is already tipping away.

It is worth saying plainly what these birds are, because familiarity has worn the strangeness off them.

A swift does not land. Not on the ground, not in a tree, not on a wire like the swallows. Once a young swift leaves the nest it may stay airborne for two or three years before it ever touches anything — feeding on the wing, drinking on the wing, gathering nest material on the wing, sleeping, it is thought, on the wing, climbing to a great height at dusk and dozing in slow circles through the dark. It mates in the air. By the time it first comes to rest, in the eaves of some building it has chosen, it has flown a distance that would have carried it several times round the world. We share our houses with an animal that is, in almost every sense that matters, made of departure.

And it is leaving us. The swift is on the red list now — the most serious category of conservation concern in Britain. The numbers have fallen by better than half in a generation, partly because the insects have thinned, partly because we have tidied and sealed and renovated away the small dark gaps under the roofline that they need. A bird that asks of us only a hole the size of a fist, and gives back the whole high theatre of a summer evening, is being quietly evicted by our improvements. I think about this when I watch them. The impermanence is not only in their season. It is in their tenure.

The warblers and the swallows keep a gentler version of the same clock. The chiffchaff was first, back in March, two notes repeated in the bare wood before the leaves were out — its whole name a transcription of its song. The blackcap and the willow warbler came in April, the willow warbler with that soft descending cadence that Edward Thomas, who heard these same birds in these same border counties a century ago, kept trying to catch in words and admitted he could not. The swallows have been over the fields since the middle of April and will stay, some of them, into October. They have longer here than the swifts. But they too are visitors, hung on the warm months, gone when the insects go.

What they all have in common is that their beauty is not separable from their brevity. This is the thing I keep arriving at. The swift is not beautiful in spite of being here for only three months; it is beautiful, partly, because of it. The screaming over the rooftops is loud with the whole short summer in it. If they were here all year — if they hung about through the wet of November like the wood pigeons — we would stop looking up. It is the going that sharpens the seeing. A migrant bird is a lesson, delivered every year whether or not we attend to it, in the fact that the things which move us most are precisely the ones that do not stay.

I have spent a fair part of these last years learning, slowly and against my inclination, not to grasp at things that are leaving. It does not come naturally to me. My instinct, when something good is plainly temporary, is to start grieving it while it is still here — to spoil the present arrival with the rehearsed loss. The swifts will not let me do that. They are too fast, too loud, too entirely in their six weeks of August-bound summer for any of that elegiac nonsense. They insist on the evening they are actually in.

That, I think, is what the solstice has to teach as well, if we will let the longest day be what it is rather than what we wish it were. The light is already turning. It has been turning, in fact, since before the swifts arrived; it will go on turning while they fly south. None of that is a reason to stand at the gate in mourning. It is a reason to stand at the gate. To watch the birds cut the evening into ribbons for as long as the evening lasts, and then to go in, and to let them go when their night comes, knowing they will lift off without ceremony and that the eaves will be silent by September.

Beyond solitude, I have come to think, is partly this: the willingness to love what is on its way out without trying to make it stay. The swifts are over the lane again as I write. It is not yet the solstice. The light is still climbing. Everything is, very briefly, here.

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Eric Ravilious, THE VALE OF THE WHITE HORSE c. 1939

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We are ten days or so from the solstice, the hinge of the year — the cow parsley gone over, the elderflower out along the lanes, the swifts at full scream round the eaves until past nine.

Everything this week is at its absolute height, which is also the precise moment it begins to tip. All three of this week’s finds were made by people who seem to have known that.

1. A poem to enjoy — Edward Thomas, “The Glory” — Back to the Dymock poets after a spring away from them, and to the one who haunts me most. The Glory opens on exactly this season — The glory of the beauty of the morning, — / The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew — and then does something braver than praise: it admits the speaker cannot be equal to the day. He tries to name the glory, fails, and turns the failure into the poem. It is the truest thing I know about high summer — that the fullness is precisely what you can’t hold, can’t “snare,” can’t carry home — and Thomas, who would be killed at Arras two years later, knew the cost of the things that won’t keep.

2. Art work of the week — Eric Ravilious, The Vale of the White Horse (c.1939), Tate — Staying with the chalk that ran under last month’s Paul Nash: here is the Uffington White Horse, seen from below and through falling rain, the oldest hill-figure in Britain cut into the down three thousand years ago and kept legible only because each generation has gone up and re-scoured it. Ravilious returned to these downs his whole short life; he painted this in the last summer before the war, and was himself lost off Iceland as a war artist in 1942. The horse is the thing the painting is really about: attention made permanent in turf, a shape held in the land only because people keep choosing to look after it.

3. Music I enjoyed this week — George Butterworth, The Banks of Green Willow (1913) — Six minutes that are, to my ear, the most perfect English idyll ever written: a small orchestra, a clarinet taking up a folk tune Butterworth had collected in the field in 1907, and a summer afternoon that seems to hang without moving. It was premiered in early 1914 by a 24-year-old Adrian Boult. Two and a half years later Butterworth was shot by a sniper on the Somme, his body never recovered, his name on the Thiepval Memorial. You can hear the whole of an England in it that he must have half-known he was about to lose — which is perhaps why it sounds less like a celebration than like someone looking very hard at something while it is still there.

A question for you — what is your signal that the year has reached the top and started down again? Not the calendar solstice but the real one: the first cut hay, the elder coming out, the evening you notice the light has stopped getting longer. Reply and tell me — I read every one.

A thought from me — three makers, a poet, a painter and a composer, all circling the same fact: that the fullest things are the ones that won’t stay, and that the only honest response is to look while they’re here. Thomas couldn’t snare the morning; Ravilious’s horse survives only because someone keeps re-cutting it; Butterworth’s idyll holds an afternoon that was already going. Attention, it turns out, is the one form of keeping we’re actually allowed. The solstice is a good week to practise it.

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Gwen John: Self-Portrait c. 1902, Oil on canvas, Tate, Purchased, 1942

There is a room in this house where I go to work. It faces the wrong way for morning light, which is to say it faces the hill, and on a clear day I can watch the weather arrive over the ridge a good ten minutes before it reaches the window. I go in. I close the door. For an hour, or two, or on a good day three, I am alone with whatever I am trying to make, and the world is asked, politely, to wait.

I have been reading Sue Hubbard1 on the painter Gwen John (after visiting the Cardiff Museum exhibition), and thinking about that door.

John was born in Haverfordwest in 1876. Her mother, who liked Chopin and watercolours and was rarely well, died when Gwen was eight — the kind of early loss the psychoanalysts tell us reorganises a person from the inside, leaving them forever a little too ready to cling, a little too easily abandoned. She trained at the Slade, then went to Paris, to Montparnasse, to a furnished room she paid for by modelling for other artists. The streets below smelled of open drains and frying potatoes. Rilke, who was in the same quarter at the same time, said the area smelled of fear. She lived close enough to the poverty line to touch it. A frugal life at the top of a damp building, not enough coal, not enough to eat — Hubbard is right that we romanticise the attic now, and right that such a life took enormous inner resources to survive at all.

Gwen John: Study of Rodin’s sculpture, Death of Alcestis, c. 1899, Watercolour and graphite pencil on paper

Then she met Rodin, thirty-six years older and the most famous artist alive, and for a time she more or less stopped being a painter and became a supplicant. She waited in her room for him. She wrote him letters he did not answer. The more she wanted him, the more he withdrew, which is the oldest and most reliable mechanism of unhappiness there is.

And here is the part I keep returning to. In 1906 she moved to a new room in the rue St. Placide, and slowly, the room gave her back to herself. She began the series of quiet interiors and self-portraits she is now remembered for — La Chambre sur la Cour, the evening light, the borrowed harmonies of Piero della Francesca. Small works. A woman in a room, or a room with the woman just gone out of it. As if by painting the place where she was alone, she could find out who she was when no one was watching.

Ma religion et mon art c’est toute ma vie, she wrote later. My religion and my art are my whole life.

I think the room did something the man never could. The man was a hole she kept trying to fill. The room was a place she could finally make something in.

This is the old, unfashionable truth at the centre of Hubbard’s essay, and she draws it out through Anthony Storr and through Donald Winnicott before him: that the capacity to be alone is not a deprivation to be pitied but an achievement to be reached. Winnicott thought it began in childhood, in the experience of being alone in the presence of someone who could be trusted — alone, but not abandoned.2 Storr thought that for some people creativity does the work that other people’s company does for everyone else: it is where they go to meet their own depths.3 Elizabeth Bishop knew it young: as a schoolgirl she wrote a small essay — On Being Alone — asking why so many of us seem to dread being alone, when we had, she thought, half forgotten how.4 Rilke, writing his letters to a young poet in those same Paris years, told him not to be frightened by the part of himself that wanted to escape his solitude. It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult.5 The difficulty was the point. The difficulty was the work.

Being alone is not the same as being lonely. Loneliness is solitude with the wanting still in it — the room with Rodin’s absence in it, rather than the room with the painting in it. The well that creative work draws from is the second kind. You go down into it on purpose. You come back up with something.

I believe all of this. I have lived enough of it to believe it without having to take it on trust. The hour behind the closed door is the most reliably good hour of my day. Whatever attention poetry has taught me — to stay with the small particular, to let the thing be the thing and not a symbol of something more flattering — it taught me in that room, alone, with the door shut.

But I want to be careful, because Hubbard is careful, and because Gwen John herself shows me exactly where the care is needed.

At some point after Rodin she wrote, in a notebook, a list she called Rules to Keep the World Away.6 There were ten. Do not listen to people more than is necessary. Do not look at people. Have as little intercourse with people as possible. Talk as little as possible. Do not look in shop windows. Do not care for the opinion of people. She turned to the Church, then to near-seclusion, and a myth has grown up around her since — the holy recluse, the woman who rejected the world and let her health go and died, finally, having travelled to Dieppe with no luggage at all.

And I find I admire the room and I am wary of the rule.

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

Because there is a door you close for an hour, and there is a door you lock for good, and they are not the same door, though they look identical from the outside. The first is a discipline. You go in to make the work, and you come out to live the life the work is for. The second is a wall with a person sealed behind it. The early loss, the unanswered letters, the slow hardening of alone into only — Gwen John’s solitude was, at least in part, a wound that had learned to call itself a vocation. The paintings are extraordinary. I would not wish the cost of them on anyone. I do not think the cost is what made them; I think it is what she had to paint her way through to make them at all.

So I keep the room and I refuse the rule. I go in, and the going-in is real, and necessary, and mine. But I have learned — slowly, and not always gracefully — to treat solitude as something you carry through a life rather than a place you withdraw into for the rest of it. A practice, not a destination. A door, not a wall. The well you lower the bucket into in the morning, and walk away from in the afternoon to go and be among the people who make the afternoon worth walking into.

This evening the weather came over the ridge as advertised — a grey curtain dragging up the valley, the hill going soft at the edges. I had got most of an hour’s work done. I read it over once, marked two lines for tomorrow, and did the thing the rule forbids and the room permits.

I stood up. I opened the door. I went back out into the rest of it.

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Photo courtesy rspb.org.uk

1. A poem to enjoy — Ted Hughes, “Swifts” — The swifts are back over the lanes — a couple of weeks now of that high, scissoring scream round the eaves at dusk — and there is no better company for it than Hughes’s poem from Season Songs (Faber, 1976). It opens by dating itself almost to the day — mid-May, cherry blossom — and then the birds are simply there, arrived at the tip of their own noise before the eye has caught up. What I keep returning to is the refusal to sentimentalise. Hughes gives the speed and the power and the near-misses, the young bird that doesn’t make its first flight, the whole switchback machinery of the thing — and lets the joy be a joy that includes all of that. The swift is the year’s great emblem of the brief: here for a hot dozen weeks, gone by August, never once landing while it is with us. A poem that attends to an arrival without pretending it will stay.

2. A Substack to savour — Lia Leendertz, Lia’s Living Almanac — Leendertz writes the bestselling annual Almanac and, alongside it, a free weekly newsletter that does one small, disciplined thing: it asks, every week, what have you noticed that felt seasonal? — then gathers the readers’ answers and rolls them up at the month’s end into a kind of found poem of the season. It is the Katherine May register (April’s pick) turned outward — less interior wintering, more the communal keeping of a calendar by attention. This week’s post happens to open with her counting swifts on the common — sixteen, she thinks, the most she has had at the start of a season — which is either a coincidence or simply what everyone with their eyes up is doing in the third week of May. The almanac discipline — mark the moment, name what is here, let it go — is one I find quietly instructive.

3. Music I enjoyed this week — Delius, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring — Six or seven minutes of Delius, composed in 1912 — the companion to the swifts in another key. A tone poem built around an exchange of cuckoo-calls in the woodwind, and, at its centre, an old Norwegian folk tune (In Ola Valley) handed to Delius by Percy Grainger. It is a piece about a sound that announces a return: the migrant bird heard before it is ever seen, the season confirmed by a voice from the trees. Thomas Beecham, who did more than anyone to keep Delius in British ears, thought it the best-known thing the composer wrote, and it is easy to hear why. It does in music what the swifts do in the air, and what Leendertz’s readers do in their comment threads: it marks the moment the year turns — lightly, and without insisting.

A question for you — what is the thing that tells you, each year, that the season has turned? Not the date on the calendar but the actual signal: the first swift over the road, the first cut grass, a bird heard before it is seen. Reply and tell me what you listen for — I read every one.

A thought from me — the swifts will be gone by August, and knowing that is less a sadness than an instruction. Most of what is worth attending to is exactly the part that does not stay. The only trick I have found is to look while it is here, and to let the looking be enough.

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About two-thirds of the way up, where the path skirts a field of barley coming through in pale green lines, I heard it. A dry, wheezy sequence — short, short, short, long — from somewhere in the hedge. I stood still. A yellowhammer. It came again, and then I saw him, halfway up a blackthorn, the chrome-yellow head catching the sun. A little bit of bread and no cheese, as my school friend’s Dad used to render the call; though it sounds to me more like a small mechanical thing attempting language and not quite getting there.

I watched him for a long time. He sang, stopped, shifted a branch, sang again. I cannot say how often in the last five years I have walked hills like this one. I had not, in all that time, heard a yellowhammer.

I walked on. The song continued behind me, thin and patient, as if he had always been there.

Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

I have written once before, in “Travel and return,” about a walk up a different hill. It was December. I had recently come back from Qatar. The separation was very new. I went up in a grey drizzle to try to feel what I had missed for eight years. The landscape, when I got to the ridge, felt empty. Three magpies. A few crows working the ploughed field. A buzzard turning slowly over the far wood. And underneath all of it, a silence I could not quite name.

I wrote at the time, I remember, that the country I had longed for from Doha was not the country I was now standing in. I thought I meant something psychological. I meant something psychological, in part. But I am not sure I fully understood, then, that the emptiness was also literal.

The curlews are gone from these fields. I have not heard one in years, only see them now on the mudflats near Newport. The lapwings are gone; I have not seen their tumbling display over the wet meadows since I was a boy in the seventies. The yellowhammers had gone, or mostly gone, so quietly that I had not noticed their absence — which is perhaps the worst form of loss. The hill I had returned to was not the hill of my memory. Some of my grief that afternoon was for my own life. Some of it, I now think, was for the life of the place itself.

Photo by Daniil Komov on Unsplash

I have thought a lot, since then, about ecological recovery and about personal recovery, and how much the first has taught me about the second.

Ecological recovery, if it happens at all, is slow. It rarely returns a landscape to the state it was in before the damage. What comes back is not quite what was lost. Species that were dominant may become rare; species that were absent may colonise. The soil organisms shift; the relationships reorganise. The ecosystem that succeeds recovery is a new ecosystem, bearing a family resemblance to the old but not, strictly speaking, the same thing. It takes whatever time it takes. It cannot be hurried by wanting it.

And personal recovery, it turns out, is shaped rather like this.

The life I lost was not the life I got back. My marriage did not reconstitute itself. My career did not resume. The house I had grown up assuming I would grow old in was someone else’s house. What came back, instead, was a slightly different ecology: new friendships, none of them replacements for the old ones; a writing practice I had not had time for in decades; a relationship with solitude that I had previously confused with isolation. I did not get my old life. I got a life that had grown in its place, colonising the ground the old one had stopped holding.

It took me longer than I wanted to recognise this. I spent, as I have written before, a fair amount of that time looking online at houses I was never going to buy, looking in my address book for friendships I had not maintained, looking in the mirror for a version of myself who no longer existed. I was looking for what had gone. Recovery did not begin until I started, instead, to pay attention to what was arriving.

The yellowhammer is not alone. If I tell you what I have seen on this hill in the last few monhs — not unusual things, but things I had not seen — it reads like a small bulletin.

A little egret fishing the brook at the bottom of the lane, in February, when they used not to be here at all. A stonechat working a gorse bush on the common, which I had previously associated with coastal walks in Cornwall. A hare, twice, in a field where I cannot remember there having been hares. A scatter of cowslips in a bit of meadow the council has agreed to stop mowing until July. Orchids last summer, which the older farmers said had always been there and the younger ones said had not.

Some of these are climate. Some are conservation. Some are the slow effect of a few people locally paying attention. None of them amount to restoration. But they are arrivals, and they are visible — if you have learned how to look.

That is the other recovery. My capacity to notice has changed. I write poetry now, and poetry is, among other things, a discipline of seeing what is in front of you without needing it to be something else. I have come to think that what I was missing, in the years before, was not the birds. It was the attention.

Beyond solitude is not a destination I have arrived at. I want to say this plainly, in case I have given, over these essays, a different impression. It is not a place you get to. It is a practice, and the practice is ongoing. Some mornings it holds. Others it slips.

But beyond has, for me, stopped meaning past or after. It has come to mean something closer to through. A quality of attention, carried through whatever each day asks of me — the attention poetry has taught me, the attention a walk up a hill requires, the willingness to notice what is arriving rather than to grieve what has gone. The same discipline, really: stay with the unglamorous particular, let the thing be what it is, refuse the consolation of a moral the world has not yielded.

Above the ridge, on the morning I started with, a raven crossed from one wood to another, unhurried, calling once. I listened. And behind it, from the hedge below, the yellowhammer began again. A little bit of bread and no cheese. All morning. As if he had always been there.

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1. Art Work of the Week — Paul Nash, Wood on the Downs (1930) — Aberdeen Art Gallery holds a Paul Nash I remember in early summer: a beech wood at the edge of chalk downland, the trees standing in a loose council and the foreground opening into a green clearing the eye is pulled towards before it has decided to look. Nash was working at the visionary edge of English landscape painting — the same line that runs from Palmer through Constable — but with the modernist’s quieter geometry. The painting is, almost too literally, what a clearing looks like: a place that is itself by virtue of what stands around it.

   

   Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

2. Something happy — the long light coming in — We are within a month of the solstice. The evenings have been going on and on, the last hour of light sliding past nine and the swallows and martins still working the lanes when the kitchen light would normally have come on. There is a particular pleasure in being able to do an evening walk that begins in full daylight and ends in something that is not quite dusk — the slow leak of the sun behind the Malverns, the first stars holding off until you have already turned for home. The light makes its own kind of room.

   

   Photo by Terence Robinson on Unsplash

7. A poem to enjoy — Ivor Gurney, “Cotswold Ways” — Gurney is the third of the Dymock-adjacent poets I have featured this spring, after Edward Thomas and Wilfrid Gibson, and the most painfully gifted of them. Cotswold Ways begins “One comes across the strangest things in walks: / Fragments of Abbey tithe-barns fixed in modern / And Dutch-sort houses where the water baulks / Weired up, and brick kilns broken among fern,...” — a poem entirely built from what a walker finds when the landscape, casually, discloses its earlier industry. Gurney spent his last fifteen years confined to an asylum in Dartford, still writing, still naming the Gloucestershire of his childhood from memory. The poem is, among other things, an essay in attention that the present landscape is built over a vanished one — a small clearing-out, item by item, of what is still legible if a walker is patient enough.

A question for you

Paul Nash saw the “visionary edge” of the woods and downs. Is there a particular place you visit where the landscape feels like more than just trees and earth—where it feels, as Nash might say, like a “council” or a “clearing”?

A thought from me

On the Persistence of Memory: It is moving to think of Gurney in an asylum, rebuilding the Gloucestershire of his childhood item by item, “brick kilns broken among fern.” It reminds me that attention is a form of love. What we notice today becomes the landscape we can retreat to later, built from the “slow leak of the sun” and the “strangest things” found on a walk.

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Photo by Hannah Smith on Unsplash

There was a year when I knew the housing stock of three counties better than I knew the rooms I was actually living in.

Most evenings, around nine, I would open Rightmove on my phone and begin a kind of slow scrolling I told myself was a search. A stone cottage in the Black Mountains, with a slate roof and a view that told you the weather a day out. A converted chapel on a Scottish island. A long, low farmhouse in the Cotswolds, far enough off the A-road to be quiet. None of these were houses I knew. None of them were anywhere I had any real connection to. The fantasy they offered was not a particular building — it was a particular state. Arrival. Somewhere I would finally have landed, and where the business of being me could resume.

Meanwhile I was sitting in a kitchen in a town I hadn’t chosen, in a house someone else had as good as picked for me, in a life that had been dismantled in a single conversation and was, months on, still in pieces on the floor.

It took me longer than it should have to understand what those evenings were actually for. They weren’t a search. They were displacement. A way of not being where I was.

I started reading Heidegger around that time — not for consolation, which I’d have resisted on principle, but because someone had mentioned, in another context entirely, that he had written an essay called “Building Dwelling Thinking.” The title alone did something to me. I ordered the book.

Look at the English word dwelling for a moment. It does something curious. It means a place you live — the front-door sense — but it also means a way of being with something. Don’t dwell on it, we say to someone who keeps returning to a hurt. To dwell, in that second sense, is to sit with a thing, to turn it over, to inhabit it with one’s attention.

Heidegger noticed this — in German, Wohnen has a similar reach — and made of it a small philosophical reversal. We do not dwell, he said, because we have built houses. We build houses because we are, already and always, dwellers — creatures who need to be somewhere with a certain quality of care.

I read this in the unchosen kitchen, with twelve tabs of cottages I would never own open in the background, and I understood, slowly, that I had got it the wrong way round. I had been trying to find somewhere to dwell. What I was supposed to be doing was beginning to dwell.

The two are not the same.

There was nothing wrong with the house I was in. Five bedrooms. A working kitchen. A garden with an apple tree in it. The shelter, in any practical sense, was perfectly adequate.

And yet I can tell you, now, with a few years’ distance, which rooms I did not properly enter for months at a time. The large sitting room — who sits, alone, in a sitting room made for company? The small study upstairs that I had meant to make into a writing space, and that filled instead with boxes from the old house, still taped. The spare bedroom, where the bed was made every fortnight for guests who did not come.

The objects had not settled either. A chest of drawers from the old bedroom, in a place that wasn’t the old bedroom, carrying the wrong association. Photographs I could neither display nor put away. A set of kitchen knives that belonged to my former wife, and that I used three or four times a week and disliked every time.

The radio — I have written about this before — was on in every room. It wasn’t company, exactly. It was the sound a house makes when it is not being inhabited: a low, continuous signal that tells you someone, at least, has tried.

This is what it is to have shelter and not dwelling. Walls. A roof. All the furniture in roughly the right places. And no attention landing anywhere. A house quietly waiting to be occupied by its current occupant, who has not yet arrived.

I cannot tell you when it began to change, because there was no moment. But I can tell you what the small beginnings were.

The desk first. I cleared one corner of the cluttered study, moved a chair in front of the window, and began to write there in the early mornings. For months, the only square metre of the house that felt unambiguously mine was the desk. I would walk through rooms that meant nothing to me to get to it, and I would sit down, and something in me would quiet. The desk was the first place I dwelt.

Then the walks. I had always assumed that good walking meant variety, new ground, a different route each time. What I came to understand that year was nearly the opposite. A landscape becomes yours through repetition. The same lane out to the edge of the town. The same path up to the ridge. The badger sett at the corner. The yew that’s struggling. The stile you have to lift yourself over in March because the wood has swelled. You don’t dwell in a place by seeing it once. You dwell by going back, and back, and back, until you start to notice what has changed.

Then the labels. I bought, of all things, a label maker. A grown man with a label maker, I remember thinking — and bought it anyway. Over a few weekends I worked through the house: cupboards, drawers, the boxes still taped from the move that I had begun to suspect I would never unpack as they were. Each thing named. Each thing given somewhere to be. Walking maps, mid-Wales. Tax receipts, 2014–18. Old letters. Ridiculous, possibly. But there was something in the small ritual of naming a thing and putting it somewhere it belonged that was the inverse of how I had been living. The objects that had sat for so long carrying the wrong association — borrowed, stranded, in transit — were, one by one, given small homes of their own. Not the homes they had once had. New ones. Small homes for small things.

And, almost accidentally, poetry. Returning, week after week, to the formless white page and the same mode and the same slow voice. A kind of tending. Dwelling, again, in its second sense — the attentive returning that turns a thing into a place.

What I had been looking for in those Rightmove evenings — arrival, some final landing — was never a matter of address. It was a practice I was going to have to learn, and the learning began the day I stopped scrolling and started attending to what was already in front of me.

The change was not in the house. The change was in the attention.

That, I think, is what Heidegger is reaching for, in his difficult and circuitous way. A home is not found, exactly. It is made. And it is not made by building, not really. It is made by a quality of returning. To a desk. To a lane. To a feeder. To a piece of writing on a Sunday morning. To the kettle, first thing, in a kitchen one has finally stopped looking past.

The kettle is the image I keep coming back to. There is nothing in particular to say about it. Green steel, scaled at the bottom. But to lift it, fill it, set it down on its base, hear the small click and the rising hum — and to do this in the same way every morning, in any kitchen, knowing that this is the start of the day’s attention — is the smallest version of what I think the word dwell is finally trying to say.

The ground may change. The practice does not.

1. Art Work of the Week — John Constable, Old Sarum (1834) — A small Constable I keep returning to in late spring: a Wiltshire hilltop that was once a cathedral city, now grass mounds and weather. Constable painted it as if the storm light were doing the disclosing — as if what stood there, even centuries after withdrawal, could still be made visible to a patient eye. Old Sarum was abandoned by the thirteenth century; the cathedral moved down to Salisbury. By Constable’s time there was nothing on the hill but earthworks and sky. The picture is what is left when a place stops being a place. It feels like the right April companion to Palmer’s Shoreham garden from last month — the same English visionary tradition, but turned the other way: not blossom suddenly disclosing the spring, but a hill quietly disclosing what it no longer holds.

2. An article that made me think — The Clearing, Little Toller’s online journal — Not Katherine May’s Substack of the same name, but the online journal from Little Toller Books — the publishers who keep Adrian Bell and Edward Thomas in print. The Clearing runs essays on landscape and place; this week I have been working through a back catalogue of pieces on shadow archaeologies — deserted medieval villages, drowned valleys, the residue of estates whose great houses have gone. What strikes me is how persistent the trace remains. Centuries after a demolition, the lawn lies differently over the foundation. An avenue’s poplars hold the line of an arrangement no longer in force. The world withdraws but the geometry stays.

3. Something I learned this week — the word Verbergung — The pair to last month’s aletheia, and the word I have been turning over while drafting a new poem. Verbergung is Heidegger’s name for concealment — what the earth does, the way ground always closes itself, withdraws, refuses to be brought fully into the open. Where aletheia is the un-forgetting that lets a thing show up, Verbergung is the prior withholding that any disclosure depends on. Nothing comes into the open except against a withdrawing. The grass closes over the foundation. The hawthorn stands at the hedge-line of a field that used to be a kitchen-garden. We are quicker to celebrate disclosure than to credit the withdrawing that makes it possible — but the two are one motion.

   

4. Something happy — the Herefordshire orchards in blossom — The blossom this week has been improbable. Walking the lanes, the perry pear and apple orchards are at their height — a soft, not-quite-white shock that lasts maybe ten days each year if the wind holds. There is a particular, very English sound to a heavy bee in heavy blossom — a low, focused, drowsy hum — which I would not know how to describe in any other terms. Traditional orchards are themselves a quietly disappearing landscape (Herefordshire has lost most of its old orchards in the last fifty years), so the blossom carries its own small Verbergung — what is here, while it is here, against a long withdrawal.

5. Where I found hope this week — the work itself, again — The Verve Poetry Press pamphlet deadline fell at the end of April, with Cinnamon and the Brotherton Prize gone earlier in the spring. After another quiet phase of editorial work — a different selection, a different running order, a smaller pamphlet built around the working-landscape poems — there is the strange clean feeling that follows submission. Not optimism about the outcome, which is out of one’s hands, but the steadier thing: the satisfaction of having brought something to the state where it could be sent. The labour of attention, again, rearranges something. The work moves on.

6. Something inspiring — Alice Oswald — I have been re-reading Dart, Oswald’s book-length poem about the river Dart in Devon. It is built from years of recorded conversations with people who live and work along the river — bailiffs, swimmers, walkers, a forester, a ferryman — collaged into the river’s own voice. What inspires is the discipline behind it. Oswald spends real time with a place before she lets it speak. She was a previous Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and her public lectures, recorded and freely available, are among the best contemporary instruction in attention I know.

7. A poem to enjoy — Wilfrid Gibson, Flannan Isle (1912) — Gibson is a Dymock poet — Edward Thomas’s circle, a few miles from where I write — and an unfairly forgotten one. Flannan Isle is his best-known piece: a relief crew arrives at a Hebridean lighthouse where three keepers have vanished, leaving behind a half-eaten meal, an unmade bed, an upended chair. It is Verbergung in a small ballad — the world withdrawing inside an ordinary domestic scene, presence read entirely from trace. As, on the threshold, for a spell, / We paused, and listened to the swell. I have been working on a response poem to one of Gibson’s lyrics this week, and finding more in him each time.

8. A Substack to savour — Patrick Laurie, And the Yellow Ale — A different register from Katherine May (who I featured last month) — Laurie writes from inside a working farming year in Galloway, where he raises native cattle and watches the land change. His recent piece And the Yellow Ale is a good way in — plain, fluent prose with the authority of someone who actually does the work, holding the byre and the weather and the small evening particulars in the same hand. He is the author of Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape — about beef cattle, peewits and what custodianship actually looks like — and the Substack is the same voice continued in shorter form. Read alongside May, the two registers triangulate where I keep finding myself: attention as practice, in places that are quietly going.

9. Music I enjoyed this week — Vaughan Williams, Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3) — Not the Lark Ascending — though I have nothing against it — but the third symphony, composed between 1916 and 1921, in long quiet thought after Vaughan Williams’s war service in France. It sounds pastoral. It is, and it isn’t. The composer wrote, late in life, that it was “really wartime music — a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres.” The music is the country those men were fighting for, and an act of mourning for them. Sixty-five minutes; four movements; the soprano in the finale rising over a wordless landscape. Best heard quietly, with low light and the windows open.

A while ago, in “Rising from the canvas,” I mentioned in passing that senior leadership is designed-in lonely. I said friendship had been the casualty of forty years in executive roles, and that I’d come back to this another time. Some of you wrote back. A couple of you wrote back at length. So here is the other time. This is the post I was avoiding when I planted that flag.

The facts first.

Some years ago now I stepped out of full-time work, and out of the marriage twelve months after that, with almost no friends to speak of. I don’t mean I didn’t know anyone. I knew a great many people. My LinkedIn was a monument to forty years of acquaintance. But in the sense of men I could ring at nine in the evening and say I’m not coping, can we talk, there was nobody I would actually have rung. One or two I might have, at the outer edge of what was possible, but the call would have surprised both of us, and I am not sure either of them would quite have known what to do with it.

That is what I mean by almost no friends. Not nobody in the world — nobody in the position where such a call would have been ordinary. The absence of anyone in that position became unignorable when the marriage I had organised my entire emotional life around dissolved in a single conversation.

How does a life arrive there?

Partly by structure. When you run an organisation, every relationship inside it is shaped by the fact that you hold the power. People want things from you. Good people, reasonable things, usually — but still. The friendships I thought I’d built across fifteen years of leadership turned, when I stepped out, into something quieter. A few held. Most didn’t. Some — this stung more than I was prepared for — turned out to have been transactional all along, and declared themselves so once the transaction closed. That isn’t a character flaw in the other person. It’s what hierarchy does to intimacy. You can’t easily be friends with someone whose bonus you approve.

Partly by exhaustion. The hours I gave to Qatar, to the executive role before that, to the one before that — there was nothing left in the tank for the unscheduled pint, the long walk with someone who wasn’t a colleague, the evening phone call that goes somewhere. I told myself I’d pick it up in retirement. I didn’t understand yet that friendship, like a garden, can’t be recovered by a burst of weekend effort. It has to have been watered all along.

Partly by the couple. We were close, my wife and I, for a long time. I put almost all my emotional weight on one beam. This is not something I say with regret exactly — it made possible many of the best years of my life — but it is something I understand now as a structural choice, not just a fact of love. Two people who find everything they need in each other build, without meaning to, a house with only two rooms. When one of them leaves, the other is standing in a very small space.

Partly, and this is the layer I find hardest to write, by temperament. I am, by default, a self-sufficient man. Leave me with books and the long view up to May Hill and I’ll be fine for a week. Reaching out has never been my instinct. The writing life has rewarded this; I have mistaken my isolation for discipline more than once. Depth over breadth has always been my preference in friendship, which means that when the deep friendships thinned, I didn’t have the wider thicket to catch me.

None of this is special. I know that.

I have, since then, read some of the literature on male friendship in midlife, and what is most striking about it is how little novelty any of us possess. Surveys in Britain and the United States consistently find that men over fifty have fewer close friends than any other adult cohort, and that the number has been falling for thirty years. Niobe Way, the American psychologist, has written beautifully about this — how boys in early adolescence speak of their male friendships in the language of love, and how by late adolescence most of them have learned to withdraw from that intimacy and call the withdrawal maturity. We grow into the very loneliness we then complain of.

I find this both a relief and an indictment. A relief because it means the shape of my life is not the result of some private failure of character. An indictment because it means I walked, eyes open or not, into a pattern that was perfectly well-documented, and could have been resisted.

I’d like to tell you I fixed this. I haven’t fixed it. What follows is reporting, not advice.

The first thing I tried was the obvious thing. I rang the old friends — the ones who had fallen off when I went abroad, or when the children were small — and I suggested meeting. Some of those calls landed well. One of them became, quietly, something I now depend on. Most of them were like trying to restart a fire in wet wood. We got a few sparks and a lot of smoke. We had both changed in ways the other hadn’t witnessed, and affection without shared life turned out to be a thinner thing than I’d assumed. I don’t think we were wrong to try. The lesson was simply that old friendship needs to have been maintained, not resurrected.

The second thing I tried was more deliberate. I joined things. A nature group, briefly. Then, more seriously, a local climate action group — not because I thought I’d find friends in it, but because I’d grown tired of reading the science and doing nothing with it, and because the people who bothered to turn up on a February evening seemed to me the kind of people worth standing next to. There is a particular awkwardness — perhaps it is only my awkwardness — in contriving intimacy by appointment, which is why I didn’t join anything explicitly social. I have come to think that men don’t, on the whole, befriend each other through honesty. We befriend each other sideways, through something else we are both doing.

Which is how the unexpected thing happened, twice.

The first was the climate group itself. Two people a little older than me — both already a decade or more into a retirement I was only beginning — turned out, over the course of a few months, to be the beginnings of real friendship. Neither of them sought me out, and I didn’t seek them. We arrived at each other sideways, through the work of the group. The age gap, which I noticed at first, has quietly ceased to matter. Friendship across a decade or fifteen years is a different animal from friendship at parity — slightly more spacious, perhaps, in ways I am still learning to read.

The second was poetry. I had started, the year before, writing seriously. Submitting to journals. Going to readings, joining a poetry community I hadn’t known existed. Signing on to do the MA in writing poetry at the Poetry School. Without setting out to make friends, I found I was in correspondence with people whose company I valued. A poet in Newport who reads my drafts and sends me his. A handful of readers — strangers, technically — who write to me after posts like this, and with whom I have ended up in exchanges that have the quality of friendship in everything but the face-to-face.

I had not expected either thing to do what it has done. I had entered the climate group to be useful, and the poetry as a solitary pursuit, and both have turned out to have a secondary life as a small network of real affection. I think it is because they are practices in which the first requirement is honest attention — to the science, to the page, to the world each of them points to — and once two people have established that habit between them, friendship follows more or less of its own accord. What I needed, it turned out, wasn’t to try harder at friendship. It was to find things worth doing with other people, and to let the friendships grow out of the doing.

So where am I now. Not resolved. The pattern of forty years doesn’t undo itself in three. The old habit — closing the door, declining the invitation, preferring my own company when I shouldn’t — still reasserts itself more often than I’d like. That hasn’t gone.

But something is beginning.

Nothing here yet has the weight of the friendships I lost, and I am not going to oversell what I have. Friendship dislikes being oversold, and what I am describing is still in its early weather.

But it is real. There are evenings now when I find myself looking forward to a conversation, or drafting a message to someone I didn’t know a year ago, or turning over something said at a meeting that is still working on me days later. Three years ago I had none of that. The shape of it is unfamiliar, and I don’t yet know quite what to call it, but it is unmistakably the beginning of something.

That is what I can honestly report. Not a victory. Just the small, corrigible fact that the door is open a little more often than it used to be, and that once or twice lately, someone has walked through it and stayed.

1. Art Work of the Week — Samuel Palmer, In a Shoreham Garden (c.1830) — There’s a Palmer at the V&A I keep returning to in April. An apple tree in such extravagant pink blossom it looks almost delirious, a small figure in a red robe gazing at something beyond the frame. Palmer’s Shoreham years were a decade of disclosure — he painted landscape as if something were being revealed through it rather than merely depicted. It feels right for this month, when the blackthorn suddenly whitens the hedgerows and the orchards commit to their shock of bloom.

2. An article that made me think — The ecological crisis as a crisis of attention — I’ve been reading Emergence Magazine again this week — a journal of ecology, culture and spirituality I return to when I need to recalibrate. Their insistence that ecological loss is first a loss of attention — that we have forgotten how to look — rhymes with what I feel most strongly in my own poetry practice. If the world is withdrawing from us, we are also withdrawing from it; the question isn’t what to do about that so much as how to stand in the presence of the world for long enough to register what’s actually there.

3. Something I learned this week — The shape of the word “aletheia” — Following a thread in my own reading I ended up back at the Greek: a-lētheia, un-concealment, the negation of forgetting. The word for truth in Homer is literally a refusal to let something slip back into the hidden. I’ve been working with this concept for so long as a philosophical idea that I’d half-forgotten how physical it is. When the fog lifts off the Leadon, when a fox steps out of the hedge — that’s aletheia, and it has nothing to do with correctness and everything to do with showing up.

4. Something happy — The first swifts are almost here — Swifts winter south of the Sahara and travel nine thousand miles to get here; they eat, sleep, mate, and drink on the wing, and touch down only to breed. Any day now they will be overhead, screaming low over the gardens. Every year I forget they’re coming and every year they arrive and I am stopped in the middle of whatever I’m doing, standing in the garden looking up like a fool. Happiness is a poor word for it, but it will do.

   

5. Where I found hope this week — The work itself — The Cinnamon Press pamphlet deadline fell at the end of March, and the Brotherton Prize followed a week later. After several months of daily editorial attention I have come out of that phase slightly blinking, like someone leaving a cinema into the afternoon light. What I found, when the submissions were in and the manuscript was sealed, was not exhaustion but a quiet gratitude for the work itself. The pamphlet may be accepted or it may not; that part is out of my hands. What isn’t out of my hands is the fact that I now know each poem better than I did before, and that the labour of attention has rearranged something in me. This, I think, is what practice looks like: not outcome, but a thickening of the capacity to stay.

6. Something inspiring — Clare Shaw — The Wells Poetry Competition this year is being judged by Clare Shaw, whose work I’ve been reading closely. She writes out of a commitment to honesty about mental health, trauma and recovery that refuses both euphemism and melodrama — a difficult middle register, and she inhabits it with real formal intelligence. What’s inspiring is watching a poet stay so close to the ground.

7. A poem to enjoy — “But these things also” by Edward Thomas — April brings me back each year to Edward Thomas, and this year to the short poem that begins “But these things also are Spring’s — / On banks by the roadside the grass / Long-dead that is greyer now / Than all the Winter it was.” A poem about the unglamorous face of the season: the chip of flint, the white shell of a broken snail, bleached grass. Spring disclosed not through obvious beauty but through what survives the winter’s erosion. Thomas knew that disclosure is partial and unflattering as often as it is lovely — and he closes with the wonderfully ambiguous “And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.”

8. A Substack to savour — The Clearing by Katherine May — Katherine May — author of Wintering and Enchantment — writes about solitude, slowness and seasonal living with a kind of attentiveness I find sustaining. Her pieces are unhurried and she refuses to performatively cheer up. I’ve been reading her alongside my own Beyond Solitude work and finding quiet companionship there.

9. Music I enjoyed this week — Delius, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring — There is nothing else like this six-minute rhapsody by Delius, composed in 1912 and built around the two-note call of the cuckoo folded into an English pastoral idiom. The whole piece drifts and lifts as if the orchestra itself had caught a thermal. I haven’t heard a cuckoo yet this year — they come later and fewer than they used to — but the piece is standing in for one, which is one of the things music can do.

The first meal I cooked for myself was pasta. Not good pasta. Not the kind you make with intention, with garlic browning in olive oil and a glass of something open on the counter. This was pasta because pasta is what you make when you can’t think of anything else, when the kitchen feels like a room that belongs to someone who has left, and you are just passing through.

I stood at the hob in a house I barely knew, in a town I hadn’t chosen, listening to Radio 4 because I’d turned it on in every room. I couldn’t bear the silence. The silence wasn’t just quiet. It was the shape left behind when another life withdraws from yours. A chair at the table. A glass not poured. The absence of the question, what shall we have tonight?

I ate standing up, I think. Or maybe at the table with my phone propped against the salt. I can’t remember, which tells you something about how little I was present for it. I was performing the act of eating, not doing it. Getting through.

That was nearly five years ago now. What happened between then and here is what I want to talk about.

There’s a particular loneliness to eating alone that other solitudes don’t carry. You can walk alone and feel free. You can read alone and feel absorbed. You can even sleep alone and, eventually, get used to the cool expanse of an unshared bed. But eating alone — particularly at home, particularly in the evening — that takes longer to settle.

I think this is because meals were never really about food. They were about the day’s debrief, the ordinary exchange of what happened and what might happen next. The table was where we convened. Without the other person, the table becomes furniture again. Just wood.

There’s a wider awkwardness too. The restaurant table for one, with the waiter’s momentary hesitation. The supermarket aisles stacked with meals for two, for four, for a family. The ‘dinner party’ — that peculiarly middle-class unit of social currency — from which the single person is gently, structurally, excluded. Or worse, included with pity, seated at the end.

I don’t think I fully understood how much of my social life had been organised around the couple until I was no longer part of one. Couples eat with couples. It’s one of the unspoken rules. A single man at a dinner table among couples is a problem to be solved — either a threat or a charity case, depending on the insecurity of the hosts. I learned to stop accepting those invitations quite quickly.

The change, when it came, wasn’t dramatic. There was no revelation over a perfectly seared steak. It crept in, the way most real changes do, through repetition and accident.

I remember a Sunday — maybe eighteen months in — when I decided to make a roast. Not because anyone was coming. Not to prove I could. I just wanted roast chicken, the kind with lemon and thyme pushed under the skin, potatoes done properly in goose fat, the kitchen filling with the smell of it for hours. I set the table. One place. A glass of red wine. I even put music on — not the radio filling silence, but something I’d chosen.

And somewhere during that meal, I noticed I was tasting the food. Not eating it to get through, not shovelling fuel while scrolling the news, but actually attending to what was on the plate. The crisp skin. The give of the potato. The wine — a Côtes du Rhône, nothing special — opening in the glass.

It sounds small. It was small. But it was the first time eating alone felt like something I was doing rather than something that was happening to me.

After that, other small shifts followed. I stopped turning the radio on at mealtimes. The quiet, which had been devastating, became a kind of space — not empty, but open. I started cooking things that interested me rather than things that were easy: a Moroccan tagine from a recipe I’d found online, a fish pie that took most of the afternoon. The effort wasn’t for anyone else’s benefit. It was mine. And the effort itself was a form of saying: I am still here. This life is worth a meal that takes all afternoon.

I began eating outside when the weather allowed, in the small garden behind the house, where I could hear blackbirds in the hedge and watch the light change. That was when I understood something I hadn’t expected: eating alone, done with attention, has a quality that eating with someone else doesn’t always have. You are entirely present. There’s no performance, no conversation to maintain, no negotiation of what to eat or when. Just you and the plate and the evening.

Image: Elizabeth Bishop: Courtesy www.poets.org

The poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote about loss as a practice — something you get better at through repetition, though she was being at least partly ironic. The art of losing, she called it, and the poem builds from small losses (door keys, an hour) toward the catastrophic ones (a continent, a loved one) with a formal control that both contains and intensifies the grief beneath.

I think eating alone is a cousin of this. A small daily loss you practise until it becomes a skill, and then something else entirely — not loss at all, but a form of attention. The discipline of noticing the unglamorous particular, as I’d put it in my own writing life. A plate of food. A glass of wine. The evening light. These things were always there; I just couldn’t see them when I was looking for what was missing.

Time passed, an evening when I cooked a piece of salmon with ginger and soy, rice, some greens from the greengrocer on the high street. Nothing elaborate. I ate at the table by the window with the garden beyond, the last of the daylight caught in the top of the hills.

The chair opposite was empty. It had been empty for a long time now, and I thought to myself, it will be empty tomorrow. But somewhere along the way it stopped being an absence and became just a chair, and the table stopped being a place where someone was missing and became a place where I sit, and eat, and pay attention.

The salmon was good. The greens were slightly overdone. The wine — a Picpoul, cold from the fridge — was exactly right.

Outside, a thrush was singing in the hedge, the same phrase repeated and repeated, the way a thrush does, testing each variation against the silence until something holds.

1. Art Work of the Week - Piazza Navona, Rome by Caspar van Wittel, 1699 - When I visited Rome last year, it was autumn, so there were fewer crowds and it was less hot than in the summer months. The best cities are walkable, and there is a lot of ground to cover in Rome, although the metro is excellent. One of the reasons I like Wittel’s painting is the glimpse it gives of ordinary people going about their business. I’m not sure what the two hooded figures in white outside the church are doing though.

2. An article that made me think - We might soon be speaking whaleish - Given the terrible harm being done to the world’s oceans, what would happen if we could understand what whales are saying? Researchers are now close to unravelling the code and we might be able to hear what whales are saying as soon as next year. Project Ceti is applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean. I dread to think what we will soon find out.

3. Something I learned this week - We are not ready to deal with the mental health implications of climate change - Climate change is already causing great harm to the natural world and many societies today. What I hadn’t fully grasped is the mental health toll it is exerts. Extreme heat is associated with mental health conditions such as suicide, anxiety, and substance use disorders. Despite the evidence of harm, a recent study shows that of 83 action plans for heat-related health problems, less than a third addressed mental health needs and only a fifth had an action plan. Our already struggling healthcare systems will soon have to grapple with further avoidable harm with all the downstream consequences for capacity and access. This is one more example of a failure for us to take the Long View.

4. Something happy - I went to see The Salt Path this week - Having read the book, I was worried the film might not do it justice, but my fears were groundless. Not only was the film able to sensitively reveal the difficulties Ray and Moth face (ill-health and homelessness), but it also reveals the wild beauty (and wild weather) the coastal path offers. I liked the ending too which, spoiler alert, left the couple still out there walking. Joyous and wonderful.

5. Where I found hope this week - The company of friends - I have written about loneliness and solitude and my journey from the first to the second. A critical part of my current happiness is derived from my friendships, many of which are relatively new. It’s not just about receiving comfort and support, it’s also about giving it. I have long maintained that kindness is a super-power, and there is plenty of evidence to back this up.

6. Something inspiring - Reading poetry aloud - I’ve done a couple of readings of my poetry in the last week. It’s a fun thing to do, not least because you often hear other poet’s work too. Reading a draft of your own poem aloud is essential - nothing reveals its little kinks in the same way. I found David Yezzi’s piece about Frost and sound fascinating and a reminder that writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound.

7. A poem to enjoy - The Whitsun Weddings by Phillip Larkin - I wrote about meeting Larkin while at university and how The Whitsun Weddings nudged me in the direction of writing poetry. The poem runs to eight, ten line stanzas, and displays Larkins acute eye for detail. It rounds off with another characteristic of Larkin’s poetry, moving from the particular to the universal. Larkin is always an unflinching observer.

8. A Substack to savour - Learning How Land Speaks by Peter Reason - Peter’s writes a series of posts sharing the theories, the experiences, and the practices arising from a series of co-operative inquiries exploring Living in a Sentient World. I particularly enjoyed this piece about the River Fowey and the reflections strike me as both poetic and deeply meaningful.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Bumbles Playlist - A friend asked me to put together a playlist and I went mellow. It was a really fun thing to do. Sometimes the old ones are the best ones.

I was a reasonable all-rounder academically at school, and my parents insisted warmly suggested I choose a degree course at university that would provide a gateway to a profession. I wasn’t so sure, as by then I was writing very bad poetry and for some obscure reason thought I would like to be a writer. Not in a serious or committed way; like many of my ideas about the future back then, it was a feeling rather than a plan. I thought English would be a great subject to study.

Unfortunately mum and dad didn’t agree and we had some lengthy conversations about my less than ideal choices. In the end I did a deal. I would do law so long as I could have a free hand in choosing the university. To their disgust I picked Hull, because at that time Philip Larkin was the librarian there.

I had an initial glimpse of The Great Man1 at a welcome lecture when he was wheeled out to speak to the freshers. Walking home that night I decided to find a way to meet him. Unfortunately, Larkin wasn’t one for mingling, and over the course of that first year it dawned on me that there was no way I was just going to bump into him.

I came up with a new plan - my Meet The Great Man Plan. I got a job working behind the bar at the Senior Common Room once or twice a week. This, I felt sure was bound to succeed. The money was useful as I enjoyed living it up buying law books. But no joy.

The end of term arrived, and the contractor running hospitality asked if I’d like to work for them over the summer break. I immediately agreed and was then more or less full time on functions. I also served every week day behind the bar of the SCR at lunchtime. Surely this would finally crack it.

The long summer weeks dragged by, and slowly my optimism dwindled. I was starting to be reconciled to never meeting The Great Man, and so, sadly, began my final week before the new academic year started. It was a Thursday, long after lunch, the SCR more or less empty. I was crouched behind the bar stocking up the mixers and shining glasses, when I felt rather than saw a shadow loom over me. I stood up and there, towering fifty feet above me was The Great Man. He was by then quite large, both tall and heavy. He was wearing his characteristic glasses and a three piece suit. I managed to squeak, ‘Dr Larkin, what can I get you?’

The Great Man paused, and when he spoke, it was with the seriousness and depth of meaning befitting a poet of genius. ‘A glass of red.’ The words settled in the room like thunder, the timbre of his voice rising from the depth of his magnificent soul.

‘Of course, er, any particular kind?’ This kind of sparkling repartee was sure to lure him in. He paused again, then looked at me steadily. Centuries passed in that moment, epochs dawned and fell, and there was almost certainly the sound of a French horn in the far distance.

‘Whatever gets me pissed most quickly.’

The Whitsun Weddings

Dad had a hardback copy of Elliot’s The Wasteland on the bookshelf at home. He also had a copy of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, so make of that what you will. As a teenager I would sit and leaf through The Wasteland, and while I certainly didn’t understand it, the sense of something irrevocably eroding or failing captured me. I came to The Wasteland when the punk revolution was just getting started. I sensed, but was perhaps too young to fully comprehend, that punk was a reaction to another kind of despair creeping over the UK at that time. And it was the first time I felt the power of poetry, not as something intellectual to admire, to try to understand, but as something merely to witness, to attend.

Frost told John Bartlett in 1913 that the best way to hear the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words. Frost was referring to how the soundscape of a poem informs our pre-conceptions of a poem through sound, well before we start to internalise what the words are trying to say. Elliot suggests genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood, and both of these ideas were working on me when I approached The Wasteland that first time.

It must have been later that summer when I bought The Whitsun Weddings. I can’t explain why: I think I liked the thinness of the book, its plain pale cover, the green typeface, its plainness. There was something approachable about a slim book, with relatively few words on each page. At home I flicked through the poems, almost certainly with The Stranglers’s Something Better Change playing on my cassette recorder. Some of the poems were easier than others. A few left me cold and I am ashamed to say now that The Whitsun Weddings poem was one of them.

It’s hard to remember why it didn’t appeal, but it’s quite possible it was its length. I remember I’d spent a few weeks trying and failing to love Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. I’m sure this was because I was in recovery from some very dull long poetry set for us at school. I think it erected what Billy Collins calls an anti-poetry deflector shield that came on line whenever I was presented with a long poem.

The Whitsun Weddings poem isn’t that long really, formed of eight, ten line stanzas. To my weakling teenage mind, it looked long though and I didn’t attend to it properly as a result. So it wasn't until a few months short of my seventeenth birthday, I thought I’d give it another go. The resulting experience turned me from what the young might call poetry-adjacent, to an all-in, fully paid up member of the poetry clan.

The first thing I noticed was that it rhymed, but with an effortlessness that felt like a charm, a species of magic. Then there was that weird, short second line in each stanza. What was going on there? It seemed to hold the rest of the poem back, to draw attention to itself. As I scanned the lines, with that odd little indent, I began to understand them as signposts, informing the reader when or where to stand. This is what I understand Richard Hugo to mean when he suggests in The Triggering Town, a poem should show the reader the ground to stand on.

The short lines are:

Not till about
For miles inland
The weddings made
Waving goodbye
Yes, from cafés
I nearly died
Bright knots of rail

Each of these lines tells us something about where we are, so the rest of stanza can take place. Then there are the images, bright and true which Larkin brushes with spare economy.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   
And someone running up to bowl—

I thought of London spread out in the sun,   
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

Finally, as in many of Larkin’s poems the poem swells gloriously from the particular to the universal.

We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

This poem convinced me to become a reader of poetry, and later, very hesitantly, a writer of poetry too. Poetry became my Swiss-army knife, a multifaceted, handy little tool for reasoning with life. I could pry open hurt or peel back the cover of distress and see what it looked like, what it wanted me to say. Over time this practice absorbed the pain, transformed it into something I could bear. Something I could even rhyme, or place into a form.

What survives?

So I’m glad I met The Great Man. We all have our flaws, but only a very few write as beautifully as he does. And his poetry helped to open the possibility of poetry for me, gave me a set of lenses to inspect the world with, a means of looking into the fire safely.

I often think of Larkin’s sadness, his loneliness and disappointment. How he sat in his chair each evening with a wooden writing board on his knees. How looking out into his room through his thick spectacles, he once saw an arrow shower sent out of sight somewhere becoming rain.

Perhaps Larkin’s greatest gift was looking unflinchingly at whatever was there. By refusing to turn away, he chose instead to find the words he needed to memorialise what he saw.

Why did he bother? I think it’s because he was, in some profound and uniquely Larkin way, in love with life.

And as the man says, what will survive of us is love.

1. Art Work of the Week - Island of Patmos by Ivan Alvazovsky, 1854 - Some people think the Book of Revelations was written on the island of Patmos - this was a place of exile in early Christianity. I’m heading off to Loutro (Crete) soon for a writing retreat and there’s a beautiful white chapel on the headland. Last year we walked up there one evening and lay on the large stone table and benches, allowing our eyes to adjust to the dark. After twenty minutes, the rods in the back of the eye are fully online and it was just amazing on that moonless light to glimpse the sea through the trees, the pale starlight reflecting back to us.

2. An article that made me think - Hunting London’s lost rivers - I’ve always been fascinating by the vanished, partly because one day, they might be rediscovered. London has many lost rivers, The Fleet, The Westbourne, The Tyburn among them. I love the fact, if you know where to stand, you can hear the The Fleet rushing underneath the street from a manhole cover on Ray Street. It made me think of U. A. Fanthorpe’s wonderful poem, Rising Damp, also referencing these lost rivers.

3. Something I learned this week - England’s Ghost Woodlands - It was encouraging to hear that parts of the Howgills in the Yorkshire Dales are being planted with trees. What was intriguing is that despite these once wooded hillside being de-forested though clearance and sheep farming rendering them devoid of anything but grass, the ghost of the old wood lives on. Bluebells are popping up and there are patches of bracken, which suggest the soils and seed banks retain the memory of being a woodland despite hundreds of years of sheep grazing.

4. Something happy - Edith Pritchett’s Venn diagrams - I stumbled on the wonderful Edith Pritchett’s Venn diagrams this week and I love them. The three published in the Guardian this week made me laugh out loud.

5. Where I found hope this week - A new concept for fighting climate change - Robert McFarlane’s recent book about rivers suggesting it is better to think of rivers as alive, seems to be gathering ground. Robin Wall Kimmerer a Potawatomi botanist argues the reason we don’t default to this way of talking about rivers and other natural features is fundamentally a linguistic problem. English uses ‘it’ for objects - thus ‘a river that flows’ not ‘a river who flows’. I’m going to see if I can get into the habit of using this new language in future. Coincidentally, I had a long chat with Angela Jones today, the driving force behind Save the River Usk. She is completely inspiring and has sunk huge amounts of her time and her own money into the terrible harms being perpetrated on our local river by the local Water Company. You can support Angela’s work by making a contribution here. She isn’t funded by anyone, and has a team of volunteer water samplers - but the reagents they need are expensive.

6. Something inspiring - A Glow in the Consciousness - Maria Popova’s entirely brilliant ‘The Marginalian’ gave me this little gem. Nan Shepherd was a Scottish mountaineer and poet and I read her memoir ‘The Living Mountain’ years ago. I was particularly taken by this thought ‘How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry?’ Exactly.

7. A poem to enjoy - Selling Watermelons by Andrei Voznesensky, translated by Edwin Morgan - Voznessensky was one of the poets who would perform in Mayakovsky Square to protest the post-Stalin regime in Moscow. It’s a reminder that poetry doesn’t have to be only lyrical or beautiful, it can also have a purpose. The way the poem zooms out to ‘the earth swings in its great string-bag / of meridians and latitudes!’ is magnificent.

8. A Substack to savour - Donald J. Robertson - Donald’s a cognitive-behavioural psychologist and writes books like ‘How to think like Socrates’. He makes the claim that in fact Stoicism is at the root of modern cognitive-behavioural therapy and since I’m always on the look out for decent life advice, it’s a brilliant addition to my reading list each week.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Hania Rani - There’s something weird about needing music that burrows into my head then calms me down. I find her music mesmerising and if you’ve not listened to her you could start with my playlist.