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.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

These lines from ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost were written for his friend Edward Thomas. The intense creative relationship which formed between Frost and Thomas in the months before the 1st World War, was formed near the town of Ledbury—now the home of the UK’s largest poetry festival.

They lived for a time in two cottages, three fields apart, and together they walked and talked as they crossed the fields, the woods and hills in the quiet Herefordshire and Gloucestershire countryside. It was during these long walks that Frost encouraged Thomas to consider himself a poet. Frost was sure the prose Thomas was writing had poetry within it.

By June 1915, Thomas was thirty-seven years old, and there was no expectation he should enlist. He nevertheless agonised about whether to join Frost on his return home to America, or to fight for his country. Frost intended ‘The Road Not Taken’ to be read as a playful dig at Thomas.

“The inspiration for it came from Frost’s amusement over a familiar mannerism of his closest friend in England, Edward Thomas. While living in Gloucestershire in 1914, Frost frequently took long walks with Thomas through the countryside. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a ‘better’ direction.”1

When Frost sent Thomas his poem, Thomas missed the ironic prod aimed his way, and read the poem as most do, as a lyrical, naturally symbolic poem. Thomas eventually signed up in 1915, and was killed shortly after arriving in France on 9th April 1917 at Arras when a shell passed through his body.

The road not taken by Thomas led to America, and the freedom to write as Frost did, while the path he chose led to his death.

We can’t see into the future, and none of us know where our paths will lead.

This is the truth of our human condition, that we must always choose and in doing so, be aware saying yes to one thing is always saying no to another. Thomas faced a bifurcation in the path ahead. In one direction lay a country far away from the industrialised killing in the trenches, one where no one (yet) feared the draft or the possibility of invasion—America.

The other direction, the path Thomas chose, buttressed by the abstract notion of duty, rose from another ideal. It is clear Thomas, a man who earned most of his living as a travel writer, wanted to protect, to stand for, the English countryside he knew so well.

In his 1916 poem ‘As the Team's Head Brass’ written in iambic pentameter (Shakespeares’ metre), Thomas depicts a narrator observing a farmer ploughing his fields using horses. Two lovers enter the woods and become hidden from view. The farmer and narrator strike up a conversation. ‘Have you been out?’ (meaning to the war in France) the farmer asks. ‘No’, the narrator replies. We imagine the farmer raising his eyebrows.

…  "And don’t want
to, perhaps?”
“If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more.

Thomas, the poet, wrestling with the consequential decision he has to make. The narrator asks the farmer:

… "Have many gone
From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him."

Thomas couldn’t know what his fate would be, that he would be killed days after finally landing in France himself. The farmer continues to reflect:

… "It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.”
“And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.”

Choice and consequence

When I was in the dark place, I couldn’t see any light. The tunnel led down all the way to the centre of the earth, there was no light to see. I just walked, and over weeks, then days, then years, I slowly discovered a new path. When I said to my friend it was like a light had been switched on in the dark tunnel, it was the moment when I began to see the future, however hazy and dim it still was.

I believe in very few absolutes. My outlook tends toward possibility, rather than dogma—my reaction to my Catholic upbringing may have something to do with this. Whenever I have taken the Myers Briggs test, however, it suggests I am more than usually prone to thinking big and in new directions, so maybe this is an innate part of who I am.

There are, however, a couple of beliefs I hold onto. The first is what you put out into the world comes back to you, precisely because you don’t expect it to.

I believe kindness is a superpower, the cost of which is free but whose value is beyond measure. There are many ways I see small kindnesses returning unbidden, and it makes me feel happier to be kind anyway. The real magic lies in offering kindness in a non-performative manner—it is best offered without expectation, and unobserved by none other than the subject of your kindness. Sometimes, even without their knowledge.

The reverse logic holds: I think mean people eventually tend to find themselves friendless, or at the very least, diminished.

My second ‘truth’ is this—don’t be a victim. If you’ve read my previous posts, you might be surprised at this. Weren’t the times I’ve described feeling lonely and in despair precisely because I played the role of victim?

My answer to this quite reasonable charge is no. The loneliness I felt was a consequences of decisions that were made. I didn’t choose the situation I found myself in, but I was there anyway.

The hardest part was learning to park the confusion, and then to look away from the past. As the man said, to wake up and live the life I want to live, not someone else’s.

We can all do with a bit of help along the way

When my friend, the poet Lynette Thorstensen, invited me to join a conversation with a small group of fellow dreamers, I had no idea where the conversation would lead. None of us did.

Over the months, we began to shape our ideas and eventually we decided to set up Néos Delta. Our analysis is that the world needs transformation—néos, new, novel, fresh and —delta, change. The big idea is to run retreats, always with the guiding idea of a transformation. This might be transformation at the community, organisation or personal level.

At our first meeting, we were all asked to say why we were interested in being part of the conversation, what drew us in. For me, there were two aspects.

The first was an opportunity to find renewed meaning and purpose in my life. The second, emerged in a straight line from this first thought and was the realisation that despite retiring from the world of work, I still had energy and a desire to affect change. In that very first conversation I talked about the strange way that a retirement conventionally meant stepping away from things, just when you had the requisite wisdom to make your best decisions.

We all felt the same way, even those still fully in their working journey. There are always thresholds, moments when we make a choice about which way to go.

The 3rd Act of a story is the best bit, where all the juiciest action takes places. It is the climax. When I thought about retirement, there was something radical about re-framing this story in a new way. It didn’t have to be beige, but instead I could write myself a fitting and suitably climactic 3rd Act.

The idea that it is possible to reclaim the future changed everything for me. When the light in the tunnel switched on again, I found there were choices I never thought were possible.

What’s Next? — Clarity and Purpose in Your Third Act

We are running a 3rd Act retreat this October. Honestly, this is a retreat I would go on if I wasn't already involved. Erina Reddan and I will be hosting a small group in Being Saatva, a beautiful and inspiring luxury eco-resort in Bali. Our goal is to help people discover their path, one that leads them to the future they choose. I’m not selling here, but I am sharing, because I’m surprised at what happens when you make saying yes the default attitude.

I also want to illustrate a new journey can begin, even when it feels as though the light of the future has been turned off.

Hope—a non-negotiable requirement for happiness

When I consider how I found a route out of the dark place, it seems fully a mystery that it led to the life I lead today. The reason I started writing these posts is because I hope that whatever I learned might be useful to someone else. I’m back to the idea of putting things into the world here, without any expectation of return.

The world is currently short on hope too. Rediscovering the link between hope and happiness was a revelatory process for me. I could never have mapped my way to the life I’m in now, I just had to keep on walking.

I think of Thomas at his battery in the ruins of Arras, the choice he made. What he might have been able to achieve if he had taken another road and the pleasure we would all have had as a consequence, reading his work.

I wish he had decidedly differently, for his family, for his future readers, but mostly for him. I prefer to imagine him back home out on his long walks, his mind noting the small things and the large things, then knitting something profound and beautiful from them for us to share.

And so I choose to carry on walking, not knowing where it will lead. Hoping it will be somewhere good.

1. Art Work of the Week - Houses at Auvers by Vincent Gogh, 1890 - Vincent led a pretty miserable life, never learning how loved his work would become. It’s a reminder that a creative person needs to enjoy the process of creating work as much as the outputs. I really love Austin Kleon’s books, and Keep Going is a favourite. As Austin says today is the only day that matters. Thanks also to Austin for giving me the idea for this newsletter. His Substack is great. I was over in Ledbury the other day, a place strongly associated with the Dymock Poets. Edward Thomas is a poet who didn’t live long enough to see how influential his work would be.

2. An article that made me think - In my later years I want to embrace valour - Sheila Hancock - What a marvellous article this is. Sheila reflects on two stories of people enduring terrible suffering, whom despite everything, remained unflinchingly positive about the future. One 92-year old man fell and shattered bones in his hip and leg. Refusing to give up, he battled back to mobility. Sheila writes how on the day he left the nursing home to return to his own house, she wanted to form a guard of honour and blow a bugle fanfare as he leaves, to celebrate his dogged valour. He will not be defeated. It’s another version of keeping going and look forward to the 3rd Act of my life.

3. Something I learned this week - Are there moose in the New Zealand Fiorlands? - I’m fascinated when the vanished seem to re-appear, like the story of the Little Lady of Flores. Myths associated with the Fiorlands, the remote, mountainous and heavily forested area of the South Island abound. It seems ten moose were released over a century ago in an attempt to create a hunting opportunity. They sank from view and the last potential sighting is a blurry photograph from 75-years ago. The takahē, a large flightless bird was thought to be extinct until it was recently re-discovered, so maybe there are still moose out there? Stories like these give me the shivers.

4. Something happy - The fields are yellow - after the daffodils of spring, the fields around my home are filled with buttercup and dandelion. It’s been dry and sunny, which after a long, grey winter seems to have driven energy into the wildflowers. If you find just the right place, there are plenty of Marsh Orchids too.

5. Where I found hope this week - The wonders of Wales - Wales has, like a lot of the UK, an industrial heritage. Many of the old industries are gone, and the scars they have left in the landscape take time to heal. But they do heal, and nature is waiting for us to just give it a chance. These photos capture the wild and windswept severity of what’s emerging.

6. Something inspiring - Humans dressed as bears - No, really. A tiny orphaned black bear cub was found alone in the California woods and taken to the San Diego Humane Society. To help him adjust to the wild, staff wear bear costumes so he doesn’t bond with humans. This unique approach aims to prepare the cub for a life in nature. And how wonderful the world has people who will take the trouble.

7. A poem to enjoy - Song for Refugees by Philip Metres - Borrowing the form used by Robert Frost in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Metres creates a delicate, beautiful soundscape for his poem addressing the plight of refugees. ‘The oud’s a lovely ark that leaks / with tales and bromides we can’t keep, / and miles of ghosts before their sleep. / And miles of ghosts beneath our sleep.’ Wonderful.

8. A Substack to savour - A Time and a Place, Helen Mort - Helen’s a terrific British poet and I’ve been enjoying her articles about her trip to Iceland. It’s thanks to Helen I also learned about Solastalgia. I definitely suffer from this.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Lonely - Nils Hoffman (Feat. Rae Morris) - I’m a terrible sucker for anthems, or at least the anthemic. This track swells in just the right way with the correct amount of melancholy. I love the fact the boffins reckon sad music can make us happy.

When COVID struck, I was living in Qatar, helping the country prepare for the World Cup. Qataris are a minority in their own land, accounting for about 10% of the country’s population of some 3 million people.

They are of course full citizens and everyone else is a migrant worker of one kind or another. The vast majority are single male workers from countries like Nepal and Bangladesh who are accommodated in huge camps in the desert. The city of Doha (and everything else) was built by these workers, and everyday the orange uniformed men are bussed in and out of the city’s various building projects.

It was into this context that COVID arrived. No one knew how lethal or contagious the virus was initially. The country sealed the workers in the camps and crossed its fingers.

The average Qatari is extremely wealthy, and all enjoy a lavish lifestyle. The riches from gas extraction are distributed among the elites, but there is plenty that flows into the pockets of the average Qatari. Perhaps because of a sense of privilege, there was an almost immediate push back to the idea of a lockdown and the response was swift.

The compulsory ID cards everyone was assigned on entry were matched to a health status app which tracked any contact with a COVID positive patient. The app was either Green (all good) or Amber (get tested) or Red (stay at home).

In practice, this enabled society to very quickly get back to a state that was fairly near to normal. All the malls, restaurants and hotels had security staff on the door. To gain entry you needed to show you had a Green status on the app.

I will return to the story of COVID in Qatar in a subsequent post.

Coming home everything seemed changed

When I came back to the UK after the worst of COVID had passed, I entered a country I struggled to understand.

For one thing, there were the dramatic lockdowns, particularly the first. Everyone I met wanted to tell me about empty motorways, towns that echoed to bird song but were otherwise silent. There was that spell of fine weather when the countryside suddenly seemed beautiful and present in a strikingly new way. Bubbles were formed and of course there were the dreadful tragedies too, families unable to be with loved ones who died.

All of this was alien to me. My experience of COVID in Qatar was radically different, and although some terrible things happened, life for the most part was not very much changed. The workers’s experience was different however, and I will return to this in another post too.

I think the experience of COVID in the UK burned a scar into everyone who lived through it. No doubt this is why the Party-gate scandal was so deadly to Boris. But I felt something else, something that seemed to have tilted while I was away.

Yearning for return

Throughout the broiling summers in Qatar, I longed to return home. There were many aspects to this. The ability to get in a car and drive anywhere you wanted. The freedom to say what I thought openly in public. Family, friends and a normal life.

I longed to able to walk into the Welsh countryside, sit quietly in a wood under leaves, or climb a wind wracked hill and clamber over the rocks. The green stink of a stiff sea breeze, the sound of gulls wheeling overhead.

I spent far too many hours on Rightmove imagining a new home, an idealised landing spot for the next phase of my life.

In short, I yearned.

The first morning after I got home, I went for a short walk up the hill to the castle and the wood beyond. It was grey December, cool with showers of lead. I walked over a field and into the wood, and heard and saw nothing apart from a buzzard, three magpies and some crows.

I got home feeling dispirited.

The landscape didn't feel alive, had few signs of life. Of course I was ignoring the life everywhere in view, the trees, the beautiful green fields. But I just couldn't see it. I wanted birdsong and foxes and instead got an ugly brown river in flood, ploughed fields and a feeling of emptiness I couldn't shake.

Travelling in good times

One of the great privileges of time spent in the Gulf is its proximity to parts of the map that are less easy to explore from the UK. Qatar is also a very small country, and once you’ve visited its few places of interest, you’re just left with malls and restaurants.

Getting out of Qatar regularly is essential.

As a couple we became frequent travellers, and visited many beautiful and fascinating locations. I know, not very green. Airports became portals to other worlds, doorways into extraordinary experiences.

I loved everything about the journey, from researching a destination to travelling to the airport, even the flight. The arrivals process was always fascinating, your first small window on a new country. Then outside, the light fell differently, buildings spoke in new languages and all the details, roadsigns, shop fronts, places of worship fresh and new.

The bad times

Once I found myself alone, I decided to visit my son and booked a flight. His particular brand of happy is a joy to be around, and it’s always low key and relaxed with him.

At the airport, I experienced a new level of loneliness. This wasn’t one more level, it felt as though I crashed through all the way to the bottom. I was accustomed to travelling with someone at my side, but now all I could see was all the other couples who looked like we once did. It took me years to get past the sense of dread an airport caused me.

Looking back to look forward

The country I live in has changed. I left for Qatar in 2016, a few weeks before the first Trump presidency and a few months after the referendum that took the UK out of the EU. When I came home, the country had also endured the further seismic calamity of COVID.

The country I yearned for while I was away, was the country of my childhood. It was a time when the now empty fields were thronged with lapwing, when I would have found thrushes, yellowhammers and curlews everywhere. The dissonance I felt was partly because I had to experience the diminution of our natural environments as if on a reel fast forwarding into real time.

That older country was also a kinder, less savage place, much less polarised and with a settled idea of itself and its values. There was a greater degree of trust in institutions, the newspapers, churches, courts, even governments. Satire was biting but never merely cruel. It was no golden age, there was still discrimination and poverty and inequality, but we were making progress. Through the 1970’s, progressive legislation rolled back centuries of unfairness. Living standards were rising along with life expectancy.

Returning from Qatar brought the change that swept over us in the period between 2016 and 2020 into focus. And as I began to reckon with this new situation, my personal world spun away into a new orbit too.

All the walking away I have done since the time of my separation, the long tramps into the countryside without an aim, have over time allowed me to acquire perspective. I can now see though I was walking away from unhappiness, I was also walking toward something too.

Through the dark tunnel

Tomorrow is another country just as much as the past. In many ways it is far stranger, because the past is always there in our memories. The future, well, who knows?

I was talking to a new friend recently and I said to her that I felt like a light has been switched back on in the dark tunnel. Meaning I was beginning to imagine a future for myself that realistically was not lonely. To some extent this is mere extrapolation. I am not lonely now, so why would I think the future would be?

But the light also shone with a more generalised hope. Is it possible that all the traumas the world has recently been experiencing might lead somewhere better? Doesn’t a pendulum always swing the other way?

When the future seems bleak, it is the often past I yearn for. Coming home helped me see the past is never really lost. If I can remember, doesn’t that mean in a way, the past is still here? Maybe the past lives on the way the buried rivers of London do. In the dark, occasionally spilling from a culvert to puddle tarmac streets.

And without memory what are we to do?

Well, we can certainly make new memories, and these days I look forward to trips abroad, even when I’m alone. I have recovered the art of entering another world, and look forward to whatever it may teach or show. Increasingly I think of this as entering the 3rd Act of my life, a story which is now mine to write.

The desire to remember is, I realise, what draws me to poetry. Poetry is a memory encoding system, locking a few resonant words together to preserve a feeling, a moment, a time. When we read John Clare’s description of a field mouse, or a familiar pond, we not only see the world as he did, we share it.

And isn’t what we share that makes us who we are?

1. Art Work of the Week - Cicada by Seiju Omoda, 1930

   Sometimes the best things are very simple. A subdued palette and the tiny cicada resting on a stem. I love the contrast in the leaves, the paler, serrated edges and the gentle green inside. Omoda wrote: “Elements like coldness or the atmosphere of a frosty morning are difficult to express in a painting. We can only depict form, and by accumulating forms, we evoke feeling, sense, and atmosphere.” This is very like the way form works in poetry, which contains tracks in a snowy field.

2. An article that made me think - AI is not your friend by Mike Caufield

   As a poet and writer I am worried by the progress AI is making - is progress the right word? Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, consciousness, the ability to feel things, and Yuval Harari suggests we stop using the term Artificial Intelligence and instead refer to it as Alien Intelligence. In Caufield’s article, he discusses how the latest version of ChatGPT was designed to be better at guiding conversations toward productive outcomes but ended up being so excessively sycophantic the model had to be taken down. ChatGPT told one user their idea to sell ‘shit on a stick’ was ‘genius’. This exposes where the danger lies: instead of a means to review what others have said about an issue, it instead delivers an opinion. Caufield suggests a rule: no answers from nowhere.

3. Something I learned this week - New ways to pull uranium from water

   Nuclear energy is costly, not least because uranium must be mined. The world’s oceans hold an estimated 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium – more than 1000 times that available to mining – but it is extremely dilute. The ability to unlock something so powerful, but also potentially destructive reminds me of Nick Bostrom’s essay: Is there a black ball in the urn of possible inventions?

4. Something happy - The river running through my town

   I am lucky enough to live five minutes from the river running through my town. It means I can round off any day with a stroll along its banks. Right now, with spring so fully and abundantly on show, each time I stroll beside the river, all of my senses are engaged.

5. Where I found hope this week - How a simple walk can bust stress, boost cognition and fight diseases

   I try and walk every day, and find it has a lot of surprising benefits, so it was great to read that science back this up. However, there’s a fascinating wrinkle: the route you choose is also important. Maybe it’s time for another walk in the woods?

6. Something inspiring - Tales from the Camino

   My friend and colleague Andrew Olivier has written about his experience of walking the Camino. My friend Sarah has just returned from her own trip and looks healthy and happy. Like many other stories I’ve heard about the route, during the long walk towards Santiago, the sense of a spiritual dimension creeps up on you. A pilgrimage is always a walk to somewhere, not the walking away.

7. A poem to enjoy - Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams

   I love this poem. It made me think of times when I’ve danced a happy jig. The contrast between ‘I am lonely, lonely’ and ‘the happy genius of my household’ is delicious.

8. A Substack to savour - Sam Harris

   Sam is a public intellectual, one of the four horsemen behind the new atheism movement that started with their conversation in 2007. He is both an experienced mindfulness practitioner (he is behind the Waking Up app), having studied in Nepal and India for years, and a neuroscientist. He takes on controversial subjects, and while I don’t agree with everything he say, his podcast (Making Sense) and writing always make me think. Sam also offers both his podcast and meditation for free to anyone who can’t afford to pay.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Summertime Blues by Zach Bryan

   I started watching Yellowstone on Netflix and stayed the course for two reasons. The landscape of Montana is rendered beautifully and I enjoy a little window on that world. The second is the music: I have never considered myself to be a Country and Western fan, but some of those tunes are just so good. I made a playlist of my favourites.

‘“Fathoms down, behind my eyes …’

Go on, she smiles. ‘Maybe it’s where

the me in me, survives.’”1

When you say yes to one thing, you say no to another.

There’s an opportunity cost involved in making choices, not least the time you commit you will never get back. But when I was at my loneliest, it was the opportunity itself that vanished. Each day looked the same, and many might pass without anyone to say a word to.

This was a world I found bewildering. I was in this unwelcome and unexpected situation, stuck in a town I didn’t know, and very alone. There was only cost, and I was paying dearly.

Loneliness is something you don’t choose, that is my experience. Choice is the main difference between loneliness and solitude. You can choose to exit solitude, but loneliness remains unbroken until circumstances change.

I didn’t understand this at first. Loneliness merged with all the other forms of emotional distress a sudden separation causes. If asked I would use words like ‘abandoned’ or ‘left’. But these are verbs, not nouns, and by focusing on those words I was emphasising the cause, not the effect.

It took weeks to fraction my pains into something clearer. Sadness engulfed me, but in the end, what was I sad about? The loss of a future seemed the best answer at first, though the future hasn’t happened yet. The future is only an idea, a dream, that’s all.

So that wasn’t the whole story.

Was it the loss of friendship, companionship, love? This seemed closer to the source. When I thought about friendship, companionship and love, I could see these were qualities weighted with the loss of a single, important relationship. I still had family and friends, even if none lived nearby.

The ache I felt included loss, but emptied of that single, important relationship, my life continued. I had not lost everything, I still had my health and the natural environments I walked into every day, the people who still liked or loved me.

Whatever I did, however, I was doing alone. There were questions:

Who was I staying fit and healthy for?

Who was there to listen to how my day had gone?

Who cared what I ate or drank?

Who knew if I made the bed, even got out of bed?

It took months for me to realise that loneliness was at the root of all my suffering. But once I understood this, there were remedies.

The stoic discipline of yes

Why stoic?

Because I first had to create the circumstances for saying yes.

If I stayed at home, hoarding my loneliness, ruminating about my spectacular bad luck, then tomorrow was already written. There would be no change in the pattern.

The first step involved becoming vulnerable, opening myself to the possibility of further rejection and humiliation. When my confidence is low, I find it hard to believe anyone could be interested in anything about me. It’s easier to stay at home and feel sad than to risk adding to the sum of woes.

This is a logical and spiritual dead end.

I reasoned this through. Just because I was alone today, didn’t mean there hadn’t been plenty of times in my life when I was anything but lonely. But if I was to change my circumstances, I therefore had to change what I was doing with my day.

This might sound entirely obvious. All I can say is that peering up at the world from the bottom of a very deep pit, none of it seemed straightforward. It took courage to clamber out and start trying. I felt vulnerable because the person I would become in this new life was to still to emerge. I was prior-me, not current-me, and the prior-me had been abandoned and felt sad. Rejected.

When I looked at the world through this rejected lens, I imagined everyone saw straight through me, as if the reasons (there are always reasons) for being alone were on show, that I would be judged.

Wearing a new suit

It helped to remember an old me, the work-me.

That me was there to be shot at as the CEO of several high profile public organisations. I learned over the years to accept the criticism, but that it was aimed at work-me, not the home-me. Both were present, but the home-me was protected by a suit of armour, the business suit I put on each day before leaving for the office. This dressing up symbolised the act of becoming work-me.

Over the years, ‘dressing for battle’ became a ritual. I left home wearing a shirt and jacket, and driving to work I prepared myself for the day ahead.

At the end of the day, the sequence reversed. The first thing I did at home was to take off my suit, and with it I learned to shed the worries and difficulties of the day.

Getting started

I started volunteering and joined a couple of local groups. The fact I was giving my time for free was welcomed.

Of course it was.

To get started, I didn’t exactly turn into work-me, but I prepared myself a shield. If I was not wanted then this would simply be a rejection of the part of me I volunteered. The mental dressing up trick allowed me to start building a new life in my community.

Congruence and authenticity

I’m no psychologist, but even I can see there’s a potential pitfall here. Who are all the me’s for a start? Surely they are all the same person. And if they’re not, aren’t I faking it, being less than authentically myself?

My answer is yes and no.

Yes, because as far as I can tell, I don’t have any serious mental pathology. I don’t think I have a split personality, and I understand these selves to be more like roles than separate personalities.

No, because I think circumstances change the way we are. If I am scared I’ll act a certain way, and this will probably not look like the same behaviour I show to the world when I’m happily among friends.

At the bottom of who I am, there are simply truths. These are my beliefs and values. It’s true that over time, these evolve, but at any moment, now for instance, I hold certain things to be true.

Beyond these truths, there are only circumstances. And circumstances change, as King Cnut will tell you.

1. Art work of the week - Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds, Martin Johnson Heade, 1871

   There’s a weird beauty to Heade’s painting, the colours so vivid, like a window into a new, brighter, even lurid world. I went for a walk along the river that runs through my town after a day trapped at my desk. I was feeling out of sorts and still ruminating about my day. Then after about 30 minutes I felt myself begin to calm and notice what was around me. It was early evening and I realised there were lots of butterflies, so I stopped, and tried to name them. They were peacocks, and the four little eyes on their wings made me think of this painting. Pale sunlight refracted through a kaleidoscope. Beautiful.

2. An article that made me think - Is this river alive? Robert Macfarlane on the lives, deaths and rights of our rivers

   What if the river that runs through my town is alive? The river Usk and the valley it runs has been home for me the last ten years. I often walk along the river banks taking in the quiet beauty. A traditional Welsh poem, Mi Gerddaf Gyda Thi, encapsulates the feeling I get when I’m fully absorbed:

   “I will walk with you across distant paths
   Flowers and dreams will bless our journey
   Into your eyes I will gaze and holding your hand
   I will walk with you whatever may come"

   The lines are often used at weddings, but I also feel profoundly paired with this river. Sadly, the Usk is now threatened by pollution, particularly overflows that discharge raw sewage into the river. I can’t help thinking McFarlane has a point. If we gave the river personality, saw it as alive, would we still treat it this way?

3. Something I learned this week - I live in a WEIRD society

   Happiness is surprisingly hard to measure. Reading this article, I discovered that social scientists define the society I live in as Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). Never a truer word, eh? Still I was struck by one of the central conclusions:

   “In Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, the pursuit of happiness often takes center stage.”

   The pursuit of happiness, an entirely subjective perspective. Instead of pursuing happiness, why don’t we stay in the moment and look for contentment there?

4. Something happy - Sir David Attenborough is 99

   When I shared this article with a friend, they shot back a quick ‘Oh no!’ assuming he had died. No, he has not, thank goodness. Instead this article includes birthday wishes and reflection on the great man, everyone from Obama to Billie Eilish. Sir David has been a constant, wise and enthusiastic (for nature) presence all my life. Reading this article I was moved to tears. Truly, he is a hero.

5. Where I found hope this week - We’ve been thinking about love all wrong

   Suleika Jaooud writes about what illness taught her about true friendship. She tells the story of her own cancer journey and that of an older fellow cancer patient, Anjali, she met while undergoing chemotherapy. Present at Anjali’s death, she movingly describes the deep friendship they developed, and the grace she felt attending Anjali’s passing. She talks about ‘the radical power of seeing, understanding, and showing up for another human.’ She says the lesson she took was learning to ‘Be fully present, listen, give of yourself to another human.’

6. Something inspiring - Spring!

   We’ve been experiencing unusually settled weather in Usk. The days have been sunny and if not always warm, at least an invitation to get outside and walk. Everywhere I look spring is wildly in flow. The hawthorns are so heavy with blossom it looks like it snowed. On the river banks, wild flowers are doing their thing. Red clover and buttercups everywhere. The rich green grass sprinkled with jewels.

7. A poem to enjoy - Eulogy for the Cantina on Chapel St. that’s transformed into another bank by Kinsale Drake

   Poetry doesn’t have to be complicated. I love the misdirection in the poem’s title though, as the poem is actually set in a Taco Bell, the poet remembering her mother. The poetry is in the memory of another time, a reminder that time passes and we move forward until the end, eventually leaving those we love behind.

   ‘ … We are all here

   for the same reasons, aching toward

   what we desire most: a drunken gaze,

   shaking the winter from our hair,

   remembering a mother’s taco shells

   and refusing to wipe away the grease.’

8. A Substack to savour - Jane Hirshfield

   A poet I admire, Hirshfield’s articles are usually informative and open doors to poets I haven’t read. In her piece on the multiple crises we face right now she asks: How is it a few ink marks on a page, a few words that stay in memory to be drawn from, can feel like a well of clear water; sometimes, a life rope? We need handholds, ways to grip a sense of normality, norms we trust in, living as we do through these times of tumult. I’m looking forward to her next article which she says will discuss her belief in four qualities of feeling that I find seed-strengths in times of duress: tenderness, courage, humility, resilience.

9. Music I enjoyed this week - Three + by Four Tet

   When I’m working I like to have music playing in the background. Often this turns into aural wallpaper, and frankly I’m not listening. I started this way with Four Tet. But then I started to wake up to the rhythms in their music. Beats (rhythms) are why I also love the Endel app. The science behind the app’s manifesto is impressive. It seems sound has a profound impact on us, affecting basic physiological responses, like heart rate and blood pressure, as well as concentration, and sleep quality. Back to Four Tet: the track that fully captured my attention and made me listen properly to their music is Three Drums. There’s something elegiac about the track that’s hard to put my finger on, but like Wodwo, I’ll go on looking.

Think of a time when you woke up after a heavy fall of snow.

Maybe you're surprised when pulling back the curtains. The hedge at the end of the garden slumps into smooth new shapes. No paths, roofs along the street no longer tiled, the sky strangely luminous.

There's a new stillness emanating from the severe white scene. A crow flaps away sharpened, rows of graphic poles and wires slice into softness.

What is that feeling you have?

Childish excitement?

Awe?

Bewilderment?

Pleasure?

Putting on your boots, a coat and scarf you push open the door. Bird tracks scrawled across the vanished lawn. Steam rises from your mouth.

It is quiet.

A first step, a squeak of snow under your heel. In the street, tyre tracks, a touch of brown sludge. The air feels chilly as you climb over the fence at the edge of the field. The hill falls away toward trees in the wood. No one came this way today.

You are free to make your mark on the snowy field.

Writers on the edge of a snowy field

This is what it's like as a writer when you sit in front of an empty page. The whiteness is still, but there is a force in the void's severity you can feel. In your mind, you feel a pressure to write, to place some words on the page.

To make tracks.

After writing for a while, I stop and review what I've written. If you are a poet you begin looking for any signs of life. Is there an image you've stumbled across that animates what you're attempting to say?

An image which now lives in the field, among the tracks you've made. This image is alive in a way the other words are not: the image animates the words you strive to breathe into life.

Let’s call them image-creatures. Glyn Maxwell has another take on this, and he writes beautifully about the faum of a poem.

You continue this way for some time. You move backwards and forwards across the field.

Soon, there are a lot of tracks.

You decide to leave the field for the day. Tomorrow will come, and there may be a light dusting of snow. Then, you’ll see the shadow of all the tracks you've made, but you notice where you've trodden more carefully, more fully. There seems to be a pattern to these tracks, a certain uniformity of pacing or conviction.

These tracks lead somewhere, you're not sure where, not yet.

You're pleased to find one or more image-creatures have endured the night. Dusting the snow from their backs, they look back at you, searchingly. You have a feeling of tenderness towards them. They appear to want to help you find what you're looking for. So you approach them, examine the pelt on their back, their shape and size more carefully.

Encouraged, you press on, making tracks a little further down the field. You look back from time to time, and sometimes the image-creatures gesture to other shapes that until then you had neglected to see. They are sisters of the image-creatures and offer you further help.

Soon, you arrive at the edge of the wood and inside, a path leads to a glade. This feels like the place you needed to find. You spend some time looking around, assessing the qualities of this new place. After a while, you leave and return home.

The end of the beginning of a first draft

This is the end of the beginning of a first draft of a poem. In this phase, you have been exploring, looking for a destination and to discover what, if anything, is alive in that place.

When I was in the early stages of mourning for the relationship I had lost, I spent many hours crossing plenty of fields in the snow. Often, I never found the glade I was looking for and returned home, glad for the exercise but unsure if there was anything new that was alive.

From time to time, I found a place I was interested in, curious about. On the way there, I would find a few live image-creatures that seemed at home in that world.

The tracks in the field were a mess however, and with a heavy fall of snow, perhaps over the next week or weeks, the direction in which they led might be lost.

What I needed now was a map, clear directions and a way to remember both the way there and what I'd seen.

Building a map and directions and a way to remember them is the work the poet does to move the tracks of a first draft into a stable form.

There are new questions I ask myself now.

• Was I running across the field? Or was the way there circuitous and leisurely?

• Were the creature-images I found at home in a quiet, reflective environment, or something more disquieting, combustible or fragmentary?

• What was the light like in that field? Sunset, sunrise, grey and flat or piercingly blue?

• Was it windy with clouds flinging the shade around?

• Did this place feel surprising and unexpected, or did it feel familiar?

• How will I remember the way there?

• How will I invite other people to explore this space?

• And how will I help them remember the way?

These questions and more make up the work of editing the poem for memorability, stability and to ensure the image-creatures have somewhere they will feel at home.

Setting the way into memory

We have moved from exploration to setting the way into memory. Finding the right form for a poem is not always straightforward, and I will experiment with several potential habitats (forms) for the image-creatures. I'll listen for signs from the image-creatures about whether they feel happy and alive in any of them.

When I'm editing a poem at this stage in its journey to something (hopefully) memorable, I lean on the forms poets discovered over the centuries as they walked into their own snowy fields.

Any form is in a wrestling match with two elements in the poem. The snowy field and the tracks we make on the snowy field.

Some poems require more snow to be left untouched. Others long for fence posts and a sense of containment. We often need containment; the snowy field is one field within a vast universe of snow.

The vastness is not inert because it is endless. Anything that is endless is outside of a mortal realm. For us to grapple with infinity (death), we erect our corrals and our stables and our farmyards. In these confined spaces, we build something we can call home.

Using a strict form, one that has rules, (like a sonnet for instance), forces us to pay attention to the fences. If there are any rules in poetry, they are surely about writing memorably. Centuries of effort and craft have refined forms compatible with embedding poetry in the human heart.

Rhyme, rhythm and metre, stanza length, line breaks, among many more, are the poetic memorability codes poets learn to use.

Form and self-healing

In the depths of sadness and despair, I would walk out into those snowy fields regularly. Making tracks helped me to confirm I was still here, and to show, if only to myself at first, I was still interested in purpose and meaning.

There was a certain therapeutic value to this work, based simply on letting out whatever was there inside. I allowed all the hurt and confusion to lead me over the snowy field.

The real value of a poetry practice to me in the heat of my despair was when I started to make sense of the tracks I'd made by using form. Form enabled me to regulate the wild, emotional energy, partially confining or containing it. Then I was no longer overwhelmed, and it was easier to make sense of where the tracks lead, and what the glade in the wood meant.

Form helped me to distance myself from the power of the emotions I was feeling. The best way I can describe this is to compare this to Chernobyl.

The reactor cores melted and, from the shattered and broken reactor house, lethal radiation pours into the air. To approach it directly is dangerous, and likely to be toxic.

I must build a shield and then a container to approach the fire's source more safely.

Certainly, if I am inviting anyone else to approach the inferno, I have a responsibility to lead them to a room with a safe observation window.

Poetry, Purpose and Meaning

Writing poetry in the midst of despair or other distressing human condition, is partly about honouring what it means to be human. Being human means being in a relationship with time.

Some philosophers (e.g. Heidigger) believe that the source of all discontent and unhappiness is the awareness of our own mortaility. As we know our time is finite, they argue, any loss of purpose or meaning has an existential quality.

Writing poetry helps to derive meaning from our suffering. This is what all artists do, and poetry is no different. By reflecting on our discontents and translating the emotional and intellectual landscapes (snowy fields) into something beautiful and memorable, is meaningful and the attempt to do is purposeful.

There are stages in most lives when the purpose and meaning of a life can be questioned. In those moments, it can be useful to turn (or return) to a writing practice and walk out into the snowy field.