Messages
4/3/2022
5 : 44
haven
My Italian is poor but I recognise the sense of what Morag is saying: she came here as a child, 20 years ago, and she will be back again in October to host a retreat. We are in rural Italy, in a
12/31/2021
10 : 34
new
Some days ago, I took a new notebook - a small, bendy-backed sketchbook - and wrote “2” “0” “2” “2” on its third page. Lists and notes to self sprawled quickly beneath, then swift lines to separate
12/16/2021
8 : 24
ribbon
Yesterday, I self-soothed by buying ribbon. Went out to the post office and found myself in the haberdashers, picking colours and thicknesses behind a woman talking, at great length, about how she
7/17/2021
9 : 54
seaweed
We arrive to blistering blue and talk over open books as the tide pulls out. At first, only the small cars try the wet road beneath the sea. Then the minutes pass and with them come the vans and the
5/5/2021
16 : 54
and sun
The showers arrived, and they were late. In April the soil was cold and hard. Cracks appeared underfoot, small and thirsty valleys. We took to train to Hertfordshire and walked on chalky white paths.
2/14/2021
7 : 54
roses
The mornings have been growing yolky. M insisted on deep yellow curtains in the bedroom, and so we get Chelsea mornings even in Brixton, on grey days. For months, when he gets up to make tea, I've
1/24/2021
12 : 24
white
Before the curtains open, before my eyes open, it is my ears that try to detect what the weather is doing. The hard slick of tyre on wet tarmac, the push of wind between window sashes. The presence of
12/19/2020
9 : 44
peckham rye
I would have been careful on the steps the first time I walked up them. Breath hanging in the air, the country in the grip of snow, and the short bus ride between Peckham Rye Station and The Gardens
11/19/2020
19 : 24
funny weather
The rain comes in like it's been produced by a machine on a film set. Heavy and slanting, it collides with the drifts and puffs of air from the boiler outlet. For reasons I can't explain, but
10/19/2020
2 : 34
leaf-tunnel
Sometimes autumn is so bright, so fantastic, that it verges on surreality. A bingo card of cliche. Hurtling down the M3 yesterday I won them all: low mist diffusing dawn light, crystalline skies, trees
9/29/2020
6 : 44
earth
The thing is, we'd talked about this. There was that evening, somewhere in the middle of sticky July, where we walked home through the park as the dusk draped over us and set all the ducks in a row
9/14/2020
15 : 14
salt
It takes a couple of days to miss the dawn. The first morning I find it seeping out around the blind, a deep and searing orange. We sleep in the eaves, with our heads pointing north. At 6am, the light
9/10/2020
5 : 44
cusp
At the moment, we sleep in the back bedroom. The other one, the one that is not our study, has been caught between old and new for a few weeks now. Dust-sheets on a pile of furniture in the middle of
9/5/2020
17 : 9
garden
We've been in the new house more than a month now. The best gifts we've been brought, like the company that has gathered here, linger in the kitchen: rosemary in a jug, lemon balm and oregano
7/31/2020
6 : 29
aftermath
Outside, it smelled like holidays. I tell myself I've become an early riser with age, but this suggests it's always been the case; that scent of hot morning air is one from childhood, when I
7/28/2020
1 : 9
downpour
The sound of it filtered into my dream, woke me up. That recognisable heavy rattle of long-awaited rain after weeks without. The weather turned this week: welcome, if uneasily warm sunshine filled
7/8/2020
4 : 46
in-between
The sky is the flat, bright grey of after-dawn, and it is raining hard. Last night, we emerged from the house into heavy drizzle, the kind that hits muggy streets and smells like relief. July has been
6/18/2020
15 : 27
traffic
It's returned, the humming. The background rumble of traffic on the South Circular, distant sirens, the odd, irate horn. It's not a new thing, really; opened the balcony door to it about 10
6/18/2020
15 : 27
downpour
The sound of it filtered into my dream, woke me up. That recognisable heavy rattle of long-awaited rain after weeks without. The weather turned this week: welcome, if uneasily warm sunshine filled