Dispatches | Editor’s Note | May 19th 2020
Dear Reader,
Two days of greying damp and high winds. The sky is lower, too. On the third, a Wednesday I earmarked for projects, the weather looks to be more promising, possibly even summery. And so, for this week’s writing quarters, the scenery has never been the same twice.
My diary remembers things gingerly. A small note, in a sort of curled penmanship, recalls the recent memory of a coup of wood-pigeons. Animal knowledge comes in colourful verse. A collective of things, I suspect, changes according to its personality. Fortunately, birds come in so many varieties and my garden is opportunistic with chance sightings. There’s a thin history to my knowledge on how the owls formed a parliament, or why quails are spotted in shakes and why when the warbles multiple they create a confusion. If you notice ravens gathering in number, that vision is a conspiracy. Pigeons come in kits, lofts & flights. But for layman gardeners coup feels proper when describing the role of bothersome wood-pigeons. They quietly potter, seemingly dithery, like any other gardener. Under the spilling feed of sunflowers, in the rear quarter of the garden, they like to gather in kits and coups.
According to another note, the tenancies of the garden have become more varied, more lively, too. A fizz of handsome orange is the wood’s sole Kingfisher. Our potted herbs, another recent project, are a few hours after ripe. Soon, I’m sure, they’ll be ready for cooking. Lifted from the bother and burden of weeds, the garden is greener and smells of aged wood.
Writing, in its best, doesn’t require any particular desk, or quarters. Though, I suspect, anyone who writes (myself included) is superstitious about their apparatus. (My quirk, in writing, is a faithful silver pen that travels with me.) Sometime ago I came across Stephen King’s anecdote about spaces of writing, wisely summed in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. One’s desk feels, ultimately, not particularly responsible for a writer’s productivity, but their surroundings can muster up a nerve for writing. From the familiarly wallpapered parlour, windowed in good measure to the garden, I write harmoniously with my new setting, finding this new story to tell.
This week I’ve been restoring the old world. I try to retire my laptop for a few hours in the day and, away from the familiar distractions, I begin restoring an antiquarian haberdashery cabinet. It’s a handsome, if sizeable, chest of oak. A quick guess at its origins might date it to the early twentieth-century, a likely moment for these traditions. A little layman history and gardening, too. Its purpose, after careful research, is all-sorts: storage, display and/or aesthetics.
Woodwork, as a craft, is a feat of mindful, measured strength, wit and creativity. In moments of great, slumping uncertainties, the mindfulness of one’s own labours can be a cathartic experience. Working on this cabinet, learning the wood, its patterns, its age and weight, I’m reset to a simpler headspace.
The old radio hums. It’s a nostalgic scene. The mechanic, brassy thwack of the sander thumbs the grain with precision, strips the aged, teak-like sepia that’s grown on the oak. The wood is, then, waxed. The brass trim is polished and treated. Finished at last, after a taxing restoration. It’s a vision of antiquity.
Fewer are the moments of greying uncertainty. Hours after dreading weather forecasts, the sunlit garden, from the parlour desk, is beginning to invite the second-life of British summertime. I’m writing again, after a curious dip into carpentry, a sort of episode in woodwork. Somewhere between antiques and traditions, the oak and the weeds, I found balance. Or, at least, the balance came back to me.
Signing off.
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