Dispatches | Editor’s Note | October 29th 2020
Dear Reader,
It was only weeks ago, time spilt like something fluid and moved through days unable to secure my attention. A timepiece, which I had always deliberately travelled with, was stowed-away in a smallish wooden box. Nothing too technical, just relaxed. I hand’t, truthfully, felt the urgency to check in with the time. Now, updating “Chapter Two” of this site, which is a phased edit and consultation of its design, I’m noticing all too easily how time has, in fact, gone by.
For now: sitting at my portable desk in the garden again, looking over the narrow, even lawn, I read often about painting. It was unintentional, but the books that I leaned into, in the quiet period of lockdown, were remarkably aware that I enjoyed reading about artists – the hungry, ambitious type from a novel. I reason it’s partly a professional obsession, being a creative myself; and, in other ways, from my previous studied twenty-something self where art was less irrelevant.
I haven’t the muscle to paint – or eye, or steady hand, and so forth. Instead, I find writing is a more natural, happy medium. I try more often to return to that space – my old desk in the garden – yet the weather is usually frightfully grey and swimming with all sorts of menacing intentions. And so, on this overcast Autumnal day, working through routine updates, I think about wearing my watch again.
Mid-July. | Prefaces
On a favourable moment, something perhaps shaped by luck, I managed to secure a long-searched bottle of bourbon. The exact bottle: a small batch of Jefferson’s Reserve.
I’m often on a losing defence for the case of bourbon – given the otherwise accessibility of finer Scotches in my area. Truthfully, a neat scotch is my preference. It’s punctuational to an evening, and feels like good etiquette too. But, I liked them aged. This, and my evolving taste and interest in whisky has created a habit of drinking Scotches as an ‘event’. It’s partly the costlier price, but also how Scotch can’t be rushed. Yet, a bourbon is better unfussed. So, for the moment, I’m enjoying my evenings with Jefferson.
It’s a grey evening. My glass, half empty, is pinned to the desk by the easy weight of a bourbon. The light is low, angular. My desk is now considerably less organised, a scattering of notebooks, some in a prop-like dithery, the others collect and store papers. I was at the very same keyboard, working a thought, or a sentence, or a mixture of the two. I pause. I reach into my bag, the one I travel with, and broke the spin on a book. A hardback to be precise. I reflect a little on the role of a preface – because I remember rather enjoying this one, considerably so. I haven’t the memory nor experience to list good prefaces, but this one stood out, playfully aware of me, the reader, and how it introduced its contents.
My glass is empty. It ended on a taste like a denouement. Only the farthest quarter of the desk has light now. Shadows spill and coil from everything. The kettle is on the stove downstairs. It whistles for my attention.
This moment, from the recent month, seemed unlike any other. This small discovery – of an author, their book, its story – shaped a memory, a recent one, but of a lasting impression. I suppose, prefaces ought to be more considered. From experience, these tend to mummify things. But, here, in this book, it’s a teasing, playful and lively precursor to a story waiting to be discovered.
Early-Aug. | Familiar places
I find myself in a wasp-bothered garden, the kind in a late bloom and the heavy smell of an old summer and damp earth. It was unsung place. Neither was it far from home. It was a chummy cottage with an old personality; there, in its garden, I sat in good company. I remember the fresh air, feeling it like a joy. The wind rumbles on the old world. It rustles the trees and a robin spills out into the path.
I trace the detail of the cottage with my eye. It feels familiar. The garden smells of cider. Something sweet and happy. Up a path, around a bend – these things are nondescript, but the rest, the heights of the trees, the deep blue in the sky, it all feels familiar. Maybe I have seen it in a photograph. It’s the subject of someone else’s writing, too. A few novelists have peopled this particular nook. Its older residences are historic. They’re signposted and create waypoints, like breadcrumbs, through the backyard mazes of our woods.
A long, deepening walk into the landscape and I’m frustrated that I can’t paint. I can, instead, only watch as it grows richer in detail.
Oct. | Autumn spills like a cup
Seasons tug at the colour of our woods on invisible strings. The treetops are thicker with it. The ground, near my car, is earthy and heavy with its fallen debris. Everything fallen – the leaves, acorns, chestnuts, berries – puddles in the street. The birdsong feels different, too.
It’s the perfect moment to begin noticing the setting of this woods, which has stood much the same for the year, but now is different. The wooden signpost that holds open the pathway is still much the same, too. The old foxes are still afoot, capering about the woodland fringe. But street-lamps are earlier. Much had tumbled down on the footpath and below it lay the clues of the foxes, the owls and the dormouse. It seemed illegible now under the messy floor of the woods.
In truth, I relearnt this place during lockdown. Nowadays, these woods are a relief from the busy, mad world b beyond us.
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