Tiny safenesses

Start with a memory – just pick one. Cast a fishing line out into the blackness of the night and try to catch one of the little silver ripples that jingle like coins against the moon. They’re not organised into a filing cabinet like you think they ought to be. They’re not in size order, or even organised by quality. They’re floating out there like stars in distant constellations, their light bearing only a flicker of a tangential relevance to their neighbours, superimposed an infinity later. 

Cast out your line, and reel in the first thing impaled on its hook. You’re nine years old, and you’ve set up a den which you’re calling your “office” on the window sill in your bedroom, behind brightly coloured curtains, where you survey the garden through a toy telescope with your little body pressed against the radiator until it sears, safe and sound.

You don’t linger long on this catch, because holding onto its slippery tail is another memory, of another flimsy den beneath the bed. Old sofa cushions and a silk scarf obscure you from view, and it’s so very impenetrable that it feels almost worth starting a religion over. 

Suddenly, the precious tiny safenesses of years gone by are abundant – each one just a flicker of something transient and too fleeting to catch – a secluded spot on the garden wall, obscured by an overgrown Buddleia, but with enough visibility of the surrounding territories that you can see if anyone is coming; a safe space for two behind the miniature railway, where crisp packets and sweet wrappers formed the bedding of the nest; the blanket fort where a years-dimmed torch was the key to an afternoon of literary escapism...

And as the tide of tiny safenesses grows stronger, somehow they fade more quickly than ever. Are you summoning them to be destroyed? Are you remembering them correctly? Were you ever really safe? The fish laugh at you as they turn and squirm back into the moonlit waves, a trick of the light or something more transformative? You’re left with the emptiness after a question escapes your lips, and an endless night of uncertainty.

How to claw back at a fiction of safeness in a world that has been cracked open? 

An old poem

It’s national poetry day and I couldn’t pick from the hundreds of favourites I have so I thought I’d go full-narcissus and post one of my own poems, written a couple of summers ago in a fresh water lagoon near Perpignan.

The empty rock, with its hole

And its unhand smooth

Roughness

Round and licked by years

Salt, sweat, tumbling

Down the mountain

The children made golden with

Two months of laziness

Gulp and scream a final weekend

Of stolen merriment

A young man and his lover

Drift along in their inflatable boat

Kept afloat with lungfuls

And the birds have nowhere to nest

Here.

The trees are elsewhere

Our fat, sundial world

A progression of shadows

That's not a fig tree there

The leaves are too jagged,

There are too many veins

A distant child plunges into the water.

This meticulous Everything

Continuing and continuing.

There’s something about Shabbat...

Lately I’ve been making much more of an effort with the actual meaning of Shabbat.  I don’t just mean the motions, but the actual spirit of the thing. The shabbats (shabbatot, if you’re going to be technical about it) of my youth were mostly spent in the home of my wise friend Tilly. We read from the prayer book (trying not to giggle at “Egyptian bondage”), drank those first stinging-sweet sips of wine, (trying not to screw up our faces at the taste), and the two tall candles would stay lit for the whole meal. The rhythm of it was captivating, and now that I know more about these things, the rhythm of it was also deeply spiritual. 

For a while, Shabbat meant work – I was the co-headteacher of the religion school at the synagogue I attended. I didn’t attend synagogue on Friday nights because I knew that a good chunk of my Saturday would be spent there, trying my hardest to inspire young people to see what I saw in the Jewish world around them. It was hard work. It was good work, but it wasn’t restful. 

My first tastes of a Shabbat that would fill my heart up to the brim and send it flying up to the setting sun were (predictably) in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv

I was there with a leftie progressive Jewish educators group and it opened my eyes to the messy nuance of something I had hiherto seen as simple, and it opened my heart to how much it could sing, and how much that could hurt. The above photos are ones I took as the sun set over Tel Aviv and Shabbat came in. 

The list of things you can’t do on Shabbat is long and I know many people who make every effort to follow it to the letter. The way I see it, is that this long list was made so that there was no chance of a workaround (get it?) if nobody could do anything that pertained to their job. No gleaning, no writing, no destroying, no burning, no buying, no selling, etc etc... 

As a progressive Jew, I don’t see how that can mean you have to pre-tear all of Saturday’s toilet paper before sundown on Friday. That sounds like a way to make work rather than avoid it. 

What I’m aiming for is to create an atmosphere of peace and separation in my home and my heart, every Friday. To go through the motions, yes, but to see the beauty in the rhythm. I’ve been lighting the candles out on my balcony, distant sounds of the city as the score to my ritual, and I’ve introduced Max to the wonders of kiddush wine. 

Today, for the first time, I visited the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond in Hampstead Heath as a sort of Friday pseudo-Mikveh, and I’ll be making sure to have a Saturday afternoon nap tomorrow, in the true spirit of Shabbat. 

Shabbat Shalom y’all. X

Hometown Gig

There’s something about going home, isn’t there. Back to the place where you became. The bones are still there – the skeletons, and the frame. But the meat is different now. 

How can something be so utterly the same while also being undeniably different? How can those two states of being coexist on the same plane of existence? ​

You feel tenderly towards the home place that is no longer home. You feel like maybe you are actually alike, the two of you. Different but the same. 

And what of it, if everyone who made this place home has left? What if your mothers and fathers all packed their bags and left it, left you, before you could leave it... them...? What then?

It used to be that I couldn’t visit Brighton without being inundated by the gap between what was and what is. The void seemed unfillable, inescapable. Around every corner was loss, because, well, there was so much there to lose in the first place. The bones jutted through the skin and rubbed the new facades raw until the paint peeled and curled away.

It’s different now but don’t ask me why this time the same places feel different. Something about sharing them with someone who understands you to your core, someone who can keep you safe and hold you through the rattling void so that it doesn’t feel like a chasm anymore – the void is just a place where you can go without touching the edges of anything, and that can be quite lovely if you think about it.

I smell a new era coming on...

​You know when it’s been a while, and you know you’ll be seeing someone soon, someone you used to be so close to, someone you knew in another time?

And you’re anticipating how awkward it could be –​ “I’m not even the same person I was when I knew them! This is an awful idea, some things are best left in the past!” 

Then inevitably it’s okay, and you say things like “it’s as though no time has passed at all!” and “we just picked up where we left off!” because you’re talking in this shared language of what once was – using it to parse and communicate what now is, through the lens of everything that happened in the mean time...​

You know that feeling?​

But this is different, isn’t it? Is it? I mean, I’m shouting into the void. It’s a different void, but you treat it the same soft way... I’m different now... but this act of void-calling is not new to me. So much has happened in between, but we’ll get to that.

What did I get up to?

Well, mostly planning and executing a successful world first trek to Everest Base Camp with my boyfriend and friends... and subsequently deciding never to do anything so ridiculous ever again. 

I’ve also learnt to confit a chicken leg, braise lamb cutlets, and make Mexican albóndigas.

I travelled to Australia, Mexico, France, and obviously Nepal. Oh and Deepest Wales?

I made a little home. That’s no small achievement.  

Tap tap tap

When the sun sets, you don't always know what's next. I mean, you do - night follows day, always. But what will the night bring? As the street lights flicker, they illuminate a world that isn't the same as the world of the daylight hours.
Bathed in orange shadows, shifting shines and the distant glitter of planes and stars and watery eyes, the streets aren't what they were before. Except that they are. The night is just another filter, another shade, another hue. Everything that once was, remains. What you don't see now - it's still there under the velvet softness of night. It'll still be there in the morning. Shadows are not an absence, they're an augmentation. And yet we hold out for the morning. We close our eyes and enter the kaleidoscopic cocktail of subconscious - in stasis until the morning breaks like a glass on a stone kitchen floor tile, with a gasp and an unnatural resonance. For a moment, the whole world ceases to spin - everyone at the party stops to listen to the very silence of them stopping.

Humans are frighteningly resilient, you know. Somehow we keep on living, unspeakable things happen, horrifying things, sad things, and yet - we live. We breathe, our hearts beat, we fart and shit and sweat, and we continue to exist right up until we don't. We make new memories and become new people, but even butterflies remember when they were caterpillars. In the middle, they are nothing more than mush. Soup inside a crispy shell, not sleeping but decomposing and reforming. And they still remember being caterpillars.