Christina Collins – Chris Collins

After the Rain. New Year: 2025

The first bleak and dark day of the New Year. What did I say that time before about the rain, when I’d come home from bright, scrubbed clean air? ‘I shall grow slippery as an eel.’ The gills have grown through. A grey day, and despite having an early night on NYE for the first time in my adult life, feeling ill. But lovely to wake up to so many messages from friends who were up celebrating (well, we’re forty now, so you were only pair-drinking prosecco in front of the telly) while I slept.

I read the opening of Orwell’s Roses, thought about my sister, thought about my friend Rhian singing ‘Bread and Roses,’ missed them both. Had a short cry – because I was feeling unwell anyway – and to purge the old year. Sometimes when it is cold, and the trees and flowers are sleeping, it is melancholy. Stillness is beautiful, but also sad. Sometimes, a little cry about winter is helpful.

I have never done New Years resolutions. Having thought about this over the last two years, I’m now quite certain that this is fear of failure. I don’t set goals, in case I don’t meet them. Writing is tough. Setting goals which we inevitably fail means we actually get stuff done but feel shit about it anyway. What a pity. As ever, I begin the year with no aims, no promises, no shoulds. The dark time of year, of resting, sleeping, dare I utter – ‘dreaming’ (eugh, no, I can’t bear it) is better for reflecting on what has gone before. Something has died. The year is over. I am in a new one, but it’s not started yet. So, I will think of the last one and count the losses, sort the gains, lay them all out so they are not missed. They will all writhe out of the cracks of the old year anyway; behind me, in my peripheral vision, suddenly in front of me. Hold them still, lay them out, order them. Study.

January comes in a vision of plum and orange. We became vegetarian and it reignited my love of cooking. And suddenly January was the most superb I have ever lived. There was no struggling to school, battling weather or job insecurity, inevitable heating failures juxtaposed with dogmas about no coats in classrooms and the thousand other little miseries. After seeing a play in Brum with the Gentleman and Cath, I stayed in. On a snowy dawn I saw two deer silver through the meadow by the plantation. I walked Brocton Coppice between the misty oaks and the great purple glow of millions of birch branches. I came home and cooked orange soups and curries, wrote, studied, read Knaussguard, Ferrante and Du Maurier and was generally enchanted. I was well rested and peaceful and felt no obligations between these quiet, lovely things: a walk, purple birch, cooking and writing. For the first ever time, I loved January. Fucken nailed it.

February shines silver with Wallasea. I did an indulgent writing research trip; which basically means I waft about romantically and get the long-suffering Gentleman to drive me everywhere. On a day so blue and bright I was disappointed by the absence of gothic vibes, I was charmed by an ancient, pretty town, stared at the pool where the three elms used to grow, marvelled at the brightness of the sea and nearly leapt for the songs of skylarks. Then in hail, wind and rain, I walked the Broomway and the wide expanse of the northern mudflats with the short-eared owls, the marsh harriers, the avocets, egrets, pipets, brent geese, plover, greenshank. I loved the marshy, muddy, shit part of Essex more than I ever knew I could.

I never like March. But I had a nice walk with Charlie around Winterbourne House, sung in folk clubs, delivered workshops, and wrote. We poked our compost and wondered to find it wriggling with worms, dark and loamy. We spread it around and watched the tulips and narcissus bloom in the grass.

In April I got into foraging. On a chilly but sunny evening I wandered down to the meadow and gathered nettle, hedge mustard, gorse and dandelion. I made fritters, tea, salads. I followed an early butterfly and saw my first blackcap of the year and listened to them sing. I noted the dates of their arrival, and the skylarks’ and the chiffchaffs. Then on St George’s day, I heard a cuckoo. Trent may have broken my heart by not making it back to the Congo, but cuckoos are still calling on the Chase. We hiked Thor’s cave in the Peaks, collected wild garlic with the Youdales, saw our niece and nephew. We had cousin Michael come to visit with Paulina and were generally ecstatic to be related.

I woke early at the start of May and tied ribbons to oaks, walked out to the belt and met the deer as the sun rose. In all my morning walks with the chiffchaffs and blackbirds and the scents of blossom and seething, wriggling life, I felt every moment I have ever been happy in my entire life rush up to me in a lungful of air. Then we went to Japan and I discovered how good a country could be, if it chooses to, which is good to know, so you know what to vote for. Biodiversity, waste disposal, infrastructure. Modern, advanced countries have these. We must not be modern or advanced. Back home, I carried on picking up rubbish, and was glad I had left, glad I had got out of my routine to remember I can, to try something new, and a bit challenging. Glad that I was able to smile at someone, point, use two words in a different language, and communicate sufficiently. It’s good to know. And I got to share and explore all that with the Gentleman.

One cold night in June, we went to the Chase to listen to nightjars. We heard them purring, saw them flapping over the tree-line, then saw two deer in the moonlight as we returned. I wrote another essay, performed more poetry and went to a Romanticism exhibition in Brum with Holly. For our fortieth birthday we had a campout and got to see lots of family, including Uncle Win, and aunty Mary Ann and Uncle Andy who all travelled ever such a long way. Then the weather perked up towards the solstice and I spent long evenings on the grass under the oxeye daisies and roses in my garden. Jen came to stay and we walked all over the Chase; she loved the birds, I loved the adder we nearly trod on. We ate a hell of a lot of vegetables. I wrote another essay.

In July I was briefly ill but discovered, with the help of a wonderful academic at Essex University, Dr Welch, that Essex Gothic is a Thing, and wrote another essay. I saw Bailey in her new flat in Hull! Then I went to Cornwall and hiked from Portreath to St Agnes and back again amid choughs and kittiwakes, the heather and wildflowers. I did solid day-drinking with Corinne and Jack, and Freeman and I did lots of cooking and baking on rainy days and thought about all the things we’d learned that year. Freeman thinks I’m exactly the sort of person who could have fun at a rainy beach bbq. I reminded her I’m that kind of upbeat whenever she sees me, because she’s there. We saw Charlotte and Dan and discussed Cornishness and cultural identity. I was excited by the new things they were learning.

I had a break from writing the novel in August. The garden was so beautiful with helenium, the lavender and fleabane wild and abundant and I wrote poetry and spent a lovely afternoon in my garden with poet Cherry watching peacock butterflies. Freeman took us to Todmorden and we walked the canal to Hebden Bridge in an excess of sunshine. We had Jess and Benjy to come and stay and took them all to the Chase to paddle in the Sherbrooke and play frisbee on the grass. Then Reuben and Lyra came to stay with us which was a big achievement of the year because we had them all to ourselves and everyone had a lovely time. I was so pleased they felt so comfortable with us and enjoyed themselves.

In September we went to France briefly to eat croissants with Will and Jen. Back home I spoke to no one all month and finished my final assignment. I handed it in the day before the deadline, then in the morning, I watched the house martins swoop around the pines in a beautiful clear sky for the last time before they left. It felt like a good luck charm, and I got a distinction for my Master’s degree, so perhaps it was.

October and November were misty and vivid. I did a foraging course and can now identify amethyst deceivers accurately. I joined New Moon Morris for the Apple fayre and had the most wonderful time being part of the side again. It’s part of me to mark seasons with silly dancing and it felt so good to be back, and to stay with Helen in her magnificent house with her excessive generosity. We hiked in the Peaks again and discovered Castleton and Rushop which were delightful, and saw Will and Jen’s newborn and Stratford Christmas market with Corinne and Tim. Then we slipped into the mouth of the year end at Christmas, which dumps us out at the end like this.

These are the good things. Some difficult things happened as well. I don’t really know what to do about those. I don’t think there’s much I can do. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to ignore them and focus on the lovely things. But what are any of us supposed to do?

So, in summary:

Saw a marsh harrier and short-eared owl, nightjar and red grouse.
Travelled to Japan and saw turtle doves and warblers and ate sushi.
Got all the bird questions right on Christmas University Challenge.
Saw some family that I’ve not seen in years.
Made a ‘tradition’ of summer and autumn visits with Freeman and Bob, Jess and Benjy and Will and Jen.
Learned to be a bit more at peace with not keeping up as much as I want, but as much as I can, with far away friends.
Read Elena Ferrante.
Have much improved teeth health.
Got better at performance poetry.
Learned something about servers. I mean, I think I can point to one, now.
Became mainly vegetarian.
Entered two writing competitions and wrote pages upon pages.
Completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and got a distinction.

Exterior – Interior: UK, August 2024

When the fires came, we stood side by side and fought them, together. Fires aren’t rational or irrational things you can talk to – the heat and obliteration of flame is utterly Other. Throughout the black summer of 2019, fire ravaged through the Australian bush, crushing homes, schools, pubs, buckling street signs, crushing corrugated iron fences, swallowing rosellas, wallabies, quolls, lyre birds, koalas – nameless, unnumbered animals.

Not unnumbered. But three billion animals are just too many to comprehend.

When the fires came, they were out there. External. And we stood side by side, and fought them, together. Volunteers drove through infernos scooping people up, hacking them out of their houses, running with hoses – every human life dragged, blackened, but spluttering, out of the smoke was a precious triumph. Volunteers scrambled to run soup kitchens, fundraisers, help families sort through their charred houses to find useful things like saucepans and crockery amid the broken remains of lounges, kitchen benches, children’s beds and the inevitable filthy teddy. People wrote songs about it, poems, flash fiction, articles, did radio programs, interviews, the whole country held each other’s hands, teams in offices staring tensely at the wind map, bosses watching, nodding quietly, go home, sort your stuff, get out. Doing a whip round, checking in, making calls.

When the fires came, they were out there. And we stood, together.

But when the pandemic came, the big, unreasoned animal was not out there anymore. It was inside. It was in us. Or it might have been. And that was the worst thing – those people that had helped you before could now be carrying something deep inside them that could hurt you – could kill you. And they might not even know. They might have already passed it on, maybe to you – and maybe, before you even knew, you’d passed it on to someone that wouldn’t survive it. To someone that would struggle for breath, like they were choking in the thick smoke of the Australian bushfires, and would gasp to ask the doctors when they could see their family again, and the doctors would press their lips tight together and not answer.

It wasn’t out there anymore. It was inside. And you couldn’t tell.

And I wonder, now when I think back at everything that’s happened since, if that recognition has had a lasting impact. We tried to band together, smiling and waving vigorously across parks, baking banana breads and leaving them on doorsteps, painting rainbows on our windows. But in the end, as Emma Maitlis pointed out, we’re not all in this together. And when it came right down to it, we wasted our generation’s great Blitz moment fighting over toilet paper.

Because in the end, we put our families first. We were afraid. We justified our actions in terms of prioritising the safety of those we love. And here was the real harm. We talked endlessly at the time about the impact of isolation, loneliness, the impending mental health crisis which, nonetheless, is all true. But it wasn’t just that. It was the survivalist need to look at your fellow human being, and then to be suspicious of them. They might have it. They are a threat. The Big Thing is in them, inside, not out there. You could walk past someone, look at them, take in their face, their hair, the way they wear their t-shirt, how they hold their legs when they walk, what they look at as they pass you, and instead of adding all those things up to build a person, a life, with all the little things they’re afraid of, their memories of family holidays, school trips, what their best friend told them last week, what they’re hoping for today; instead, we could look at them and see just a threat.

It has corrupted us. And even more so the faint, background awareness that we might be harbouring disease – the Bad Thing – in ourselves. We might not know it, or be affected in ourselves by it, but it gets out of us, and hurts other people. This is now built into us every time we see another person and are suspicious of them, make judgements about them, try to assess their threat.

And then go and set a Lush on fire.

Austerity has driven increasing poverty in this country. Lack of housing, the cost of living, inadequate services have driven despair, and the despairing are fed someone to blame by cynical actors. There is plenty to be angry about in the UK in 2024. But let’s be clear on the difference between protest and riot, between anger and violence. The riots in the UK this week are, without question, racist acts, anger misdirected at a group of people, all who have been pre-judged based on incorrect, ignorant assumptions. That is prejudice.

And at the root of it all, perhaps, is this dug-in habit we now have, this convention of thought – other people are threats. The Bad Thing is not Out There, in front of us who are standing before it, side by side. It is in him. And her. Them. Maybe ourselves. So be suspicious. Do not trust, do not reach out, do not seek to understand, to learn, to grow. The Bad Thing is inside. Suspect everyone. Turn your back.

Close your door.

Alone.

Published Thoughts about Publishing

The Writer in the World

I put off studying this chapter in my course. Turning over the practicalities of publishing has a rather … desiccating effect on me. Is it because I find it so enormous and intimidating – or just stultifying? This is not promising for a writer. I think it’s those words; ‘marketing,’ ‘acquisition,’ ‘schedule’ that make my neck disappear into my shoulders in spasms like I’ve been shot. They are so removed from what I do in the blackness of early morning, at my desk with the window cracked open to hear the first trills of a robin, with an idea, with an image, something I find beautiful.

That sounds very high and mighty, doesn’t it? We both know that the truth is probably more that if I dismiss the whole publishing process as hyper-commercialised, soulless wank, I can excuse myself from trying – and failing. Which is cowardly.

I liked the interview with Linda McQueen. She said ruefully (in impossibly clipped vowels – which brought me back to Alexa Von Hirschberg’s comments about the industry’s lack of diversity – also spoken in impossibly clipped vowels) that people don’t like copy editors. They come in with their red pen and split hairs over free indirect thought vs speech punctuation. Well. I was a teacher. I am not afraid of the red pen. She talked about being freelance, because her section of the process is often so discreet that she can slot in and out, then buzz off. No conversations for her about events and articles, prizes and shortlists, contracts and edits. Her concern is the work itself.

I like that. All the rest is just noise, isn’t it? I’m not so naïve to not understand that promotion and sales and advertising are important; it is not all mindless selling. They have the vital role of carrying important words further, so they can reach someone sitting alone on a classroom desk, swinging her legs, or on the carpet with his back against a radiator, in a café, on a bus, at a bar, in bed, and fling them up into rarified space. From the interviews with the commissioning editors, that was certainly what they told themselves. Important work. But Linda McQueen, the ‘midwife to other people’s creativity’ as she so beautifully put it, just gets to focus on that flinging.

Travel Writing and the Leisure Gap

Well, then I had to research an author’s journey to writing and their process. Wanting someone up to date (Jean Rhys’ experience is probably not going to be a helpful guide for me), I went for Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path and Landlines.

Her topic is probably better known than her style. She famously hiked the Southwest Coastal Path right after she was made homeless and her husband was diagnosed with a terminal illness in the same week. Lovers of her books enjoy the story of her journey out of adversity, the relationship, the triumph of hope over despair. Relatable stuff. I discussed this with my best friend. We talked about women and male travel writers, and I think there tends to be a difference. My best friend suggested women writers tend to focus on the personal, the inner journey. Male writers might focus more on the landscapes, the history and absent themselves somewhat from the text. It is not about them.

Ah yes. The invisible white man. Invisible because his subject-ness is the given, the standard. While I thought my best friend’s comments certainly applied to Winn and MacFarlane, in all the many travel books I’ve read, male writers (and there are more of them) go off on journeys as a frivolity, or an intellectual passion. MacFarlane hunts down old pathways. Haywood alternates between his narrowboat and Triumph, MacKinnon fancies rowing himself from Wales to Serbia.

When a woman travels, it’s more often out of necessity. Winn certainly wasn’t on a jolly. Here is the disparity, and perhaps the reason for the inner, personal focus of women travellers – or maybe those women writing about a merry trip don’t get published because – I’m getting carried away – perhaps all of a sudden this sort of thing seems too frivolous. And how could she leave her family?

Here we have the leisure gap.

The Commodification of Meaning

Alright, alright, I’m clambering down off me soapbox.

So I researched Winn’s journey to publication. There’s not a lot: she wrote the book, then after being persuaded by her daughter, she sent it off to agents. Then – I don’t know, underpants or something, and: world domination. Or bestseller list domination. But I thought, surely, she can’t live the life of a writer in the professional sense. She looks after her husband, she goes for a walk when he needs it. And it helps. She’s not hunting for things to write, she’s busy caring about nature.

Then I read an interview where she talked about a big project coming up. It was the walk from the book Landlines.

And suddenly I went cold. In the book, the walk is approached in cautious terms, after weeks of watching health deteriorate, then back and forth with guilt and persuasion in equal measures. To talk of it as a project, like it was work, like something to map on a Gant chart, when it was someone’s life, a human life, a person who needed to move so it would genuinely save them – I didn’t know where to put that.

And it frightened me. Because what Raynor Winn’s writing offers her readers is Ideas with a big I. Love, endurance, hope, the enthralling power of nature.

And those ideas are exactly what are for sale.

Branding is a horrific thing. I read Naomi Klein’s No Logo back in the early 2000s – weren’t we all on board with the idea that brands are evil? They’re just made up concepts created to persuade people to part with money. Straining to convince us that this product is not just a radio speaker, a detergent, a drink, but a whole lifestyle that they can have if they just buy this thing. Obvious bullshit. But right after that, social media accelerated and we got into the habit of curating our online image that has eventually warped into a kind of eternal self-branding.

Reviews of Winn’s work celebrate her ‘resilience,’ her observation of landscape, her ‘empathy and integrity,’ her ‘compassion.’ These beautiful notions are what are packed up and sold on the publisher’s memoir/nature writing List. We are building our list of titles about resilience. Send us your manuscripts that have empathy. We are looking for empathy to sell. We are selling integrity and compassion. That’s what our customers expect from us. In the market of ideas, we offer connection-with-nature. It is our niche, our USP.

People aren’t brands. Ideas, feelings, aren’t brands. Wilderness is not a brand. Brands are lies. Brands aren’t real. Trees, rocks, rivers are real. Everything else, and I mean everything else that we have layered and lacquered on top of our forests and mountains are the things that aren’t real, that will all be washed away. Feelings, the ironic anthropomorphisation of nature, love, art, are all ephemeral things, but they are the one thing humans have that is uncomplicatedly pure. And making these experiences, these feelings into commodifiable consumables is … fucked. Really fucked. Selling and buying transcendence is a betrayal of the human spirit. And I am afraid that when Raynor Winn is feeling transcendental on the peaks and thinking about how nature heals, and the imperative connection with our landscapes – she is actually just at work. Turning beauty into neat little packages to sell us on Instagram on her way to the next speaking engagement.

Resist

I am being pretty childish, aren’t I? I’m quite sure I said similar things when I was nineteen. I’m forty soon, but I never did get the hang of the difference between realism and cynicism. But it’s the shock – suddenly having the Beautiful Idea illuminated by a bright torch and there’s the project and the spreadsheet and the timeline – and it’s reduced to project management. And so, while I get over the initial shock, I am having a bit of a sulk. Without publishers, I would not have the luxury of reading transcendental ideas at all. And Raynor does a lot for conservation, and her writing makes people care about it more. That’s essential.

But I do urge us all to resist commodification. Resist the reducing of our selves and lives into brands. Resist the depletion of spirit as we move through the world. If we reach out and make connections, let’s make them meaningful. When we act, let’s act with meaning and intent, act with love. Walking in a forest is an act of love – a painful one. This is also why I am in a sulk. Winn’s book beat me round the head with climate decline and environmental degradation, and darl’ I was already converted. You see, if we’re too busy working on our brands, and buying and selling our experiences; when we turn back to the real world, we’ll find it all gone.

So resist. Resist.

Writing Characters …

I recently went to a writers’ open mic in Birmingham. I listened to a wonderful writer with long, thick red hair and a short-sleeved dress (I was distraught about her chilly arms) read a section from her work-in-progress. She wanted to ‘write as if no one I know is going to read this,’ she said, and it seemed to unlock something for her. The section was about her experience of aphantasia.

Aphantasia, she explained – just as well, I had no idea – is the name of a condition where you cannot picture things in your mind. You can think about things as concepts and ideas, but you can’t ‘see,’ say, a house, you can’t count its windows, decide and cast into being, say, steps leading to the front door, an iron railing, trailing hanging baskets and long sash windows. It’s an absence of visual imagination.

Damn. That must be hard for a writer.

I thought of my characters. The little people I have set free in my mind to move about and do their mischief and decided (rather dramatically) that I must have aphantasia, too. Because my sulky attitude to my failing characters is obviously entirely on a par with genuine neurodivergence.

But I do have real trouble with these imaginary people. I feel a sort of heavy dread at having to ‘think up’ stuff for them to do – and heavy is the word; it feels like a sort of dragging climb. My characters can seem real enough, but it comes in flashes. The sly smirk of the Cunning Man as he hints to Clara about her mother’s past, the impatient sneer of Margot – I know exactly what they all look like. I watch wonderful Carmella flap her arms so wildly that her heavy upper arms swing like washing, and listen to her tell me where I’m going wrong in life; listen to the clear voice of an old man with estuary vowels, drinking half pints of beer and talking about being a pirate.

But then it goes. I can’t see them anymore, there is the absence of the visual. I build them out of snatches of voices, lips and eyes from people I know, then sit them down and they just … lay there. Inert. That heavy weight comes again in those questions that come so easily to other writers; if this happens, what does she do, what if she met this person, where will she go after that talk, what does she pick up off the ground, a table, a bench? The vividness of seeing it never comes. My characters are not like the ones I read, who leap out of other books with their afros or laddered tights, with their bitterness and longings, and punch you in the face.

Perhaps I’m not very good at people.

But I had a bit of a revelation this week. I finished a piece that I started in a workshop; the premise was: your character is taking something back to a shop. Create the voice. It was my voice, of course, the description was of … well, a ridiculous middle-aged short woman in a purple anorak – the memories she had were mine. And I was struggling because I was trying to justify the grumpiness, the prejudice, of this character. I was trying to show the moment of revelation, the ‘she’s not an arsehole really!’ moment. Because the character was me. And it was getting didactic.

After chatting ‘Karen redemptions’ with my writing partner, I had the idea to just … you know … not make the character myself. I could … make her up. Crazy idea for a writer. Then if she is a dick, it’s not on me. At first it did take quite an emotional effort. There was a wrench, a metallic and squeaky uncoupling of me from her. But then leaning her meanness became addictive. Punishing and embarrassing my ridiculous short woman in the purple anorak became enormous fun; it was easier to write; it was a satisfying ending. I did it!

So by all means, draw from life. Use bits of yourself, your friends, your family, what happened when you were twelve, to get you started. But then: depart. Turn left at the memory and cross over the road. It will set you free.

Blogging is what writers do. Apparently.

My blog-writing for years has pretty much been; what I can see out me window.

First it was, What I saw out the side hatch when I lived on the narrowboat, then it was, What I’ve seen in Australia (often from the balcony), culminating at last in, What I see out the window of my midlands three-bed semi. I seem to have been watching hedgerows my whole writing life.

Now I got binoculars. Sweet. Although I worry the neighbours opposite will one day catch me peering intently at a jay eating an acorn with a smile that, from their angle, will definitely look salacious and think I’m perving on them. Then the facebook group will go off.

Well. Let’s reflect on that. No, not the facebook group, or the perving. Put the binos down. I’m realising in the instant that I’ve spent all my blogging life writing about nature because I … like writing about nature. The world can be pretty horrible. After the pandemic, austerity, the climate crisis and now Gaza (what a merrie little list that is), retreating to folky, old-world appreciation of plants and animals, including writing and singing about them, is a balmy reprieve. I think I’d rather look out the window and tell you about that than look at the world and write feisty things about, say, the decline of the cuckoo. Or my opinion about female shaving. I got many opinions on that. Or about why I smell more now, isitmyage?

So, that jay really is cracking, you know. In fact, there’s two of them now. In the hedgerow in the last two days I have seen:

Five blackbirds
Two jays,
Three magpies
Two crows
Four long-tailed tits
One chaffinch
Four bluetits
Two great tits
Three more blackbirds I’m starting to suspect may be young thrushes
Eight sparrows
One robin

And there they all go, fluttering. The gentle potterings of little creatures eating haw-berries and hanging out with the avant garde squirrel, just existing. And I think it’s important to know what they are. Because if you spend some time looking at them – you get all the good shit your Instagram and the NHS tell you – you slow down, you’re mindful, you rest, you look at green space. And if you watch and learn what they are and do, you have a relationship with them. You become complicit, accountable. And I think there is nothing more important.

To avoid becoming to didactic, I’ll take you back to the hedgerow. In the woodlands on my walks this week I have been scared the shit out of by precisely:

One very large deer
Three panicked pheasants
Twelve squirrels
One haphazard golden retriever.

That’s turned itself into a festive little song, hasn’t it? Yeah. Now you’ve got twelve days of Christmas in your head. That’s my gift to you.

So I know Hardy is out of fashion. Banging on about hawthorn and ash trees is twee or genre folk. But if A.S. Byatt can write literary fiction that names periwinkles, oxeye daisies and great campion, why the hell can’t I? You’ll have to wrestle the dead flowers out of my cold dead hands! I shall never capitulate! Rebelliously, I have nothing useful to say about narrative perspective this week – although I learned lots of things I’ve failed to apply because every time I sat down to attempt, it came out identical and I got frustrated and went back to listing birds. Nor do I have a quirky little list of winter skin care dos and don’ts. But I have never blogged for these things. Which is probably why no one reads it except my friends.

I’ll have to make more friends. Come and look at the blackbirds.

Christina Collins, 37, Rugeley, by Christina Collins, 37, Rugeley

The start of it was hopping off the bow onto the aqueduct – inelegantly into the arms of a passing couple – and following them through hawthorn and campion to the steps. They dropped some comment on the way; I told them my name and melted away into the hedgerow.

Actually, maybe it began two nights earlier on the tow path. Goldfinches landed in a young ash tree and swifts skimmed above. I thought; it is too lovely an evening to die.

Or perhaps it was at the gravestone – the first time I really felt it. I knelt to place forget-me-nots in its shadow and found, to my embarrassment, that I was snivelling.

I must be fair; it started years before that. It was when my fixation with narrowboats first arose, when I read every romanticised perspective about life aboard. It was my research into canals that built towards the moment that our lives would come spinning together across a century – when I read about the murder of a woman on the Trent and Mersey canal at who just happened to have exactly the same name as me.

What morbidly fascinating coincidence. And there were other similarities between the two of us: she was also petite, like me. She also referred to her husband by his last name, like I do. And she was also thirty-seven – like me, and on a boat in the same place, when she was raped and murdered by four boatmen and left in the canal at Rugeley in June, 1839.

But there it is, I suppose. It becomes all a bit less quirky when you put those words together.

****

Researching a murder of someone with your own name is unsettling. We’ve all googled ourselves but let me tell you, seeing your name next to the word ‘murder’ over and over gets uncomfortable. I found a comprehensive internet article with pictures of the aqueduct and bank where her body was found and the Bloody Steps, up which her body was carried to town – which, legend has it, ooze blood. I read a book by John Godwin; a pretty well researched text published in 1999, which details as much of her life as could be known, her journey by a Pickford’s company boat down from Liverpool towards London, and the public response to her murder. It had pictures too.

All taken in winter. There are the bloody steps, with their un-gothic, municipally painted handrail, sodden with rain and mud. The only green is the bleak dark of ivy and the sky’s greyness adds to the sombre mood. Good for a ghost story, isn’t it? You need a bit of pathetic fallacy to get in the mood.

When Christina was actually murdered, it was June. It’s my favourite month – my birthday. Her own birthday was July, another summer child. I was thwarted from shivering with evocative atmosphere as I strolled along the towpath on a May evening, because the cow parsley and bluebells were too glorious. But the uncanny feeling crept in as I pondered the exact place she may have been strangled. I am here, it is evening, she was also here on a summer evening. Did these flowers comfort her? Remind her of some fresh world outside the confines of the stuffy boat cabin? Or did the moist fragrance of late spring become eerily warped by the anxiety of darkness and spending ten hours in that cabin with four drunk men?

I followed the journey in Godwin’s text. Stoke, Stone, Hoo Mill. Place after place where she reported the behaviour of the boatmen, to people who later bore witness to her obvious distress yet did nothing to help her. Then that dark, five hours from midnight when she was last seen alive, yawning to dawn, when the worst thing had happened. And I ended, like her, on the aqueduct at Brindley bank, to stand looking into the water where her body was found floating, face blackened, in her dark gown and faun neckerchief.

It wasn’t spooky and exciting. I found it all very sad. What is it about our attitude to history, where the passing of time can somehow turn sickening tragedy into gory myth? As children, our class was shown grainy photographs of the Ripper’s mutilated victims. We lapped it up, admiring his precision. Why do we show children this and make it some kind of ghost story? Why do we sensationalise and make a spectacle of very real violence against women? In a hundred years, will we have a sign on Clapham Common where Sarah Everard was murdered? Will people take selfies with it, and dress up as policemen?

Much of what you can read about the murder now, is Colin Dexter’s own take in his novel, The Wench is Dead. From his two days of research after reading Godwin’s text, he concluded the court’s verdict over three of the boatmen was unsafe and wrote a version in which Morse effortlessly vindicates them from a hospital bed. This idea was taken up by the BBC’s show Murder, Mystery, and my Family in 2020, where investigators refer to Christina’s murder in quotation marks and bring on a descendent of one of the hanged men to get emotional.

Forgive my waspish tone. Like Dexter, I want to go through all the witness statements to better corroborate Godwin’s presentation of the facts. To be sure in myself that there was actually a murder, and not a madwoman who fell in the canal.

But as women, aren’t we so used to being discredited? To being ignored and disbelieved when we challenge the abuse we face at work, on public transport, in clubs, in our homes. So used to others looking for culpability in our own actions when bad things happen to us. Or even challenging that the bad thing happened at all, like Dexter and the BBC. The tired narrative of the hysterical woman is preferred over accountability. Is it really so hard to believe four drunk men got handsy in a confined space with one woman over ten hours, and turned to violence when she tried to fend them off? We see this play out in our own lives every day. It’s simpler than a healthy woman on a journey to her lover suddenly being seized by such a fit of melancholy that she throws herself in the canal.

The Wench is Dead, after all. Why worry about her?

Unlike that first Christina, I have had wonderful experiences on boats. I was never a passenger, dependent on others to transport me. I owned my boat, NB Encharnted (yes, that’s how it was spelled, in great big letters); I lived on her gentle rockings with the musical scrape of piling hooks when the locks shifted the water, and I steered her up and down the cut. When I walked the towpath at night, it was not for escape, but to collect wildflowers and put them in jugs on the gas locker. I filled her with water, emptied her toilet, lit my fire in winter and drank whiskey with the owls. I chose that life, in my safe and secure fifty-seven feet of steel that I helmed. Not a constrained trap of horror.

So coming in to Rugeley for this Christina Collins, aged thirty seven, on a canal boat, was very different from the first. And I walked the towpath; thought of her; remembered; wrote tributes and put flowers on her grave. And did not die.

Through all life’s rhythms that cycle through moments and ages – when we try again to do things better; maybe for now, that is the most I can do, for her.

Imbolc

My body has fallen back in with its Northern rhythms. There was Imbolc, brief reprise of snowdrop and crocus, brave buds peeping early, but now winter storms have come again. I sit in a turret, with half a panopticon of vista to watch the winds whip bare birch and oak, the hazel’s pale catkins turning yellowish to play dead. Rain is driven in visible sheets before the woodlands and the brook below rages, plunging its steel grey waters.

This reminds me of other turrets; writing in a Goulburn neo-gothic villa, and precarious above the sea at Eden with the writhing jacaranda. But we do things more quietly here in England. There is no wide ocean passage or endless limestone plain. Just ivy choked trees like a mockery of eucalypt regrowth, the green field, the brook, the rain – persistent, but somewhat tamed. Wind howls in cracks in the windows between the ladybird infestations I’m newly discovering. Magpies gather in nursery rhyme prophecies on the grass below. I read them.

Yesterday, I walked along the canal. Stamped mud up my long brown skirt, drenched it in the rain then it was blown dry again by the end of the walk.

If this is all sounding like a typical bucolic idyll where Chris hedge witches about or tramps the fields to the farm shop like Tess of the feckin’ d’Urbervilles, let me disabuse you.

I have moved to Birmingham.

Without is no wilderness, or whatever passes for it in England. I can see the tower blocks from my windows, and the copse runs to the grey tarmac web of roads soon enough. But undeniably, our new apartment is nice. It has two bedrooms. It has a balcony. It will have birds – although not cockies. It is indeed in a warm, south-facing turret with a marvellous panorama. It is by a large playing field, a raging torrent of a brook, the Stratford and Avon canal and is bordered by strips of woodland. So I get all that ruralish bliss, but because it’s just down the road from King’s Heath high street, the buses also come every four minutes. Winner winner.

Since arriving back in England, I calculate I have slept in about eight different beds. We finally have our own little place, and it’s not even shit, and I’m relieved. Today I have spent the afternoon scrubbing skirting boards and dusting venetian blinds while listening to an abridged audiobook about ‘wintering.’ It’s very Chris. This clever writer even managed to hit upon a whole lot of the insightful comments I already made about winter in my last blog. I tell you, it’s a crime I don’t have my own radio 4 podcast yet. But this writer certainly focused on all the good stuff about using winter to rest and rethink. Wallow, I say. Embracing sadness, stillness, quiet. So I meditated very profoundly on these deep thoughts while balanced on the windowsill until I opened the window to let out a mysterious ladybird and a whole fucken swarm of flies collapsed onto me.

So that was stillness, repose, and very nearly me, right out the window. Seemingly ladybirds are sort of nesting in the window frame. The bit where you open it, on the side there, don’t look too closely, it’s probably where the spiders lurk, although I’ve never worked out how they don’t get squished. But in the case of my windows, there’s an intimidating number of ladybirds crawling over each other, potentially preyed upon by the swarm of flies that also seem to inhabit the area. Perhaps it’s not so bleak. Perhaps they all live in the window frame in some sort of symbiotic harmony, like an epiphyte or something; but I tell you what, they’re not bloody living in harmony there anymore because I poked them all away with a pen lid.

That shall need further Dealing With.

Goodness, this wind has got rather more intense; as has the rain. I shall be able to see a soggy Gentleman walk up the path from here soon enough. Poor man. Have a care also for the poor spider in the left-most window; she has spun her web outside and is being rudely buffeted, but she is an English spider so I don’t need to move out and leave her the keys – she won’t be trying to kill me in my sleep.

Other things I have been doing in my two days At Home is traipse to Lidl and back (it’s like Aldi, chaps – and we even have Aldi in the UK too) to restock cupboards. I thought regretfully of all my nuts and seeds and stacks of food organised serenely in Jen’s Northbourne cupboard, but of course, I’m just glad it didn’t go to waste. Meanwhile, I rebuild my spice collection starting with C and working up.

I have seen most friends since getting back. And shout out to those dear bosom friends of the soul – who keep me in their hearts while I slip away for three years and welcome me home again as if I’d never left. After my mother’s arms and her insatiable pouring of wine, nothing made me feel more at home than reuniting with people who let me just guiltlessly pick up where I left off – who clearly didn’t begrudge my absence but were just happy for my return and the time I’d had. As I get older, I hit happy milestones of having known some friends longer than I haven’t, and there is much to be said for having friends that have seen you grow from idealistic student to embittered teacher and still like you anyway. I am aware I’m pulling a bit of a Victor Frankenstein, here, lamenting that old friends of youth are the only true ones, and new friends are never as good, while he dies by the new friend who rescued him from the ice. Poor Walton. I shall do no such thing – and I hope my Australian friends will stay close as I work to keep the Australian version of me true and open.

Which I suppose brings me to my new job and how my friends are helping me in to that. Having applied to a swathe of jobs, I’ve accidently got one that isn’t teaching. This has been an intense mind shift. Instead of marking mocks and guiding young people towards my leftist agenda through peace, love and literature an’ all that, I’ll be doing a junior admin role with the Open University. Working from home, in my little turret here. Seven and a half hours a day.

The same day I was offered this job, I was also offered an interview for a teaching role with a TLR in a school out past Wolverhampton. I sat down to prepare my interview lesson, I spent two and a half hours in Birmingham library stimulatingly researching the poem to teach, the method I would use, the resources, and realised I had completed only the first fifteen minutes of the lesson. I didn’t sleep for two nights, felt sick on the day of the interview and needed to poo five times before leaving. And that is how I feel for the whole first year in a new school. I am such a fuck up. But I really don’t miss that. The feeling that even after hours of planning one lesson, doing it completely differently might turn out to be more effective. You just don’t know. And there isn’t the time to plan lessons to that extent. And I don’t know what it was, but while I was sat in the inevitable breaktime come-and-bog-at-the-new-teachers session I felt … some of the toxicity of teaching again. The comparing of yourself, the trying to outdo each other, the show-offyness. But that’s all neither here nor there – I didn’t get the job, so junior admin role it is. It’s not a pay cut; right now, I’m on nothing, so it’s a definite pay rise.

I have gone through several waves of emotion on all this. First, I thought of all my marvellously clever friends who are role models and leaders, like Brooke and Claire in Australia, and Jenny in London and worried they might not want to be my friends anymore because I’m not in their league as a junior earner and lowly admin. Then I realised that was not only foolish pride, but also quite insulting to their integrity and decency. Then I felt like I was betraying my beautiful teacher friends like Corinne, Spellman, Emma-wife and Grace by abandoning them. ‘Confessing’ to Corinne made me feel better. Going back to my old school, where my old role doesn’t seem to be … thriving, made me feel worse – I should be sorting this out. Sitting with Emma on the floor of her spare room while she looked like she was about to pass out with exhaustion made me…think again. I love working with young people and sharing literature. But that seems to be less and less what teaching is allowed to be.

Part of me is a bit embarrassed that I couldn’t get a role of equivalent responsibility outside of my sector. Lots of people manage it. I expected a drop in pay, but not quite this much. Hearing other people talk about the things they’re doing at work that sound so important and exciting make me feel a bit ashamed of myself. But I don’t start till Monday, so who knows, my job could be that too.

Ultimately, I come back to Imbolc. The cold part of early spring, where things begin to grow from tiny, vulnerable shoots that may either die or thrive. Yup, I’ve picked a bit of a nervy time to change from a stable, well-paid career to a very junior one. Australia – I’m sure you’ve heard about fuel price increases which are global, but the UK is facing a major cost of living crisis this spring. Whoops. But I am also hoping this job in an excellent organisation will lead to more challenging things. I know there are excellent opportunities in the OU; I applied for them and didn’t get interviews. I’ll apply again.

And there will be growth in other ways. It’s morning now and I have re-established The Routine, even though I lamentably don’t have Hanna anymore to keep me accountable. I was up at six, did a HIIT, washed and was writing this by half past seven. I mean very much to keep up writing and the successes I’ve had in Australia. I will be planning it in and using the extra brain-space and weekends (where I’m too poor to go away) to finish novels and try to develop as a writer. I needs must first buy myself some sort of floppy sleeved linen shirt a la The Death of Chatterton, now that I am going to be a poor, struggling artist. Really lean in to that, you know? But all my life I’ve not had to think much about what happens next, because the term drives you forwards and tells you what to do. Now I must decide. I’ve realised in the last few years how damn lazy I’ve always been, how I actually find it a bit of a struggle to push myself to do things I don’t have to do. I was a bare minimum kid who was lucky enough to be reasonably smart. This will be real growth, real change. It will be hard.

It’s a beautiful morning. Storm Eunice is on its way. Things are lovely, then hard – there is no linear trajectory, just cycles. I will be soothed by sunshine and blackbirds and feel strong and happy and capable. Later, even though I know it’s coming, I won’t be able to stop myself being anxious or overwhelmed or deflated when things are difficult, despite logically knowing it’ll be alright. But I know I’ll survive it.

Growing hurts. This is the lesson of wintering. Poke green fingers through the earth and frost will bite them. But snowdrops grow anyway. So you must poke, try, make, and when it hurts, it’s a reminder you’re growing.

Home

Winter.

It’s in the blood. It’s not so much a season as a state, woven into people; stamped, stained. I know this to be true because I thought this would be harder. Early days, I know, but being plucked from blues and reds of an Australian summer’s sharp outlines and dumped into the moist of England’s winter, I had thought … I had thought I would cry more. But it is something in the body that the cells recognise, they know, they adapt.

It was immediately harder to see. When the pavements, buildings and drab fields are a monochrome grey, smeared with a putrid fog and the sky lingers in bluish twilight for seven hours, I found myself squinting. I rubbed my eyes and cleaned my glasses repeatedly, until I realised the very air is thicker here, and seeing through it is harder – disorientating after the brightness of Australia, where even my myopic eyes seemed buffed clean.

Those were the first impressions. The next, most significant, was that I tested positive for COVID immediately and that fucked up everything.

Thus from isolation, I have had time to contemplate winter. On the narrow, crowded motorways to home, I felt smothered by the very burden of familiarity – a recognition so strong it seemed to supersede the last three beautiful years, to override them like reality asserting after a wonderful dream. Like being crushed by it. It reminded me of walking along Rainham marshes with mum a few years ago, and arriving back in Purfleet, where I grew up. There was a deadening feeling of familiarity, like a weight of inheritance – no matter how far you go, this is you, and this is it, you can’t escape it. My Essex accent asserts immediately over three years of drawling ‘righto,’ bare trees like birch brooms nod, kangaroos and blood red birds evaporate into fantasy and cold is recognised.

And winter. But it was less of a shock than I thought. We arrived in Brentwood, to three sunny days in a row and our invisible, winter-coloured birds of greys and browns singing loud colours I’d forgotten. The sky is a pale blue, the shadows through the white gold light are long like a splendid and forlorn sunset. Light is gentle, moist, fallow. As I spent much of the first day sat on the windowsill I realised I have so rarely passed such a meditative day in winter. Normally I am demoning through mock papers, assessments and trying to think up cool shit for the end of term to try and remind young people that school is not just about being beaten with the exam stick. I don’t look up to breathe – then weekends; even on the boat in the middle of our rural idyll, were frantic all winter with getting water, washing and shopping and then finishing that marking before you lose the light. Or I was drunk, dulling the misery of winter. I can’t think of a time when I have had moments to stare out at the wintry daylight and watch it.

It’s in the blood. You remember what to do. I have lived cosily under a blanket for several days, draped dramatically in scarves. The sunshine is tender and gentle and moisture oozes out the very atmosphere – drink, drink it deep, quench a three year thirst. I’m surprised we don’t all have gills and webbed limbs here; as we swim through a wet cloud that has descended upon us that mutes visibility and the air is wet even though it isn’t raining. My skin feels less scratchy – I will go slimy like an eel. There is no desperate watching of clouds and mapping the hills and rivers to squeeze out every drop. Catchment here means where your kids go to school. So much water. And it is beautiful in its different way. Spiderwebs adorned with drops, that sort of thing; all those cliches. But I can prod these spiderwebs with my fingers without any red-backed vengeance. Yesterday was cloudy and misty so I collected my anthology of vampire tales and sat in the garden, wrapped in more blankets than a Victorian invalid and got my Goth on. It was great. Hot tea, lean into the gothic, blankets, scarves and enjoy the ghostly mists and birds.

Of birds; I miss the cordial friendliness of our cockies and galahs, shuffling over to see what you’re doing. But these bluetits and blackbirds remind me of the importance of stillness. So be still, and watch. Read, write. Stay in, make hot chocolate, get cold so you can get warm again. Winter is not something you screw your eyes up tight to, holding your breath and hoping it’ll be over soon. You have to live it, here. Sit with it.

It’s in the blood.

The Garden of … Eden

A pelican suspends itself against a grey sky thickly smeared with misty forms. I watch it, holding my breath with its static.

There – it has flapped at last and sunk. I can no longer see it behind the thrashing head of a gum, nut-swollen and flinging honeyeaters. The purple jacaranda stands garishly vivid against the resolute rain that thunders against the thin windows.

I am alone.

When rain drums against a deliciously morbid sky, and the wind moans between the cracks in old, thin walls (blow, winds, crack your cheeks!) I think of the loneliness of lighthouses. Long days against the ache of wind and weather, filled with industry and the busyness of routines to sooth the mind – or concentrate it, whatever your preference. Curse the innovations of electricity that stole the lighthouse keeper from their tower! When Darlings lived alone against the storms and rowed the lips of whirlpools to save the drowning perhaps once or twice a year, to break up the tasks of cleaning the glass and metal of lanterns. What perfect profession – to live your life in service to humanity’s salvation, but rarely have to actually talk to them!

I should write a shanty about Grace Darling, or old Tom the Killer Whale, or a Rapunzel tale about a lighthouse keeper.

I imagine a pair of overalls – no skirt and apron to trip over on the one hundred spiral steps – and arranging the day’s metal out in a neat line for cleaning. Two hours a day amid the day’s other duties for twelve in a row to finish, then start again. Two hours a day in a high room, warmed by the glass from every side like a panopticon. I could look up from polishing in any direction, at any moment. Two hours every day, eying the sun passing from one headland of the bay to another to mark the time, singing songs to pass it.

I imagine hot days when the breeze off the coast is fresh relief to the close, moist heat just the other side of the melaleuca and wattle trees where the ground forms dips and hollows on Green Cape. West is emeralds, broken by the blood of bottlebrush or jacaranda amethyst. East; South, is sapphire blue, the eyes squinting against the opals of the sea until dusk eases the ache.

I imagine grey days like this one, blasted from all sides and the thrum of fear as the wind shrieks and waves bark against the impossible red cliffs. Sitting out the watch in the tower – every bit as confined as Rapunzel, scanning, scanning. Not praying for a prince, for rescue, but silently begging the sea to be empty of just such things. For who has to be the hero in this Rapunzel version, but Rapunzel herself? Retiring at last from the watch, eyes sore and body stiff from staring and hunching in the cold, to a warm fire and tea, maybe parsley or lambs lettuce in your supper.

How could I imagine bored children, desperate to get away from the company of all that sea? What life holds better purpose? To run the headlands and forests looking for wombat holes, the refuges of wallabies, banksia blooms and the calls of birds? To watch the sea eagle skim the bay, wheeling above the harbour? And then to take your place on duty at the four-hour watch above the tides and rocks to see the shifting of ages – to wish the migrating humpback whales God speed as they leave, then be the first to welcome them home again when they bring new calves. And if it is adventure you want, what better the rage of a sucking sea that cleaved the hull of the Ly-ee Moon steamer and flying on the waves to heave its passengers out of them? If it’s drink, there’s gin a-plenty. If it’s the brouhaha of the city, what more sociable conversation than the winds?

All this above Eden, which exists only because of the whaling industry. And whales very nearly don’t because of Eden.

Before whaling, it is estimated there were over 200,000 Southern Ocean whales. In fewer than a hundred years, there were 360. While the town of Eden, with its street names and memorial sites will have you think it was down to the acumen of about three pioneering families, the successful destruction of nearly a whole species was actually down to luck, and the deep affinity of the Thaua Yuin people with killer whales. This ancient relationship involved the belief that the spirits of dead relatives became these orcas. When humpbacks or baleen whales swam into the deep, natural harbour of Twofold Bay, the pod of orcas would trap it at one end while the lead bull would jump around a lot and signal to the oblivious watchers in Boyd Tower. The whalers would spot him, then launch their boats to row out and harpoon the humpback, rewarding the orcas with its tongue and lips before hauling it ashore to harvest the oil and bone. Before any fanciful narratives about intent can get carried away, there are lots of examples of predator animals that work together to hunt, like wolves, hyenas, prides, and several that cooperate inter-species for the same purpose. The spotted antbird of Costa Rica observes, follows, and benefits from the movement of ant swarms to eat crickets and invertebrates, and there is the honeyguide bird in parts of Africa that works with humans to locate beehives. Driven in part by instinct to eat, animals can learn.

Thus, it was these orcas that were the heroes and cunning hunters. Not the men that for seventy years made a fortune out of their exploitation of whales to the brink of oblivion, then obviously lost everything when there was nothing left to hunt. And the killer whale gets a real good rep in the town’s killer whale museum. More, in fact, than the Thaua people. Referred to throughout as ‘Aborigines’ and spoken of with some reverence in regard to their hunting skills and their ‘superior eyesight’ (I’m sure this was empirically verified), there is no mention about the treatment of these people and what happened to them when three families set up docks and stockyards and grazing on their land. It brushes over their employment by the Davidson family; one quotation refers to their payment of ‘slops and food.’ Well, confronting as it may be, and whatever the intent was at the time, that does meet the unfortunate definition of slavery. There is a small set of boards dedicated to Aboriginal dreaming in a very generic sense, but no representation from local people (I must be fair; there was one piece of art by a local Yuin man) that instructs about the specific life of the coast people, or offers recognition about how this brutal and short-lived industry impacted them.

As well as the blind spot on the First Nations people of the Sapphire Coast, there is another partial blindness to the brutality of whaling and its impact on the species. There is one board that notes the difference in numbers before and after whaling. And some pretty, wavy writing under a lot of other text that said Australia does not support whaling, but nothing joins up the two. Nothing offers recognition and ownership of the reality that it was the industry that did this. Eden did not make a conscious, conscientious, conservationist decision to stop whaling. It stopped because there were so few left it was no longer a viable industry.

But this blindness or silence on that salient point, and the contrasting wealth of information given about the uses of whales, how they were killed, who killed them, how big they were, along with unavoidably romanticised paintings and poems with a healthy dose of ‘rush-o!’ and ‘thar she blows!’ presents the industry and heritage of this town as undeniably glorified. I’m sure it was all very exciting and dangerous, and they were very brave and strong, and real men and all that – but where does it leave Eden now? Struggling to refocus its identity, it has turned to trawling – until we run out of fish too? and logging – until … ? when it could have led the way in whale conservation and remodelled on progressive science. On the direct migratory routes of several whale species, it is uniquely placed to be a centre for marine research and conservation, not to mention tourism. But admittedly, even if research became the dominant industry in the way that education centres sometimes can, it might not be for everyone. In a town that defined itself by the meaty, manly history of whaling, a research facility may not provide the full scope of options for your average bloke looking to understand who he is, how he fits in the world and how he can contribute to it.

The lighthouse would have been perfect.

Forest to Reef

Cape Tribulation is sold short by its name. Maybe it’s the getting there; it must be the getting there. You cross the Daintree River on a charming little ferry – it’s seriously croc infested (the river, not the ferry) – then wend along a narrow, windy road. High rainforested hills sweep up to your left, the coral sea glitters out to your right. It is, apart from perhaps that veranda at Red Mill House, the most enchanting place. This cape exemplifies the Australian specialisation of beautifully sweeping curves, and honest-to-goodness palm trees on sand so white it hurt. Then the blue, blue, blue.

We spent an unforgivably luxurious afternoon paddling (on the safe side of a sandbar, in water an inch deep), practising handstands (I don’t know why this has become a beach tradition of ours) and I read while the Gentleman built a little fort with a good coaching house on its little road. It was just extraordinary; you must ask him about it. A rhythmic knocking above our heads caught our attention and we turned to see another black butcherbird butchering a coconut. It fell down and cracked. We actually picked it up and drank the water that trickled out of it, like a pair of goddamn children-of-nature. Freakin’ idyllic. Then we strolled along the Dubuji track – a boardwalk through the mangroves which was also captivating. We had been assured by a girl at the servo next door that we might meet a cassowary. I’m not sure I want to meet a cassowary, I said. Oh, they’re ok; they’re pretty curious, she said, they can come right up to you. I’m not sure I want them to come right up to me, I said, they can bloody kill you with one knife edged foot. In fact, if I see one, I want a clear space in the other direction and nothing stopping me from keeping it in clear view. What I don’t want, is to be trapped on a narrow boardwalk surrounded by snake-infested swamps. But she assured us it was fine, and, not knowing if this was again the risk tolerance, safety reality, or actual bloody ruthlessness of northerners, we shrugged and went.

A word on mangroves. They are hauntingly lovely places. I don’t know why haunting, I’m trying to resist an inevitably gothic comparison, and in their deep, moist shade there is something gothic, something shadowed and mysterious. But not threatening. I don’t know, maybe meeting Kuku Yalanji people, reading about Aboriginal culture and meeting lots of people talking about their culture means that a person never again can approach the spaces of Australia with the attitude of Joan Lindsay in Picnic at Hanging Rock or… or bloody Lawrence. It is vast, but it is not an unknown place of terror to be conquered. It is deeply, deeply known, and deeply loved by people who have known and loved it for thousands of years; who will share that knowing and love. It’s something I can feel. Ok, chaps, fade back in, I’m finished, either way, the mangroves gave me that tingly feeling of excitement that forest river pools give me when the words of Jenny Greenteeth songs slip into my head.

Right, and THEN we shot down to another campsite that had freakin’ fresh stone-baked pizza, so we smashed two of them like a pair of hungry bastards, crushed a couple of beers and watched the moon rise over the sea. JESUS, I shouldn’t be allowed such loveliness. Then back at our tiny little cabin at Safari Lodge (this place, despite being waist deep in rainforest, does an awesome almond flat white, breakfast fritters and noodle salads), we sat outside in the dark watching little marsupials nip in and out of the bushes.

After visiting ice cream making fruit orchards and tea plantations, and getting MANGED (eaten by insects, as the Gentleman calls it), we regretfully left the rainforest. Yeah, I was pretty gutted. I could have stayed there another full week listening to the lolla-palooo calls of wompoo fruit-doves and the oli-oli-oli calls of the olive-backed orioles, the ever-present peaceful dove, and the sound of the sea. And the drive was the last chance to listen to Murder Ballads all the way through, so, heart break all round.

I have never been snorkelling before.

As a child, watching The Little Mermaid like all children do, except, apparently, the Gentleman, I thought being able to breathe underwater and chill with fishies would be just awesome. The sort of thing ya couldn’t drag me away from.

Turns out, it’s a lot harder than I thought.

At the age of 15, I discovered that getting out of a wetsuit is one of the hardest things a human can do in their life. Twenty-two years later, I bloody stand by that. On board Coral Sea Dreaming, I dragged the horrific latex thing off one shoulder, and it took me a bit too long to realise that in the struggle I’d whapped a bap out, which was, unbeknown to me, enjoying the sea breeze completely unencumbered by my bikini. Of course, I did what any dignified adult woman would do, which was exclaim loudly in horror, oh shit, look! I’ve pulled my boob out…

Christ, Chris.

But I’ve noticed that in the telling of my adventures to chums, that snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef – a lifetime ambition for any human that has ever seen Finding Nemo – consistently comes last. This is not just because it was the last thing we did. I’ve been pondering. I think because it is so otherworldly, so unlike any thing I have ever done before, that I don’t know how to explain it. I haven’ learned how to tell it. There is no point in a human’s life when you are lying flat, facing down, and watching things move ten feet below you. Floating face down and looking, seeing, is not something humans are built for. It’s completely unique.

And a bit fucken scary.

First you put your big old goggles on, and there’s a bit that goes over your nose. This, as we know, is to close off that orifice so you only breathe through the tube you put in your mouth. Of course the minute I put the goggles on, I tried and failed to breathe through my nose, which made me panic, then putting something huge in my mouth was pretty uncomfortable. Oy, stop it. Then when you’ve figured out a few breaths, you do what you are taught from birth never to do, which is put your face straight down into the water; and breathe in.

Bleaurgh. So I got the hang of that a bit, even graduated away from the pool noodle, but I managed to keep sucking in sea water, so I’d panic and surface again, and stare out over miles and miles of open, wide sea and feel lonely and scared with the waves breaking over me and my toe rubbing roughly against the flippers as I tried to stay upright. The impossibly tanned, impossibly beautiful young people on the boat were very kind about my ineptness and the lovely long-haired young man told me to pout more, as if for insta; that stops the water coming in, he said. Millennials and their adaptivity.

Eventually I calmed down a bit and got to stare at some fishes. We saw a beautiful little turtle, frowning in that wise and thoughtful way that they do. Not towards us, like in the picture above. In fact, he took one look at us and swiveled round right back where he came from. Gracefully. But disdainfully. Huge coral plants had tiny little fishes darted around out of time with the current and tides. We rounded over big bommies (like under water mountains or something) and swam right into huge shoals of fish of every colour. Some had hilarious bulbous heads, like really big foreheads or frowns. Others were gracefully tiny, all blue with yellow tails. The implausible parrotfish were shimmery purple and green. A little whitetip reef shark shimmied its way below me as I stared down.

As we got more used to it, I suggested we just sort of hang out in one place and watch. And that was wonderful. We lay spread-eagled on the surface, breathing carefully, and feeling ourselves being gently buffeted by the current, left-right-right; left-right-right; left-right-right. With all the fish that were doing it too. Left-right-right. Left-right-right. For days afterwards when I closed my eyes, there was that gentle surrender of left-right-right, with an imprinted halo of cold around my head where it peeped above the water, the weightless feeling and the fish left-right-right-ing with me.

One thing you don’t expect is how soooooore your foreheads get from the goggles pressing deeply into your brow, and your teeth ache like hell for hours afterwards from clamping down on your snorkel tube for dear life.

But the whole affair was delicious, hours of cruising across the sea and bouncing on the purple-blue with the green rainforest mountains behind us; lolling in hammocks reading books while a whole freakin’ pod of dolphins followed the boat, writing, making new friends, squealing over a minke whale that came to explore what this funny, big, whale-like thing was that ejected these funny little spiders. Oddly, the gender balance was completely the opposite from the Kimberley trip, and it created a different tone. I took my customary role as group gob-shite, and a wonderful woman, Margaret, who was #vanlife-ing her way around Australia (because she was wanted at home, not needed – isn’t that beautiful? Life goal) gently teased the only men into submission and quiet.

We all drank a lot of beer, ate tacos and watched the full moon rise over the sea. And I fell asleep trying to think of ways to describe the gentle, endless left-right-right as the waves gently tapped the boat in an eternal game of It.