A Long, Good Day

It is Monday or more precisely it is still defiantly Monday, a Monday that will look you hard cold in the face for the fact it has decided to still be it; it is Monday and it becomes dark when I am at my desk and it is darker still when I realise how long I’ve been at my desk, although surely it was only less than an hour ago I was walking along the seafront, watching the waves, the seabirds I have come to love playing in the thermals, the rocks exposed, and me too far away to see the layers of sediment in them but knowing what they look like close up and thinking it’s been too long since I was down here at low tide with the children, all winter and longer really than that. I walk to a cafe because I need a bigger desk than the one I have, I need to lay out many notes and notebooks and pieces of paper and every time I start a new project I think this will be the one that stays in a certain kind of order, this will be the one I can make notes for, notes that at least resemble notes, and not the whatever you’d call whatever it is I use in place of them, and then it happens, every project works the way it wants to work, which is to say it works in a strange way that defies gravity, logic and explanation but above all things, space. This was in part why the cabin in the forest was so good, the desk was obscenely big. Perhaps the biggest I’ve ever sat at, big enough to rival the desk of a writer whose desk I sat at once, hoping for just a small part of their talent. I was the first person to use the desk in the forest, I worry about what I might have haunted it with. The missing of the forest has become more visceral than it was, perhaps it is far enough away now to feel like a memory, whereas at the time, it still felt like an experience. For some of today, this Monday that is still Monday, I was researching Chronos and Kairos, two Greek concepts of time, and the forest experience certainly didn’t conform to Chronos, used to describe linear named time. Maybe it was more accurately resembled Kairos, fleeting time, momentary time. Certainly it was a moment and a moment in which I had no need for Chronos, which is perhaps what it means to be free, or at least or at times, freefalling. Freedom is not always what it’s made out to be.

In this eternal February Monday, I go to the cafe with the large tables and drink strong black coffee with everyone else who is doing the same, there is a kind of tacit hush over the whole cafe, only broken by the man next to me joining a teams call and talking loudly about import and export duties and possibly also shell companies, although I pretend not to hear that bit, and then when he loudly mispronounces Ghislaine Maxwell as jiz-lane, everyone else also pretends not to hear him. I like cafes with this type of hush, since it seems the opposite of what you should expect from a cafe, and is far preferable to cafes with babies in, or worse, cafes with mothers in who can only talk about either 1. their babies (who are also there) and/or 2. their husbands who are always utterly inept at everything that have ever tried to do; although it is also the type of hush that would have me running from a library since it is expected in a library and therefore to be avoided. After a time, I break my head by reading too much Roland Barthes and Marina Warner; some people they should not be read together, or should but perhaps not on a Monday morning after two cups of coffee and next to a possible money laundering expert. I leave and walk back along the seafront which by then is the type of biting cold my overly optimistic leather blazer is a poor match for.

By the time I stand up from my desk at home, with the true dark outside the window, punctured only by the lights from the houses opposite the rows of back gardens, I realise in the sudden way you do when you’ve forgotten the fact of your body for many hours on end, that I need air.

This is how it comes to be that on this interminable Monday when it is still February and after we all wonder how it was that January was at least 400 days long, how is it February lasts for twice that, despite the fact of the snows drops I saw in the park yesterday, despite the crocuses and the buds and a fool’s spring they’d call it but we are not fools enough to think of this as spring, not yet, not when on this longest day of the year so far, I am standing on the cliffs, with the 30 miles an hour gusts of wind not strong enough even then to knock enough air back into me, wind so ferocious it steals my youngest child’s laughter away, finding it when it hits first landfall from across the channel and then whipping it off, in the way it is doing the same with our hair, wet now from the might be sleet, might be the sea thrown up the cliff towards us. I ask my daughter why it is I’ve brought her specifically up here, away from town, high up with the wind, to look at the stars. Lately, we have taken to night time excursions for this purpose. I tell her the names of the stars I know, and point out the planets too, and she also prefers moonless nights for the way the stars are brighter then. She can now recognise Venus and nothing else, I take this as a victory. I tell her about the forest, how I saw stars there I had never seen before or since; how close the sky looked, how at times it looked like it might buckle under the weight of so much light. When I ask her why we are standing where we are, she says, her voice full of a frown, is it because we are closer to the stars up here and I want to keep her like this forever, just on the verge of the next stage of childhood, when her logic will not be as simple or as pure as this. I tell her it might be. There are no stars tonight. Just wind. Even the street lamps are difficult to pick out. There must be a haar, the same as there was the night after I took her to Edinburgh on the sleeper train, and her going to sleep barely before the train pulled out of Euston, going to sleep one age, and waking in Scotland another on the day of the spring equinox, and me at the window with the blind up as she still slept, the rime on red pantiles signalling home. And that night, the night of her birthday, I walked her around my old haunts, her my only child not born in that city, born instead in the foothills of the Eildons, where they say pixies are born, and some legends make a person make sense. I did not think to call the haar a sea-fret that night and can not bring myself to call it that since. How many words are there for mist and how is it I know so few, how was I lucky enough last year to learn new words for wind and to not stop thinking of these since; the winds the migratory birds must encounter and come to understand in ways we can hardly imagine.

I think of the word haar travelling by sea, the norsemen rolling in and the words they brought with them, the echoes still in Sweden, acting like a bridge when I encountered them there, a bridge from heart to home, and I think I heard this phrase in Carol Ann Duffy’s The Christmas Truce but when I check, it is wrong; instead it is a song that is a sudden bridge from man to man; a gift to the heart from home. It is melody that creates this unifying bridge she writes about in this poem, one I read every Christmas Eve to my children, and every Christmas Eve, I worry it’ll be the last they’ll want to hear it. I cannot stop thinking of the sea as a road. It helps to see it like this, uniting more than it divides. For much of my childhood I was conscious of the sea, not simply because I grew up in close proximity to it, but because much of my family lived over it, and one especially enterprising one, lived largely on it, creating much excitement (for me at least, I was young enough) when he was beset by pirates.

I thought of this in December, when I stood looking out across the Mersey, how much - unless winged - for so long arrived or departed by water. I was struck then by the commonality of the word Mersey with the word merse, used more commonly in the Scottish Borders than anywhere else in Scotland, specifically Berwickshire, where even the rhythm of the name evokes still the sound of the foghorn on school mornings as the haar rolled in from the coast, and the rolling hills, always present, on one side, Scotland, the other England, a border we crossed so often it should have been commonplace and yet it never was, always we’d whoop when we got back over, safely back on the proper side of it where the roads were properly maintained and the hedges allowed to ramble, where merse doubled its meaning to denote lowland flatlands in close proximity to the water, or to stand as a synonym for Berwickshire and the border the Tweed demarked between Scotland, move further west and its meaning triples, referring to land along the Solway Firth, again water separating Scotland from England. It is no surprise perhaps that the Mersey, another boundary river, shares the same root. It is no surprise either perhaps, that having grown up in the borders, and reaching 20 before I realised I was asked which borders, and realising there was perhaps a more specific name for the region, that I always feel at my most comfortable in these peripheral places.

Maybe too, home and the time we mark it with, the way in which we remember it, is through a series of moments more closely aligned to Kairos than Chronos. Specific moments return us to points in time that continue to exist even though the logic of Chronos would suggest otherwise. Kairos too allows these moments in time to continue, it preserves the fleeting, whereas Chronos in that it is always seeking to move forward, endlessly and also annoyingly, at the precise point memory begins to fail us, will ruin time, Chronos will only ever try to obliviate time, and the memories we create within it. Just as in The Christmas Truce, when it is melody irrespective of a specific language that unifies the men in the trenches that Christmas Day, similarities in language, and the persistence on returning to elements of our mother tongue, that enables home to live on, irrespective of where it is we end up.

I stand there on the clifftop, my daughter not knowing yet there are words like sea-fret, fog, mist even, all these lesser words; I ask her if she were Grace Darling would she set out in this weather across the oil dark sea we sense but can’t fully make out, more a looming presence in the way anything truly dark is. I ask her this and for a moment she doesn’t get the reference, the school project too far away, and her memories of Northumbria the same, how us children on either side of the border were indoctrinated with the story of Grace Darling’s heroism, in the same way on the Scottish side we were thrilled by Jim Clark’s daring, or would have been if he were not so commonplace as to no longer feature in our collective imaginations, he simply was there in the graveyard, and in a small car on the clock at the top of the village, in the same way the statue of Wojtek the Bear risks becoming boring to local children, but never my children, because he will to them always be tinged with the rarity myth needs to function; seeing him will be part of the moments of their childhood, just as this moment, me and her on the cliffs, laughing at the wind on this everlasting Monday which is still Monday, might become part of the myths she later tells of her childhood in the same way I talk to her of the haar, the foghorn, the hills and the hedges.

(it is a coincidence that I wrote this while listening to Erland Cooper’s Holm. When I was in Sweden I made a playlist of work songs, hoping for a Pavlovian type of response when I put it on. The first song on this playlist is Erland Cooper’s Haar over Hamnavoe (with Bill Ryder-Jones). As usual, I didn’t decide on what I was going to write about before I started writing this, maybe subconsciously I was influenced by this song, it is truly beautiful. Also the song titles on that record pretty much sum up what I’m thinking about language and the sea and how maybe we should let Scotland be part of Scandinavia - please.