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early Sunday morning things

Sunday morning and the trains are off. The bottom right of my screen tells me it’s 14 degrees and mostly cloudy, at home, it’s not been below 20 for weeks. Outside, gulls are squabbling. Two nights ago, I lay awake around dawn maybe, or earlier than that, listening to the foxes screaming, later, when I left the house to buy coffee, white feathers littering the drive. It is likely that the fox stalking my neighbourhood shares my aversion to gulls. Although these feathers were soft, tinged with grey, it is possible to feel a measure of sympathy for the baby gull and its high pitched, constant mews, alerting the fox to its whereabouts.

Soon, I will get a bus to the highlands. Same price as a train. This is showing not telling that the infrastructure in this country has become a joke and a deeply unfunny one at that. It is a bad comedian in a flat roofed pub that only serves two kinds of beer and one of them is Tennant’s.

En route to Euston yesterday, an alert that my train north was ‘no longer stopping at Glasgow Central’ an unfortunate omission since I didn’t fancy taking my chances in Motherwell or Shotts. Euston is, if you’ve never had the misfortune to experience it, the worst of London’s stations. A box essentially, at least a mercy for London’s skyline, but an airless suffocating one, with platforms at the end of long ramps, and in place of barriers, manual, lengthy ticket checks all conducted under the auspices of a large clock, counting down the minutes until the platform closes. For someone who veers towards neurosis, this is not great. And unlike King’s Cross, five minutes down the Euston Road, it has nowhere for a good coffee. To compound it, the underground has stairs, less than handy for someone who might say have packed a suitcase nearly the same weight as them. Three weeks of unpredictable weather and many work events is a long time. This is my excuse. Maybe I just like shoes. As I stood helplessly at the bottom of the stairs a man grabbed my case and carried it up for me. I heard the last call for the earlier departing Glasgow train and ran for it, down the steep ramp, the ticket inspector waving me through three minutes before the doors closed, the burly man who helped me on advising me to ‘pack less next time love’.

In Glasgow, the light feels like home. I’ve said this before, somewhere here. I love coming back to Scotland because, although the weeks leading up to it are a mess of organising and logistics and trying to clear work for a week so I can tutor and all the usual stuff working people with kids need to balance, as soon as I arrive, it’s easy. I know the transport system, I know the weather, I know the light, it looks like home, smells like home, once my ear tunes back into the accent - increasingly taking longer and longer - sounds like home. I don’t think it ever matters how long you’re away, where you grew up stays curled in you, a muscle memory of home. Barry Lopez writes about his experience of this in Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. Home isn’t the same as where you live or where you chose to settle or even where you like living best. It’s the cards you’re dealt early on, it’s the earliest thing your body remembers. Home is an embodied thing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about home and the uncanny, the unheimlich, the uncanny being precisely that because it breaches the home, and the home should be unbreachable. A bastion of sorts. There’s a scene in the BBC TV series Luther that is uncanny in the truest sense, a serial killer posing his victims around a dinner table in their home. This is one of the most horrible and enduring scenes I’ve seen for the way the killer has breached the borders of the home. This is precisely why Twin Peaks works so well, exposing the limits of home. I have, just now, remembered Greil Marcus’s great essay on Laura Palmer and Twin Peaks and the uncanny; American Pastoral perhaps.

The idea of home as a comfort, a myth. Perhaps the truest myth of home is the biblical one, Adam and Eve cast from the garden early on, expelled from their paradise as we are our first home -our mother’s womb - and the umbilical cord, our first encounter with thread, soon severed. Birth is a violence we wear as a wound in the centre of our stomachs for the rest of our lives. No wonder we talk about the pull of home, this first thread, reeling us back.

I listened to Nathan Englander speak about childhood kitchens once, and he highlighted how it’s such a personal phrase. For some, the childhood kitchen is a place of warmth, conviviality, others, the opposite. This observation, an accurate reflection of the larger instability of language. As writers, we like to think we’re working with a medium of a certain dependability. Words have meanings after all. It should not be that hard to pass meaning from person to person, and yet the reception of the meaning all depends on the subjective experience of the person receiving it, combined with the writers’ ability. When writers speak about truth, I become suspicious; a good writer knows language itself is an apparition, a lack only. I am currently reading the new Jonathan Lethem, Cellophane Blocks, in it he talks about the writer wishing for a more stable medium. I often do, for me, it’s always textiles I wish I could return to. The mathematical predictability of a loom, a plan and a certain outcome. And yet, if I didn’t know the inner workings of a loom, if I couldn’t pattern, if I didn’t know that maths or how the thread works in it, I wouldn’t be able to write the things I do, because when I’m plotting and writing, I still see it in the same way. Holding many threads, weaving them into something larger; text and textile, the same etymology. Textiles too my first home. The first time I held a needle was the first time my hands made sense. I was not an athletic child, balls and bats and rackets didn’t mean anything in my hands, but a needle did. I learnt to sew the same summer I learnt to read.

The bottom right of my screen now warns me that high winds are expected. I need coffee. Something for the bus. Soon, I will schlep my suitcase to the bus station before thinking I am the luckiest person alive for getting to see the highlands up close and calling it work.

(This is literally me being awake early and wanting to write something before the day starts and runs away from me. It isn’t meant to be coherent or profound or anything other than just what happens as my brain wakes up. Apologies for this. Sometimes it’s just useful to write and see what happens. I especially find this useful and pleasurable and so slightly self indulgent, when I’m working on something where I can’t do that - my next novel is meticulously planned otherwise it wouldn’t work, so there’s no room for just seeing what happens. I can be AWOL here.)