Three Months

and protecting the private and public.

Walk the baby to school and it doesn’t matter that she’s seven now, she’ll always be the baby, although I don’t tell her this, I let her think she’s grown although I still can’t get over how tiny her hands are. Walk her to school and the leaves are frozen, the air exiting our warm bodies, white. She jumps on leaves and talks about moving home. She wants to wear a kilt and learn the bagpipes and I let her entertain the idea that this is how Scottish children behave and do not tell her that most of them spend most of their childhoods plotting an escape.

Walk her and although we are late, I watch as she jumps on the leaves, not cold enough to snap and crunch like she wants them too. Maybe soon, I say, knowing the forecast is that it will get warmer, and soon is a while off yet, but still. Walk her and as she jumps, think of the last three months; how busy I’ve been, how little it feels like I’ve achieved. I was warned, under a full moon, about this negative voice. I have not let myself use it since. Think instead of everything I’ve done.

August feels far away, both for the temperature and the location. On the 20th August I was home home, back in the Scottish Borders, visiting my uncle after a week at Edinburgh International Book Festival, and the week before that, tutoring in the highlands. I rarely go home home, it was special to do it. The light there, isn’t like anywhere else. Or the hills. Or the rolling landscape. Or the coast. I am biased. I used to hate it, now I something it. There aren’t words for every feeling. It’s good to go back home, it’s good to connect the past and the present. An integration of things. Although I never learnt the bagpipes and rarely wore a kilt.

Last week, a student showed me a free drawing she’d done, asked me what I saw in it. I saw a tree without roots, bending in the wind. Maybe it’s true that everything external is a mirror. Certainly, no one else saw this tree.

Back in Scotland at the end of September, I began to think about roots, or more specifically, what the lack of them does. What displacement, relocation and assimilation do, not only to the people who experience it, but their descendants who inherit its effects. For a long time, I have thought myself half. Half Scottish, half South African, half Christian, half Jewish - wholly nothing. This is no way to speak about anyone, but especially myself.

Back in London, on the first evening of Rosh Hashanah, I caught the train to the coast as the sun set, a blazing show off of a sunset, as if perhaps an ancestor or two were having a word. Impossible this year, to not think of being Jewish, however small the ish. These roots I have tried to ignore, make their presence known in other ways. It is better sometimes, but really every time it is better to face things head on.

October was a month of thinking, reflecting. I fasted for the first time. The children worried I would find this too natural and forget to stop. I didn’t. To find the gates closed on the past at Yom Kippur was a relief. A relief of a phrase, an idea to entertain. What’s done is just that.

Three months of travelling, interviewing, reading, teaching, pitching, listening, thinking. Sometimes things feel like a coiling inwards, towards a private place, and it’s difficult when you’ve made your work part of the trauma machine, to draw that distinct line between the public and private, but imperative too, when it comes to protecting the place the real work comes from. Not the work that concerns itself with the sensibility or peculiarities of the market, or the work made for likes and clicks, instead the deep work that’s rooted in some place in you, in me, the work that’s uncomfortable to produce, difficult to revisit, harder still to look at twice, thrice. Essential to retain or at least try and attain, a singular independent mind, especially when there’s so much vying for it, which is why these times of travel, conversation, tutoring, are times I love, because they feed that.

Three months and it will be February and the winter nearly over and I am bad with the future. I do not like how uncertain it is. I do not like dreaming it or planning for it or saying a thing will happen for the fear it might not. But the baby has no problem with it, as she jumps on leaves and talks about learning to horse ride and all the things she will be when she grows up and what a thing, to know how to dream still.