I Am Conferred As Reader

My mother taught me to read using a set of word cards. I can see her holding them up in front of me in the corner of the vicarage dining room in the winter-dark. I see myself as very small. Four, perhaps. Many significant things happened when I was four. The dog arriving, for example. 

The letters on the cards were large and some were red, some were black. That early evening, I knew I couldn't read, and it felt like a deficiency in me. 

As I pieced words together letter by letter, I sensed frustration in my mother. With four children under the age of ten, and the whole parish to consider, she was probably feeling the utter endlessness of her tasks. But back then I linked her anxiety to my reading.

In this memory, towards the end of the flashcard time, something fell into its place - maybe CAT or ANT or BOY or (to make things story-neat-and-tidy) DOG.  I read this word in one shot, understood something about its shape and relationship to sound. I noticed my mother being relieved about something. She put the cards away, and I don't remember ever seeing them again. 

The word I learned to spell deliberately and collaboratively, as a sort of family chorus, was the dog's tricksy name. "CHUMLEEEE," we'd chant. "C-H-O-L-M-E-L-E-Y!" It wasn't long after learning that words on the page and in the mouth can differ that I took off into reading big time. I lay on my bed, its granny-knitted white bedspread turned grey at the foot where the dog slept each night, spending wonderful afternoons with whole books. 

What's brought on this musing is my promotion in August to Reader at Wrexham University. The title has been conferred on me through a process of application, reference, and consideration of the evidence of my academic standing. I was able to choose my own title as part of the process - Reader in Creative Coproduction. It reflects the way I work with others to find new and collaborative ways of learning in social work education.

I like the word Reader. I like the word Confer. I like the way words have enabled me, reading, reading, speaking, and writing, to grow into the teacher-as-learner part of myself.

If I were making an acceptance speech I'd thank many people, especially (you know who you are) Outside In. I'd thank my colleagues and referees: Tim, Jill, and Neil. I'd thank my family, I'd thank Tove Jansson, C.S. Lewis, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and A.A. Milne. I'd thank my dog. 

And, at this point, I'd thank, most of all, my long-dead-but-never-left mother, for the precious time she spent with me: her gift of hard-won priorities, her wanting so much for me to be a reader.

Photo taken by the lovely Kate Lefroy

I Am Foot-Washed

I cycled to my allotment first thing - let's say 7.00am. It was a continual and sun-washed morning in this long drought of UK summer, and even though I wasn't as hot as I've been in recent days, I relished the gift of water lurching from the watering can onto my feet as I splashed the courgettes, beans, tomatoes, and the monstrous one-fruit-a-day cucumber plant which has taken occupation of the greenhouse. 

As the first washing included a residue of allotment soil, I carried out a quick second rinsing of my feet in the afternoon prior to going out again. I book a massage from time to time - it requires forward-booking and then, as is my wont, a last minute dash to be ready to go. 

My organised part, let's call her Kanga, anticipates my need to be taken out of my tendency to busyness to balance the way I (my Rabbit part) fill my days with the work ethic which runs into me like a given, a sort of kettle flex, rarely switched off at the mains. Booking a massage means bracketing a requirement to lie down in comfort and receive the carefully learned ways of therapeutic touch, the ways that seek out the spaces between my tension and my need.

The third washing of my feet today was offered by Maddy who is a wonderful holistic massage therapist. The place was a bowl of warm water and Epsom salts in an upper room at Neals Yard, Shrewsbury. She suggested it as the ritual start to my Deep Peace massage and I said yes. It sounded practical given the allotment soil still staining my soles.

The third washing - well, it brought me to tears. The gentleness, the care shown: Maddy kneeling at my feet, not as servant, not holier than me, but woman-to-woman, practical, thoughtful, smiling. There was a grace in the way she listened to my over-exertion then spoke with authority to the part of me that's more used to kneeling than being knelt to: the part that digs potatoes, cleans the communal stairs, listens to those who cannot stand up, searches, searches for a lost coin that does not want to be found. 

This third washing - the blessing of it - was ordinary sacrament: the generosity of the foot-soak-flannel-wipe-towel-pat-pat. This readying of my body to to receive the smoothing out, the soothing out of heat: of heat and thought and striving.

Thank you water, thank you skilled hands, thank you graciousness. 

We Forget Rice

… and I don’t mean Declan Rice, of Arsenal and England. I don’t forget him because I have a football sticker of him on my phone case. No, I mean risotto rice. 

My longest-serving friend and I are on our annual camping trip and we forgot the essential ingredient in our much-loved camping dish. It felt like a stumble when we realised this yesterday, deep in our camping valley, not a risotto rice shop in sight for miles.

The thing is, as we’re already discovering, we’re both adaptable and lenient. So we’ve leaned into pasta. And adapted to salads: partially home-grown, laden with avocado slices. And we’ve swerved into new potatoes dug from my allotment. And ginger biscuits half coated in dark chocolate - well, some things are never forgotten.

We’ve also not forgotten swallow flights over the pond, grasshopper and chiffchaff soundtracks, flashes of a kingfisher, cool grass underfoot, sunscreen and insect repellent. We’ve remembered our journals, pens, paints, books, and this year, my new hammock. 

One year (the Norfolk year) I forgot to bring the Trangia stove. We thought about buying a stove for about five minutes before reckoning we could cook in the Jetboil water boiler. Fortunately, that time we’d remembered the rice since risotto is one of the few from-scratch dishes it’s possible to cook in a Jetboil. You heard that first here.

I wonder if Declan Rice likes risotto, and whether this explains his agility on a football pitch. It maybe that forgetting risotto explains this. 

As for my longest-serving friend and me, we’re, risotto or not, doing what we always do when camping. Relaxing into remembering who we are and what grounds us into growth. 

I Sprint to the Finish

I'm not a natural runner, but I have become a habitual one. I like the almost weekly feeling of surprise I experience when I turn up at 9am to the start of a run (not a race) with 100s of other participants. Finishing, however, is never a surprise because I've made that my only goal. Were I more of a risk-taker, more hare and less tortoise (to borrow from Aesop), I might run faster earlier, but then I might have to give up (so my thinking goes) and nap en route. As soon as I reach the home stretch, especially when I can see the finish flag, I feel confident and pick up speed. 

I've had several other finish lines to cross this week. These finishes have included the usual ones for teaching sessions at work; a printing deadline for the 2nd edition of a poetry collection I've edited for a friend (more on this soon); my own poetry submission for a collaborative exhibition in Girona in the autumn (more on this soon); a mid-May aim to get sweet corn planted in the new badger-proof section of my allotment (more on this now):

This flurry of finishes has been satisfying but also perturbing- maybe my motivation levels are shallow, and it’s only a deadline which results in completion?

But reflecting further on what I've learned from all those Parkruns leads me to think a little differently. I had, after all, to do the first 199 in order to complete the 200th. Slow and steady. The sight of the finish each time has been the measurement I need to judge the equation between the resources at my disposal and the task in hand. 

I'm going to apply this Parkrun learning more consistently to other areas of my life as I approach the era I'm thinking of as 'elder-hood’ and see where it takes me. Rather than rushing into anything, I’ll try building steadily towards a goal, whether it’s DIY, writing and editing poetry and prose, making a new composting system at the allotment. I’ll wait to pick up speed, relish the sense of completion, when I can see clearly where I'm heading. Then repeat, repeat, repeat.

I Picnic On Ice

Here…

...and it was so beautiful. Imagine! 

There are landscapes I’ve never been in before, and this was one. A high lake in Sweden, frozen to 40-50 cm thick of ice. But not frozen as a single sheet, not as a block-lid, but made from layers and layers, built up over what has been a particularly cold winter and changing now that spring is coming. 

The top lake layer: remnants of recent snow, the morning's recent frost, some places a sheen of water depending on where sunlight has fallen. In places, near the edge and under the tree canopy, there are scenes of broken glass crystals, like the perfect fall of a precious chandelier, and in others, slews of glistening ice caviar. 

This lake surface is flat-with-rising-places. These are mini alpine mountains, where expanding ice has pushed itself into Mont Blanc-resonant peaks to alleviate the pressure that comes with expansion. There are fissures too and in some places, there are small portholes to the next layers down, and these are mysterious with interlacing crystals and thin pastry layer accumulations. 

We sat, P, L, and I, and talked of rootedness and our lives (which, I've just thought, add up to a small-large 188 years). We ate and drank, looking outwards. It was peaceful, and there was a white silence as backdrop to these connections. 

And all the while the sun warmed us without the interruption of a single cloud.

I Fall Flat on my Back

I’m listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. One could be forgiven for thinking the opening is prelude to something pastoral and grandly reminiscent of drifts of snowdrops in Cound woods, Shropshire, on a Sunday in February. Spring’s in the air. Some tunes are reminiscent of the 6th - lamb-leaping exuberance contained in the wood, brass, silver and guts of a symphony orchestra.

Imagine that first audience of Beethoven’s thinking they knew where they stood in a Viennese whirl, in their dancing shoes, riding boots. Imagine me thinking I knew where I stood, on Shropshire home soil, in my walking boots, stepping carefully enough around the deeper puddles, plodding through the shallow ones, taking it at variable walking paces, andante, guided by the terrain.

And then imagine me climbing up through the woods, along a clay-slip muddiness of ridge, and spotting, suddenly (through a gate) an open grassy field.

The terrain of the 7th’s second movement is slow to build. It’s funereal, ending in a question, leading to the run down the hill of the third movement.. 

I think I thought I was Maria von Trapp in a Beethoven alpine pastoral for a moment when I saw the hills alive with grass, and I left the path walking, entered the field at an allegro. 

You never run down wet grass, everyone said afterwards. But I did, and I fell flat, picked myself up, fell flatter still. 

Mud on my anorak, my trousers, my hat, my watch, my boots - mud in my hair. I lay face up to the sky, a small child, strayed from the path, accelerating into that faster and faster beat of spring, grin on her face, revelling in this forerunner of an ode to the joys of all the outdoors that’s to come, and soon: a child relieved to be so far beyond hope of cleanliness. 

I Paint My Year

I have taken delivery of the final bowl in my 'tree' series. Here it is:

This is the fourth bowl I've painted since December 2024 at the decorating studio in the Emma Bridgewater factory in Stoke. The visits have been a joy in themselves, the bowls holding memories of time spent with Charlotte, Gabriel, Jonty, Ally, Ruth, and Charlotte again. 

On my first visit, I painted 'Winter', and instinctively set up the style of my Tree Bowl series. A circle of branches outside. Oak leaves inside. A sun always in the inside centre. 

The IFS (Internal Family Systems) model of therapy, which I'd just begun, conceptualises the compassionate, curious, creative, confident, clear Self as being like the ever-present sun, sometimes obscured by clouds, but never absent. 

I used  the colours I am drawn to, which is most of them. I wrote words I felt arise from my own centre around the bottom rim of the bowl. 

In December 2024, I was over-wintering, sheltering from the storms that had swept across my life - trauma revisited and compounded by present-day events. My coping strategies weren't working in the face of the new onslaught, so my therapist was teaching me to find a reliable place of safety within. I came to visualise this as sheltering in the idea of myself as tree. So this first bowl reads: "I am my own tree...I return to myself...free and wild." That was my hope. 

Spring saw some greening at the tips of the crown of thorns branches I'd imagined, then drawn: outside on the first bowl, inside on the second, outside on the third, inside on the fourth. Here's the second, backgrounded by pens and pencils. 

"I await next year's greening."

I knew my healing and growth would take time, the passage of seasons, and patience; and yet, that waiting was so hard and painful at times that I wanted to stop the process. The tree bowls and my perfectionist, pedantic streak helped - I needed to complete the set. 

By summer, the shoots had grown, sheltering me from rain and sunshine - the wreath of leaves on the outside again, the oak leaves inside:

And also last summer, with the help of daily swims in Sweden, and living among trees on Penny's forest farm, I was finding the resources I needed to see the sun beyond the clouds. 

So, to autumn, which is a fall, a shedding. The words on my fourth bowl encapsulate what I've learned to respect as the rhythms of growth. I've come to accept that the storms of 2024-5 will enable whatever comes next, and I treasure these Tree Bowls as keepsakes of my journey, a reminder of the ever-present company of the sun, and so many kind friends and family. Thank you.

"I fall into earth-life.

Acorn. Willow-seed.

We are the making of ourselves."