I "Do What [I] Damn Well Please"

When Suzanne invited me to see Lambrini Girls (punk band Phoebe Lunny and Selin Macieira-Bosgelmez) at Birmingham's XOYO night club the other weekend, I said yes without really knowing. It was a bit Molly Bloom of me. Yes! I said, Yes! 

I'd never been to a punk gig before, just like there are a lot of things I've never done before. There's an advantage to having spent my youthful years wrapped up in church being told what I could and couldn’t do / say / think. There’s so much I like yet to discover. Hallelujah! 

Sixty was the new sixteen in that night club among a diverse age-group of parents and teenagers: people living and reliving their youths. And even better, the day before I got to walk with Suzanne on the beach. We spent the afternoon in Aberdyfi in the clear November sunshine. It was the perfect, peaceful preparation...

... for the noise of it! The exultant, white, brash, crashing, strident, energetic noise of drums and bass and guitar and that voice (what a voice!) calling out the patriarchy, misogyny, injustice, racism, homophobia ... and there was tenderness too, and joy, and hurt and crowd-surfing and an enormous mosh pit, and all of it LOUD and PASSIONATE and UNAPOLOGETIC! 

It's the un-apology that mesmerised me. And when I opened a birthday card from my younger son yesterday, he framed the thought for me in a way I could apply immediately: Have a lovely day Mum, “doing what you damn well please!” Something about his turn of phrase, the love expressed, opened up my birthday in that moment. I'd planned, for example, to postpone my present-opening till the evening when his big brother would be home. "But I please to know what my presents are now!" I thought, so I damn well opened them over breakfast, and I'm so glad I did, and I knew my sons would be too. What I found was that there are people who clearly know and care about me. So much thoughtfulness in the givings. It made me very damn pleased.

I’d already planned to take the train (I damn well like trains) with my friend Paul (a damn good fellow) to Aberdyfi (thank you for the reminder, Suzanne, that Aberdyfi pleases me). Before boarding, I had damn pleasing coffee and a bacon roll at Shrewsbury Coffeehouse. I took pens and paper on the train and we did some damn writing and drawing. (My drawing has all the characteristics of someone who damn well doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Paul's is sophisticated, funny, and elegant).

In Aberdyfi, I went into the pleasing sea. Damn! It was invigorating! I got wet up to my neck by lying down in it as it was too damn dangerous to go in deep. I pleased myself, eating fish and chips and bara brith, bought a set of chalks, and ginger beer. Paul ate fish and chips and bara brith too, so I think he was damn well pleasing himself, but that's for him to say. The trains ran through storm Bram unapologetically, as pretty much on time as they cared to be. 

At the Lambrini Girls gig, I couldn't take my eyes off mic-brandishing Lunny and her embodied fury, intellect, and too-small-shirt/bare-midriff-fragility. To be so certainly herself - how does she do that, I wondered.  How to care and not to care? I'm damn pleased I learned more about that on yesterday's journey. 

Happy damn pleasing train-swim-fish&chip days to all of us: girls, women, others, Lambrini or not. May there by many happy, damn pleasing, returns.

I Do Happy

Not all my poetry is about love, death, queues, and swimming. This one has just been shortlisted for Poem of the Month, a regular feature of Verve Poetry and Spoken Word Festival. When I saw November's theme, EAT, it felt like the right time to send off my ice cream poem, the one I wrote after visiting Shrewsbury's Gelatistry a couple of summers ago. 

Everything Ice Cream

Sitting on the steps, I’m eating ice cream

when a dog goes past and it seems we’re each in need

of the way he stops and the way I scratch his ears.

The ice cream is my for-now-favourite flavour.

The dog, caramel brown, looks with his chocolate eyes

at the ice cream, then up his lead towards you,

as if to say, 

                    Hey! This – my ears, the ice cream,

this perfect blue and sunshine ice cream day.

This. 

          And so it goes sometimes. The dog and you,

me, sitting on the steps just then, open

to something as ordinary as you walking your dog,

strolling past, stopping by to say hello.

The winning poem and other shortlisted poems can be read here.

I Travel In Time (this one's not about swimming)

The programming of a concert is an art in itself. Done well, an audience will notice the progression from piece to piece, while also having a sense that there’s a whole behind the parts. I felt that whole on Saturday listening  Oran Johnson and Jonty Lefroy Watt’s Strings, Still Lifes and Scenery in the beautiful setting of Clungunford’s St Cuthbert’s Church. 

Since meeting the Four Quartets in English Literature A level, I’ve been fascinated by TS Eliot’s phrase ‘the still point of the turning world’. He captures in this metaphor the idea that, if you can get to the very middle of something (as with a wheel), you'll find that the central point isn't moving, though all around is turning. The point itself in physics terms (i.e. in terms that stretch the limits of my mind and imagination) is one atom big.

Saturday’s programming was audacious, in particular the second half bracketing of two new works (Kulning by Lefroy Watt and Murmurations by Johnson) around the Adagio from Bach’s Violin Sonata no.1 in G minor. This was exquisitely played by Zea Hunt, but (and especially, you may well think), how can two young composers in 2025 sit themselves either side of Bach? Then again, how can they not? 

What this Jonty Lefroy Watt : JS Bach : Oran Johnson juxtaposition did was open up the Bach to newness. As I listened to the three pieces, surrounded by a warm, attentive audience, I felt myself gradually lulled out of time. It was as if the Bach was fresh as the pieces either side. I imagined what it would’ve been like to hear any of Bach's compositions as a world premiere, and then realised I had: feeling on this occasion his composition as completely, viscerally original. This is the joy of live performance - it's all new to us.

By the time we reached the sweeping shapes of Johnson’s Murmurations, I felt myself eternal (not immortal, nothing so grand). I think I mean eternal in the sense of experiencing my life as a singular life stretching backward and forwards within a collective of lives. It was like reaching right into the legacies and promises of creativity as fundamental as Bach's and as vibrant as that of the young musicians in the church. I'm not sure if the still point atom was the quality of  concentration given by the audience, or a singular note - let's say G - of music. It doesn't matter - as Eliot says elsewhere, 'words strain, sometimes crack' if we lay too much on them. 

I’m so grateful to the musicians - Declan Hickey, Eliza Nagle, Zea Hunt and to the composers - all of them so young, and so experienced in musical technique and traditions. I’m so grateful to Anna Dreda and St Cuthbert's for hosting a concert of contemporary classical music. And I'm so grateful to the people listening with me - to all who supported the event in so many ways: for the chance, for those minutes, to feel myself stilled, connected to all that has been, all that is to come. 

Jonty Lefroy Watt; Declan Hickey; Eliza Nagle; Zea Hunt; Oran Johnson

Photo - Ally Dunavant

I See Myself Home

I've returned home from August, and from the resolve that emerged as I went into this gift of a month that I'd swim outdoors each day. It wasn't a rule so much as a blessing I've given myself, and that was given to me by spending most of the time on P's farm in Sweden, a few hundred metres from a beautiful lake.

Something about taking this love of mine - for water - sacredly has been part of a cleansing that I've felt on my skin and within my body. 

The resolve has also been a means for creativity as I've travelled towards home, and for solving how to take this water with me into my homelife via a couple of days in Oslo. I've managed it like this: yesterday - in the open air pool on the edge of Shrewsbury; on Friday - in a barrel of sea water as part of a sauna in Oslo; on Thursday - from a beach on the island of Hovedøya reached by boat from Aker Brygge, Oslo; on Wednesday - first thing in little Norrsjön before I left P's farm for the station. Swimming has given these last few days a shape that has made the leaving of August purposeful amid the undercurrent of sadness that comes with endings.

This morning, I swam out of August's final day in the River Severn just along from where I live. It was J. who helped me to see I could find my way home like this. We met early, and she brought a flask of tea for afterwards. All these years in Shrewsbury, and I've never swum in the river which characterises the town's year with its floods and lows, its duck families, weir, its leaping salmon. Without the peaty clean clarity of Norrsjön it has its own beauty in trees, swans, and tiny fishes.

And on my allotment, I've started a new project: Biscuit Tin Lake. I won't be able to swim in it until I work out how to shrink down to Lilliputian height. But I've sunk the tin into soil, filled it with water, surrounded it with stones, shells, and rose and raspberry prunings. I've floated a few flowers on its surface in memory of friends and family. And maybe, in September, there'll be birds that come to drink, and to bathe. 

I Dip Into The City

I left London when I was 24, so I'm used to cities by now. Nearly. In contrast to London, Sweden's capital, Stockholm, is home to between 1 and 2 million people, depending on where the line is drawn. The city's structure is watery, and forests live between, and close to, even the most densely settled areas. 

Last week, I took a trip away from the farm on which I'm writing and being with P. We travelled together to Karlingesund Retreat Centre where we first met in February's Grief Ritual. We spent three days in the beauty of trees, rocks, water, and swam with stars (I Bathe With / Under / Among Stars). Then, when P. dropped me off at Karlstad station and drove home, I travelled on to Stockholm to spend time with my longest-serving Swedish friends.

The extraordinary thing about Stockholm is that so much of it is clean. On our first day together, C. and I took a bus, our walking shoes, swimming costumes, and sandwiches out to Bogesundslandets Nature Reserve  We walked along well-marked forest tracks, often by the shore. The sky was blue between the aspens, alders, birches, and pines, fluffed up by a scattering of white summer clouds. We talked as women who've known each other in visits which seem to me now, from the perspective of 45 of years friendship, like a chain of islands interspersed with stretches of water, some like small seas, some like rivers. Each of our island meetings over this span has felt solid under my feet.

Keeping to my one-outside-swim-a-day in August commitment - a commitment I made to the inner child in me that has always loved to be in water and which has been too often in distress this past year - keeping this commitment came naturally last Monday. After a couple of hours' walking, we looked for a way in to the water, then changed on the smooth surface of a huge rock. The shore-side was a little rough on our soft feet and we braved it, recalling those summers of childhood when, having gone mainly barefooted - C. in Sweden, me in England - our feet had hardened satisfactorily by August. 

As part of the Baltic, the sea round Stockholm has low salinity: around 1/4 or 1/5 of the saltiness of the open ocean. I like this: the way a low-salt sea swim leaves my skin clean and smooth. I paddled around in the wake-spill of boats which were to-ing and fro-ing between islands, safely distant, sending their waves to shore. 

After our swim, we ate sandwiches, then walked to Vaxholm, via a café, via an ice cream shop, and the comforts of coffee and blackcurrant gelato. 

The next day, back in the city centre, I walked to a nearby park. At the public swim spot was a crowd of students enjoying their first days back at university. The jetty was crowded, and the water bobbed with rafts and barrels as students raced and cheered each other on. I waited till they'd gone singing up the path, then changed and swam. A boat, moored at the jetty, wafted weed-smoke into the air. People strolled past. I felt aware of my phone sitting in my jacket with my pile of clothes on the side. But I felt safe. Later, C. and S. took me to a rooftop bar - we drank sangria, and watched the sun set into the arms of the city.

And then next day, we drove to the island where I spent much of that first summer visit in 1982. The Stockholm Archipelago and its beauty has stayed with me ever since, captured in a few photographs I still have at home. I don't remember swimming then - though I remember sailing and loving it. I'd learned to hold my body back behind clothes, to hide my embarrassments from the elements. I'd learned a resistance to wearing - even to owning - shorts. On the bluest days, when C's mother kindly laid a selection of shorts out on my bed for me to borrow, I resisted even trying them on. 

I am glad I've made it to this point in life: the point where I've learned that to wear shorts on warm days is to feel the air as kindness, and to feel gratitude to my legs for all the walking and swimming. I've learned, since trying it first in Australia, that to swim naked is to be held by water, skin-to-skin. In the quiet of late summer weekdays, and in this quiet and chosen month of my own late summer, I have swum in places in and close to the city which are so free, so solitary, and so beautiful, that I wanted to share them with you.

I Bathe With / Under / Among Stars

I will not forget last night’s swim until I forget everything. I went, with L&P, down to the harbour 1/2 a mile from where I’ve been staying these past three days, nestled on Sweden’s west coast. L had urged me to experience swimming in the dark.

There’s a jetty there, and a swimming ladder - Sweden thinks all the time of getting in and out of her waters. There’s a bench on the jetty to leave clothes, sit down to take shoes off, put them back on. 

In the just-about dark twilight of late summer, the stars coming out after their long Scandinavian rest, we stripped off - no costume or shyness required. L&P insisted I go in first promising me a surprise, and not the jellyfish which L scanned for using a torch. 

I took my silhouette down the ladder into the sea. I swam, and as I stroked the water saw sparks fly from my fingertips. “Oh my god!” I exclaimed. “Oh, oh … wow!” I could think of nothing more poetic. As I moved in the water, it seemed stars were born. 

I looked up at the sky - stars. I looked into the water - stars. Starlight everywhere. Starlight within reach and starlight beyond imagination. 

L&P came in to join the celebration, the firework party, the bioluminescent joy of seawater - plankton when ruffled - in dark-skied warmer waters of this late season.

The current drifted us away from the jetty - we took the light show with us, between our fingers and toes. We laughed, sang, played with the magic of the night - British, Australian, and Belgian, in Swedish waters, nothing between our skins and the heavens’ gift of freedom, of joy. 

I Make It Through To The Big Lake

I may be testing your patience, dear readers, but my daily swim in Little Norrsjön has become the pivotal moment of my days in Sweden, so here's more swimming writing.

For the sake of geography, I should say that Little Norrsjön is attached to Norrsjön (sjö - lake) where the river feeds in. If you imagine the attachment as a T-shape, the river is the long stem. It branches into a right and a left arm, the right arm feeding Little Norrsjön and the left arm feeding Norrsjön. In other words, it's possible to reach Norrsjön from Little Norrsjön by swimming into and through the arms of the river. 

I've been approaching the river's arms for a while, swimming up to the meeting point, seeing the eddying currents, and backing out again. The forces have just looked too strong for me. Getting to Norrsjön looked simple enough, but getting out against the flow of the river? This has seemed much less certain. 

The other day, P. took me on a walk through the forest along the river. We saw so many trees felled by beavers I was surprised the beavers had any time to rest from gnawing activity. It's an extraordinary sight - teeth marks going through to the central fibres of a tree trunk: the ones that eventually give up the attempt to remain vertical and allow the tree to fall. 

The outcome of our walk through undergrowth, on the most densely padded forest floor my feet could remember (moss, decades of needle and leaf fall, berry bushes) was to see the T of the river from land. Seeing it from this viewpoint gave us the idea that, if the current proved too strong for me, I could get out of Norrsjön and walk to Little Norrsjön, with some danger of scratching and insect bites, but nothing more serious.

So the day before yesterday, I swam through.

Emerging into Norrsjön felt like possibility: like entering a wider, more expansive world. I've known it was there all along, seen it from the shore, but to approach it from the river's arms intensified the experience of opening out. I paddled around a little, noted the houses on the far shore, and a potential future adventure. But I wanted to save my energy for the swim back, which was a useful thought as I had to struggle against the current in some places. The branches and grasses on the banks lent me a hand, and I pulled myself back to the centre and the turning current, and then went with the flow into the growing familiarity of the smaller lake. 

There's something about this short journey, lake to lake, that lends itself to meaning, and I've been mulling it over for the last couple of days, but I'll leave you to make your own way through, dear readers.

P. pointed out this isn't beaver-work but the photo below is ... 

Ant work

The softest moss-floor