Notes from the Coast in Winter

Plus Weekend Write Along Booking Details

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

Yesterday a keen frost lay itself over the village. I woke at my usual hour and rose to write by lamplight in my little office, watching as the sky became light above my computer, the seagulls returning in slow lazy slides, the jackdaws arriving in a fast scatter, some hierarchy jostling between them before they set to work finding the day’s food, striding and poking through the lawns and in the parking spaces behind the house.

This has been a challenging week. On Monday my mum was in hospital for an out patient cancer operation. That day we had an icy, pre dawn drive over the Yorkshire Wolds to deliver her into the care of Castle Hill Hospital. It was the same unit in the same hospital that we had delivered my dad for his very big, very serious operation for stomach cancer in August 2022. It was the same door that I watched him walk through for the last time. He died a couple of days after the operation, never having come round from the induced coma. Complications from the operation killed him. When I returned to the car, on Monday, for a cup of flask tea and a chance to sit quietly and recover from driving an unfamiliar car over the deep black frosty roads of the Wolds, I realised I’d managed to park in the exact same car parking space as I had that day in August. Time layered itself over the moment in a clear, crisp image of my dad walking away, bag-for-life in hand, as I shouted after him, trying to get him to turn round and say a proper goodbye.

The day turned into a long one, and my mum’s recovery longer than expected. We finally got out at half past eight that evening, got back to my mum’s house at twenty to ten. I slept in the room that had been mine in my teens. A strange thing to sleep in a familiar, but unfamiliar room, all trace of that time gone, all trace of teenage me, gone. The view was the same, the rural stars still bright against the black. Next morning I headed home early after feeding chickens and making tea.

Yesterday I felt better, after a day of exhaustion and feeling weepy the day before. I realise am sitting in the doorway to the next part of my life and it is an uncomfortable place to be. When you begin to slide into the role of carer for parents you begin to realise that you are entering a section of your life that ends in one place and one place only. Sometimes I find the inevitability of grief grinding. There seems, these days, little recovery time between periods of pain. I have set up the structure that allows me to live my life with my daughter’s death in my pocket, a familiar pain like a beach pebble rubbed under the thumb. My dad’s death, and the other people I have loved and lost, I carry like charms on a bracelet. I keep my daughter’s death separate to them, because her death was so different to these other losses. My structures are about sleep and nourishment and allowing myself to let the wild thing within me out, because that’s how I feel much of the time, as if a wild creature lives within me and must be kept contained in order to fit in with the world.

Photo by Thom Holmes on Unsplash

Yesterday I put my waterproofs on and my walking boots on and the cat looked about the house for the dog because these were my dog walking clothes and this is a routine that has not yet faded from our lives. The cat loved the dog. Now the dog has died I am moved up in his hierarchy of love and he shows me affection in a way that he hasn’t before. Then I set out with my binoculars, up through the village sleeping under its thin skin of frost, up the old village road, now a path grown thick with yew and hawthorn and hazel and ash, feeling the missing weight of the dog at my side. I crossed the busy bypass, and then up again, climbing higher, taking the old coast road that leads, eventually, to a bronze age burial mound in which a significant bronze age skeleton was found. I did not visit that place yesterday. Instead I walked between the holiday parks where I know the gorse is beginning to bloom. And I said hello to the Jacob’s sheep in the field, and the rooks on the frozen ruts and the light that poured through a perfect blue sky over the rim of the Wolds and into the valley still white with frost. I passed the old farms and falling down dry stone walls and the moments of life and change caught in the stone work there, and greeted the donkey on my way back down, having come in a loop along the cliff tops, and I stopped to touch the soft yellow petals of the gorse, some frozen, some fresh and silk-like. I gathered a small handful, like gathering sunshine, and when I returned home, and put the heating on, and warmed my numb face with a warm flannel, I boiled water and steeped the petals to make the most glorious yellow infusion, and I sat in the peace of the life I live and read my book, and drank my gorse tea and ate my little blueberry cake and knew myself again.

Book Your Place on the Weekend Write Alongs

Introducing The Weekend Write Alongs

A day to put your own writing first, with guest speakers, Q&A sessions, writing prompts and space to write, all through the convenience of zoom, all facilitated by me, Wendy Pratt.

Following on from the success of my facilitated morning writing group, The Dawn Chorus, I have decided to launch a series of day long write along events with a focus on inspiration, community and accountability.

I have three sessions open for bookings now:

Saturday 27th January 2024 10am - 3pm UK Time - Guest Speaker author and poet Polly Atkin.

Book your place here:

Saturday 17th February 2024 10am-3pm UK Time - Guest Speaker founder of Valley Press publishing Jamie McGarry.

Saturday 30th March 2024 10am - 3pm UK Time - Guest Speaker judge of the Nan Shepherd prize, agent and founder of Portobello Literary Agency, Caro Clarke.

The day begins with a meet and greet, followed by a talk by the guest speaker, then a chance for yo to ask your own questions. After this we'll have some optional writing prompts and you will have space and time to write before we meet again to talk about how we've gotten on.

This is a pressure free environment for your to work in. You do not have to share anything, you don't even have to have your camera on if you'd prefer not to.

You can work to the optional prompts or you can bring a longer term project along to work on, it's really up to you.

If you're looking for regular events where you can be a part of a writing community, working at your own pace in a nurturing environment, this may be for you.

January 27th is our first event with guest speaker Polly Atkin.