It takes a while to leave the house, to feel ready to leave, but I'm always glad when I do. My hands carry two thick, cream-coloured envelopes and a small paper parcel down the road and along the water, and I glance at a man standing at the stop of some stone steps that lead down to the sea—it is the first time I've seen a man standing there, at the top of the steps that presumably belong to him, and so I cannot help but look over briefly.
As I pass the petrol station a heron floats across the road, low, strangely and astonishingly low, and in a kind of slow motion beats its wings out across the smooth, glassy water towards a small island that looks as though it was made for herons and herons alone. I squint into the sun to watch it fly, its huge, awkward wings almost dip into the sea and with the reflection of them in the water make an ellipse—the sight of this impresses itself upon me like a too-tight sleeve. The heron lands, beginning its motionless surveying of the world, and I continue walking up to the town.
Envelopes in the postbox and a terrible coffee now in hand, I go down to Poulgorm, picking my way across worn stone to sit on some damp steps, to look at things. The water here is a deep and breathing green, reflecting back the hug of Scots pine trees and invasive rhododendron that shelters this place, protects it from the rest of the coastline. I haven't been in the water in several days, but this doesn't matter, and I take off my shoes and socks and half-slip half-panic down the sea-sludge-covered path to stand up to my ankles in the textured cold. When I can't feel my feet any longer I sit on the edge, hanging legs over and waiting for my toes to dry slightly before resuming socks and shoes.
Soft voices of a man and a woman talk behind me for a while, but then I am alone again, the most heaven, and a cormorant comes to preen its glossy black body on a small outcrop. Its body turns green, blue, bronze in the light and we regard each other on and off for most of an hour before we both turn to leave—bird flying, I'm walking.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
At last! I can share some work news!
A selection of you will have already seen this, but wonderfully and bizarrely my small book-treasure, We Will Be Close Again, has been picked up by the American publisher Andrews McMeel (then in Germany, then in Italy, endless thanks to my agent Jennifer who works away at these things, like a beautiful and knowledgable bee). I’m pleased, because although it started out as (and had every intention of being) a finite, tiny thing, I would never want to keep it to myself and to those of you who supported the first and second editions if there were a possibility of more people finding some solace-like moments in the pages, encountering a gentle space to keep memories and hopes for the coming months.
This version of the book will be titled, simply, Close Again, and contains a further three illustrations—all decisions are moving quickly given the publication date of fall 2021, and for me there is definitely a feeling of lurching, lurching from slow decisions to quick ones, from days that definitely feel like slugs to more days that feel like sparrows.
I have some other work happenings up my sleeves (almost always knitted sleeves), which I will be able to share in the coming weeks, but for now I hold patiently onto them and turn almost all of my waking hours towards the tasks that come with the promise of 208 pages (most subtle hint).
THIS WEEK I (RE) FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Illustrations by Tokyo-based Fumi Koike, whose work I fell in love with a long time ago, but it had been a while and it turns out the love is as good as new.
“Incomprehensible people ran all around me doing incomprehensible things.”
— Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
The end.
