No.283
May ending, a list:
Indecisive rain, sudden heat, suncream, and a strawberry as large as my hungry curled-up hand
Do I hang the laundry out in drizzle anyway?
‘The origins of the English word noise are disputed, as some adhere to its arrival in English via the Latin noxia (meaning “hurt, harmful, injury, damage”), but others believe its route to be through the Latin nausia, literally meaning “seasickness.” This brings to mind ad nauseam, “to a sickening extent,”’ — from my essay The Age of Noise in Orion’s 40th anniversary issue
Ananda, Engagement Manager for Orion, told me during a recent all-staff meeting that someone had emailed her asking which issue contained that essay, The Age of Noise, and then paid $40 to ship it to Australia—I think who is this person?
The blue tit eggs have hatched, and we know this because both parents now fly back and forth without much pause collecting, mainly, apparently, caterpillars from the garden
I’m gifted a soap wrapped in a layer of felted merino wool—it smells like a forest and feels like moss and now I want to wash my hands at all hours of the day for little-to-no reason
The recording and subsequent broadcast of my conversation with Michael Rosen for BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth—we mentioned støvfnug, below
The valerian keeps growing and one of them is now taller than both of us—still yet to flower, I wonder if it will manage to exceed the height of the hedge
The moon, in fact, today, is full, which I’m sure explains either partially or entirely my rageful and/or existential grumbling state the day before
How to protect, or not protect, yourself against the possible eventual disinterest and tiring of another person in your being there
While walking between places I have no problem with crossing to the other side of the road to avoid disturbing a bird i.e. if there is a bird doing something up ahead I will, where possible, try to avoid troubling it
In my notes I find a whole page detailing the leaks from ceilings and walls during a period of very stormy weather at the end of December 2023—gable walls sarking boards apex east side roofline velux rafters attic floor
At noon I start to dream of bread
“When I’ve finished the required painting, I resume my struggle, but this time considering the distinction everybody appears in a big hurry to make between what is exceptional and what is plain ordinary, something I think I’ve been trying to haphazardly iron out for the last ten years, something that I think dictates a lot of why people can spend years of their lives feeling unhappy, unworthy, uninterested. The courage needed to say something differently, to explain to someone why the thing they readily dismiss is the thing you love more than anything, to declare the historically mundane valuable or irreplaceably important—all these sorts of things are actions of revolution and the radical, of actually intentionally arranging ourselves differently in relation to one other.” — from my most recent ‘Root Catalog’ column in the spring 2026 issue of Orion, on vernation
Artemisia abrotanum smells exactly and bizarrely of coca-cola and I find its flowerheads unfairly referred to in some places as ‘insignificant’
I usually like to end these lists on a multiple of eleven; alarmingly today I find myself unbothered or uncaring to do so
Less than four weeks from the summer solstice—have you stretched fully out yet? Have you rooted plenty?
The chapter in Words to Love a Planet titled ‘Time’ is just as much about light as it is about time, and my preoccupation with light stretches longer at this time of year (see ending note)
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
The paintings of renowned Swedish artist Karin Mamma Andersson, which were described in an exhibition from nearly twenty years ago as ‘interiors and landscapes [merging] the mysterious with the mundane’. A current Paris exhibition of Andersson’s includes on-paper works including aquatints, etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, which for no certain or uncertain reasons I find myself less drawn to—instead it’s almost always the trees, and it’s almost always the layers of the mundane.
The light at certain times of day can help save you from any number of maladies, but it is necessary to know and accept it will also leave you behind, preferring as it does to remain eight minutes and twenty seconds ahead.
We are illuminated by time and left behind by light.
— from ‘Time’, Words to Love a Planet
