Tag Archives: landscape

1. Four more days of school

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It was unusually and pleasantly cool when I went for my walk just before 8 o’clock this morning. Overcast and with a slight mist on my face. A respite from most mornings when the sun is already beating down hot and glaring from the sky at that hour. It won’t last long. In a few hours, the clouds will have burned away and the temperature will be in the mid to high 30s.

Sheep on my walk this morning

This week every year feels like the lead up to Christmas for its levels of busyness. The last week of school each year somehow always coincides with me having more than normal amounts of editing and writing work. It’s not that I perceive that there’s more work because I’m so busy doing other things. My records show that, year after year, one of my busiest work weeks of the year is also the last week of school. Maybe the writers I work with are also racing to complete their writing projects before the end of their or their kids’ academic years.

When the girls were little, the last week of school involved a day-long parent-student-teacher excursion to a water park, preparation for the end of year school performance, the one-day medieval festival that we, the parents’ association, organized, and finally a parents’ association convivencia, to which we all brought and shared food, had a barbecue and got sozzled – in the baking sun.

Now that the girls are older, my duties are more of a chauffeuring nature. No longer in the village school only a one-minute walk from our house, their secondary school is 25km away. As the school year draws to a close, trips to that town have increased – for evening graduation prep (for Lily), get togethers with friends, end of year parent-teacher meetings, and so on. Then there’s Katie to her tennis lessons 40km in the opposite direction. Plus the dog’s annual rabies vaccination lands this week each year. Luckily, the roads are good and we have some good music and podcasts to listen to.

To make matters slightly more crazy this year, we’re leaving next week for 10 weeks. We’ve never left Sanlucar for such a long time before so I’m in the process of getting the house ready to close it up. At least I haven’t had to do much grocery shopping this week, as I’m running down the food cupboards and the fridge. I’m setting up an irrigation system to water the 50 potted plants on my patio (I didn’t realize I had 50 until I set about the rather fiddly business of setting up the system). I still need to lift the dinghy and kayaks out of the water and store them until we come back. And there’s the packing, of course – not only of clothes and whatnot, but everything I will need to be able to carry on working while I’m away. Somewhere, in the midst of it all, as with every other year, I find the time to sit at my desk and meet my work deadlines.

The craziness of this time of the year is suffused with optimism and looking forward. All three of us are looking forward to the end of the school year for a shake-up of a routine that has started to feel like a drudge. All three of us, for different reasons, have had a tougher than expected year, so we’re looking forward to the end of school perhaps more than other years. A miscalculation on my part, however, means that, rather than having a few days to relax at home, and swim in the pool and the river, we’re leaving Sanlucar the very first day of the school holidays. Silly me.

Four more days of school…and summer, here we come!!

Walking through January

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In late December, I set myself a challenge to walk 200km in January.

2023 had been an exceptional year for me. I was joyful and exuberant in turning 50 and everything about my life seemed to glow. That was until the end of the year, when it felt as if someone let the air out of my balloon. From early December, I felt lost, drained, living in a cloud of cotton wool, from which I neither could nor desired to work, be with other people, or drag myself out of the house.

Happiness and contentment are my default modes. If chemical imbalances play a role in the onset of depression, then I often think that I have chemical imbalances in the other direction. I’m chronically happy. I’m annoyingly upbeat. My glass is always way more than half full.

Except at the end of 2023, when it wasn’t. I had no reason to feel down, and yet I did. A weekend in Sevilla uplifted me momentarily but, even there, I was unusually sharp with my daughters and, at times, felt the strain of being in a city more acutely than usual. Then I came down with COVID and a week in Tenerife over Christmas that was supposed to relight my lamp instead left me feeling even more down in the dumps. I returned home to Sanlúcar COVID-free but feeling flat.

Then one day, in the last week of December, I set out to walk the dog. Not an ‘oh god, I’ve got to walk the dog’ sort of walk, the kind that had become my default over the past year, when I’ve increasingly cited lack of time, but a ‘let’s see how far we can go’ sort of walk, with a backpack on my back, containing my water bottle, a notebook and pen, and my phone to take photos. I walked north, along the path that leads up the river, stopping to allow myself to be enveloped in the silence, to watch a raft of canes drift down the river, to marvel at the orogeny on a wall of rock. The dog, of course, loved it too, walking farther than she had in months. At the farthest point from home, I decided to set myself the challenge of walking 200km in January.

I walked for the first few days of January, recording the distance so that I had a sense of how far I might walk in a certain amount of time and considering how I could make space in my work day for this challenge. On each walk, I was uplifted. The land was brightly green, decorated with patches of wildflowers, yellow and white. It was a balm to the eyes and to the soul. Each day, though my spirits descended again when I returned from my walks, the troughs were not so deep. By the second week of January, I felt like myself again.

Some days I walked 10km or more, one day I only managed 1km. I walked at all times of the day – in cold early morning mist in jacket and woolly hat, bright afternoon sunshine in t-shirt and sunglasses, at sunset, carefully picking my way along rocky paths in the dark; Lady always my faithful companion, the land I walked through nourishing and uplifting me.

By the end of the month, I had walked 201km, along paths leading out in a radius from my house. I became reacquainted with places I hadn’t walked in years, just as I became reacquainted with why I love living here in the first place – the immensity of the land, the stories it tells of the people who lived here before, if only you take the time to read those stories in the landscape, the other creatures nourished by the land, and the river that brought me here snaking through it all; the vastness of the sky, at times a blue so deep as to seem unreal, at times ominous shades of grey, at night the riot of stars a glorious reminder of my insignificance, the Milky Way mirroring the route of our little river.

Over the course of the month, I observed changes taking place – sudden changes brought about by a heavy rain shower, slower changes as grasses grew, the number of lambs in a herd of sheep increased dramatically, the oranges continued to ripen and fall from the trees. I have found one, two, or even three hours in each day to walk. Those hours were there for the taking all along, I just failed to see them. Walking became the fulcrum of my day throughout January, uplifting me, soothing my soul, reassuring me that in the face of such ordinary magnificence, it is only to be expected that happiness is my default mode.

As for February? I’m back on the tracks and trails again, mostly in the lengthening evenings, challenging myself to another 200km. It hardly feels like a challenge. It’s starting to feel more like a drug.

Snow memory

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I remember this time of year about a decade ago. We were living in rural Cambridgeshire, about four miles from Cambridge. It had snowed heavily overnight and the flat southeast English landscape was blanketed in white. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and go for a walk. I left by the back gate and headed across the fields. The land around our house was owned by Trinity College, one of the Cambridge University colleges. It was heavily cultivated and, although the fields were accessible, walking was restricted to signposted tracks or to field perimeters. As I walked, the sky grew more overcast and it started to snow again. After twenty minutes I was well out of sight of my house and the quiet country road on which we lived.

Instead of the joy I had anticipated feeling at being out in the snowy landscape, I felt unease. This walk along the familiar hedgerows was one I took regularly, and it was not uncommon for me to encounter a hare or a deer. Indeed, on this particular day I found fresh hare prints in the snow. But, somehow, I felt decidedly uncomfortable. I was on a circular walk and at this point I was equidistant between going on or turning back.

I was aware that I had quickened my pace and I was perspiring under my winter clothes. I had the sensation of being a hunted animal as I kept furtively glancing around. Suddenly, the reason for my fear became clear to me – polar bears! There, in the bucolic, highly-managed, symmetrical landscape of rural Cambridgeshire, something had subconsciously brought me back to the Kivalliq. It wasn’t simply the snow. I had been in the snow at least a couple of times since I had last lived in Arviat, and I hadn’t feared an encounter with a bear. But that day, there was a certain quality to the light, a certain texture to the air that tricked my brain into thinking there might be a bear around.

Despite being in a landscape where the largest carnivore I could possibly encounter was a badger, I found myself feeling the way I had that spring day seven or eight years earlier when I had walked out to Huluraq. Arviat was more than a 40 minute walk behind me and all around was the flat west Hudson Bay landscape, where the undulating snow-covered land reached a snow-covered finger, Huluraq, out onto the frozen seascape of Hudson Bay. As I turned to make the slow snow-hampered walk back home I saw two sets of prints in the snow – a mother polar bear and her cub. My blood ran cold. I was unarmed – although I doubt that, armed, I would have stood any better chance. I had no idea how old the prints were. They looked fresh enough, clearly defined and without an accumulation of blowing snow.

The walk back to Arviat was the longest of my life. I expected at any moment that the last sound I would hear would be the fluey-sounding grunt of a mother bear coming up behind me, turning me into a meal for her cub. I walked as fast as my cumbersome clothes and boots and the terrain would allow me. There had been other encounters with bears, some where I’d felt threatened and some where I’d felt awe and gratitude for being in the presence of such a creature. But no encounter was as frightening as that non-encounter that day near Huluraq.

And then, years later, what should have been a pleasant walk across a snowy English landscape turned into an anxiety-filled power walk, as I raced to escape from my subconscious fear. I realized at the time how ridiculous I was being and I forced myself to slow down, relax, bring myself back into the moment. But in a very short time I found myself once again anxiously speed walking towards my little chocolate-box English cottage.

I’ve often thought of that snowy day in Cambridgeshire and the subtle sensations that caused my mind and body to subconsciously make connections between past and present. We all subconsciously make these connections all the time as our senses trick us into time travel. The smell of a 2-stroke engine immediately transports me to the west coast of Hudson Bay; the theme music to BBC Sports Roundup puts me back in the busy little kitchen of my childhood at 5pm on a Saturday evening, me, my cousins, our parents, aunt and granny and the smell and texture of fried bread; tin-foil wrapped ham sandwiches take me back to the Canal End of Croke Park.

It’s not simply memory or nostalgia. Rather, it is a triggering of the senses that awakens reaction, muscle memory, feeling, sensation, emotion. Perhaps it’s the closest we get to time travel as we are transported backwards through time to catch glimpses of what were, perhaps, the moments that defined us. We may not have known at the time but those would be the moments that would remain, imprinted on our souls.

The view from the window

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God knows, there are worse views. From high up in the village, our house looks southwest over the orange village rooftops and beyond. Below us lies the whitewashed church, perched on its own hill in the centre of the village, and beyond, up on the next hill, two picturesque windmills and the green field below where white and chestnut horses peacefully graze. I can’t see the river, but the hills of Portugal are almost within touching distance and the river runs between them and the village.

Home Feature

It’s like a scene from a Hollywood movie, a cardboard cutout of an idyllic southern European village. Imagine Mama Mia, or Chocolat, or Jeremy Irons in the final scene of Damage.

It’s just as well that it’s such a pleasant view. Since September I have been staring at that view for more time than I ever could have imagined. To coincide with moving into the house (indeed, because of moving into the house) I slipped a couple of discs in my lower back, leaving me severely incapacitated. I can’t walk very much, I can’t do most of the things I love to do. All those things that draw me to life in the village and the things that make me feel part of village life are, for the moment, out of reach. It’s a strange and unpleasant feeling to be in the village and yet not in the village.

But I have the view. Despite the picture postcard quality of the place, I know this is no cardboard cutout. Behind those pretty whitewashed walls and under those orange roof tiles there is love and laughter, joy and sorrow. And in the hills beyond, the seasons bring change, there are lambs and rock roses and wild flowers.

I am reminded of (though in no way compare myself to) Seamus Heaney’s poem Field of Vision* as I sit looking out on the view from my office desk or from the sitting room. For almost six months I have watched the seasons change, the parched sun-baked golden brown of summer giving way to the bright rain-fed greens of winter and spring. I’ve watched the sky, the bright blue empty sky, and the immense clouds sometimes bringing torrential showers of rain. These mornings I look down on fog, an inversion over the river, like steam rising from a witch’s cauldron.

The changing life of the village is harder to observe from this remove. Like those subtler changes in the landscape, one has to be in the village, rather than observing it from afar, to understand and appreciate its changing moods. I cherish those rare occasions these days, when I get out, when I feel sociable enough to be a part of village life again for an hour or two.

I long for a time when I can once again take a carefree stroll down to the bar and have a coffee or beer with whoever happens to be around, chat with my neighbours when we pass on the street, be spontaneous in my socializing. And I long to get beyond the village, to take long walks in the hills again, to be nose-to-nose with wild flowers, to row across the river in my little red dinghy and walk the smuggler’s trail in Portugal.

I am optimistic that all those things will come my way again. I expect I’ll appreciate them all the more for the months I have spent merely observing life through the frame of my front window.

*Field of Vision
Seamus Heaney

I remember this woman who sat for years
In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.

Straight out past the TV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,
The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate —
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see

Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.