“The whole air struggling in soft excitements”
Quietly rising on the upswing of the season cycle
The quote that I have used to title this piece is from a poem by Ted Hughes, titled Spring Nature Notes. It can be found in the collection Season Songs which was published in 1975. I have long been an admirer of Hughes' poetry, in particular those plentiful moments where he sets his gaze upon the natural world. I read aloud from his collection, The River, on an almost daily basis, yet still get lost in the free-form structure of those poems – on those unwinding tangents that turn you around like an eddy in the current until you no longer know which way is forward; where you are compelled to surrender to the exploration of a supplementary idea and to have faith that it will eventually lead you back around to a point where the blank verse rights itself.
I have always felt a grounded connection to the seasons. Nothing mystical or airy fairy about it. More a sense that I am integrated, on a biological level, into the workings of some great mechanism; one that raises me up, even as I am slowly being ground down to dust by the passing of the years and the decades.
The beginnings and endings of the seasons are a source of disagreement among meteorologists and astronomers, and are defined in more abstract, personalised terms by other interested communities and individuals. I am acutely aware of the subdivisions within these blocks of time that unfold as predictable sequences of natural events: The sun that is suddenly a little higher in the sky in the morning, its brilliant glare cancelling out the television; the pommel handle on the outer side of my bedroom door warmed by the solar heat. Anyone with access to a garden will be aware of how briefly different species of plant come into flower. Where I currently live, the end of winter is heralded by the arrival of the snowdrops that are spreading along the earth bed alongside the compost heap. Around the same time, across the lawn, an increasingly bushy cluster of yellow aconites, that have proliferated around the roots of the fig tree, will gradually come into flower. As I write this, the daffodils are on their way out. They have been a little disappointing, not as strident and as upright as they have been in previous years. I think the heavy rain may have played a role in this. The tulips are just coming into bloom from within the sprawl of their broad leaves that buckle and twist like malleable sheets of oxidised copper. Something lilac-coloured and hyacinthy (that for all I know may actually be a hyacinth) is flowering along the boundary of one of the raised flower beds.
This morning I awoke to the sun shining through the east-facing window. I have not drawn my curtains in years, and recently I took them down. The little plastic hooks that attach them to the rails had been made brittle by the sun. They snapped like wishbones. The plant stand by the window – a five foot tall flatpack scaffold of splintery eucalyptus wood, that I hope to improve with a coating or two of teak oil – is currently home to a selection of carnivorous plants. They should be south-facing really, but this is the best that I can offer them. The thread-leafed drosera is very happy there, at least. The sun had infused the globes of stickiness at the end of each delicate tentacle, haloing the long, curling leaves in hazy light.
My mind wandered back in time to a Saturday morning, in 1993. I walked around the corner from my home, to a house where a tarp-covered dinghy and trailer was a permanent fixture on the dulled, roughcast driveway. My friend, Jon, lived there with his mother. We had known each other since we were thirteen and had attended the same secondary school.
It was early spring. Clouds of pale-pink blossom were clustered around the spindly, arthritic boughs of the cherry trees, that lined the thin grass verges of the flagstone pavement. Everywhere I looked, there were signs that life was returning to the world after the long dormancy of winter. I could feel the burgeoning momentum of it; the freshness; the urgent and uplifting potential of possibilities that were now unfolding, having pushed their way up and out of the dead season; bare branches spear-tipped with greenery; the barren ground resplendent with thickets of yellow daffodils. Every cell in my body recognised the impetus towards renewal, and instinctively turned with it, the same way boats will turn on their moorings in alignment with the tide.
Jon's mum answered the door. To no great surprise he was still upstairs getting dressed. I was directed into the living room where she left me to my own devices. After scanning the contents of a plastic tower of compact discs, I put on Sense by The Lightning Seeds. The title track that opens the album was co-written by the late Terry Hall of The Specials, Fun Boy Three, The Colourfield, etc. It is loosely stitched together with a keyboard melody, that nods in the direction of house music, but is garnished with enough extra notes to break the cycle of monotonous repetition. It swings into the verses in a long arc. The song brims over with openness and optimism and it captured the mood of the morning perfectly.
A few years passed and so much changed during that time. Jon and I became geographically separated by our evolving circumstances. His mother moved to another town and took the dinghy with her. The driveway was relayed with an angular mosaic of ash-coloured brick. I reconnected with him briefly at the funeral of his foster brother. The last time I saw him was around ten years ago, the night his father died. I doubt we will meet again.
I spent the closing moments of 1999 stone-cold sober and no longer able to stomach the enforced conviviality of the New Year celebrations, nor the dread thought of having to diplomatically slog my way through Auld Lang Syne, while bound into a cross-armed human chain composed of people who I barely knew. I think there should be at least some glimmer of sincerity placed behind those words and their sentiments, as opposed to the song being something that you bellow in chorus with all the finesse of a mortally-wounded wildebeest, before drunkenly snogging someone who you only half fancy, while the Jools Holland Hootenanny plays out at low volume on a television in the background.
Deciding that I was above all of that, I had decamped to Thorpe Bay beach taking my bad mood with me. Facing towards Kent, I unleashed a golden stream of piss over the threshold of midnight and over the thresholds of years, decades, centuries – millennia even, if one is not too pedantic and yields to the popular consensus that 1999-2000 marked the end of that eventful era. All across town, batteries of fireworks were bombarding the low heavens with a cacophony of colourful explosions, staining the air with the smell of gunpowder.
A couple of days later, I decamped to Tooting, in South London, where I had enrolled in a three-month NVQ in periodical journalism. I had been interested in the profession since my early teens, when I had arranged periods of work experience on the local newspaper.
As part of the NVQ, I did a fortnight's worth of interning at a news agency in London. The agencies were, and I expect still are, an extension of the reach of the tabloids. If there was something potentially newsworthy that an editor didn't think was worth covering with their own journalists, then they would dispatch a proxy through one of these outlets. In addition to being a poorly-paid, high-pressure job, the working environment was not a harmonious one. As an intern, I was spared the worst of it. I witnessed reporters on the receiving end of torrents of abuse from editors, delivered through the speaker of a mobile phone, but clearly audible. If you could get your copy in fast enough, there was the possibility that some other paper might also buy the story. This placed you in cut-throat competition with other journalists who were covering the same ground, and undermined some of the camaraderie that might have otherwise developed. By the end of the two weeks, I knew that I could probably do the work and be reasonably good at it. What I couldn’t do was reconcile my deontological moral code with the muddied ethics of the profession.
The doorstepping troubled me: James Hewitt, a former lover of Diana, Princess of Wales, had apparently claimed in an interview to have re-enacted her final journey around the Peripherique, in an identical model of Mercedes, while drunk and in the company of four women. His confession necessitated that a gaggle of journalists and photographers assemble on the pavement outside a house in Kensington where he lived, though I doubt that he was in. The neighbours were not pleased to see us. I think the police turned up at one point. It was a struggle to find local businesses who would allow us to use their toilets. One of the photographers from The Sun reminisced fondly about his time in Sarajevo, and a pair of houses near the hotel where he stayed that had survived the fighting and that became known to the foreign correspondents as the Hansel and Gretel cottages. He'd snapped a photo of Prince William at a swimming gala when the young royal was attending Eton. The negatives were in a safety deposit box somewhere. He was hoping that he would be able to sell the image in his dotage. Another photographer bemoaned the exorbitant but necessary cost of converting from film to digital. His new camera set up had cost him over £10,000.
I ended up forming a grudging respect for the tabloid reporters with whom I rubbed shoulders. At least they knew what they were. They didn't attempt to dress up what they were doing as something noble. They struck me as far more genuine and far less conniving than some of the broadsheet journalists who I encountered. They were also pretty thorough in terms of taking notes which impressed me. I used to transcribe my teeline every night while the context was still fresh in my mind. Conversely, I once glanced over the shoulder of a Guardian journalist who was interviewing someone. She obviously couldn't write shorthand and was instead jotting down the odd word with the intention of reconstructing the conversation from memory later.
The breaking point for me was being asked to stand vigil at the perimeter of a private hospital in Kensington where the footballer, George Best, was rumoured to be resting his liver. I was told to ask anyone who I saw entering or leaving the building whether they were visiting/had visited the beleaguered just-about-still-living legend. Hassling people going in and out of a hospital was a line that I was not at all comfortable crossing. I knew so little about football that the entire English team could have paraded past me and I wouldn't have recognised any of them.
I was rapidly falling out of love with my zealous journalistic persona for whom the ends always justified just about any means that I could think of. When the working day was over and the job fell away, I found that I didn't want to be alone with myself. I delayed returning to my South London lodgings – a shared house that was, to all intents and purposes, a brothel, since two of the other tenants were working girls. Up until that point I had never understood the urge to erase oneself with alcohol. I think that if I had committed to journalism then I would have been dead by my own hand a long time ago.
By April, the course was over. I still hadn't completed the work that was required to graduate. Despite having no intention of entering the profession, I felt that I should see it through. Along with a handful of fellow stragglers I spent another week at the training centre finishing things off. The certificate that I eventually received lies in a draw, and is about as relevant to my present capabilities as the certificates that document my performance at various Sunday school sports days.
One Saturday morning, I was making my way through residential streets of closely-packed terraced housing towards the epiphytic junction where Amen Corner fuses with Mitcham Road. At a glance, and absent any signage, you could be anywhere in London. I planned on walking to Tooting Broadway Underground station and thereafter catching a train into the city. On the way, I encountered Toby, one of my fellow trainees, who had actually finished his coursework on time, and was probably destined for some sub-editorial/production role, which was where his talents lay. He was living with an elderly Trinidadian man named Mark. We stopped briefly to talk. He told me that he was coming home from a fancy dress party. Unable to discern anything unusual about his appearance I asked him what he had gone as. He pointed out some barely discernible epaulettes that were somehow applied to the shoulders of his body warmer and claimed to have gone as Mills – Brad Pitt's character from the movie Se7en. Perhaps earlier on, he had been in possession of a likeness of a severed head in a box. In the wake of our conversation, we parted in opposite directions, every footstep carrying us out of each other's lives, probably forever.
I felt the same way that I had all those years ago when I had walked to my friend, Jon's, house; the same way that I have felt many times since: A feeling on my skin of slow-building heat that hadn't been present a week before. The air had a dry bite to it that had yet to be neutered by the indolent swell of the summer. My surroundings seemed to be alive with possibilities. The spark that I felt inside me was the same spark that tells plants to flower and trees to grow new leaves. It didn't matter whether this potential was fully realised. It was enough that it had come back from out of the darkness. On my Walkman (in a moment that was less serendipitous and more choreographed to what I thought my mood should be that morning) Sarah Cracknell was singing:
“This is the morning of another day And you kiss another dream away Ready or not “You never say the things you should You didn't, and you never could Like it or not.”
The petal fragments of a long cherished dream were scattered around my feet and all I felt was optimism and a urge towards my own revival.
A couple of years ago, I was walking through a cross-section of South London along the River Wandle, from where it rises in Wandle Park, to where it empties into the Thames, roughly twelve and half miles away, if you are keeping to the banks. There was a point in the journey where my surroundings began to look vaguely familiar. Having emerged from a stretch of footpath onto one of those country lanes that you can scarcely believe exist so close to the heart of the Capital, I realised that, if I walked a short distance to my right, then I would arrive at the business park where I had done my journalism training.
The infrastructure was still there. The office buildings had been transformed into apartments, overlooking the dead grass expanse of Mitcham Common. I wandered further on, in search of the rough pub where one of the patrons had once passed out in the ladies toilets. That too seemed to have been developed into housing. It is enjoyable sometimes to revisit the past and to reminisce, as it is to dwell on the future. Better still are those charged moments that you feel in the air. When a current, coming up from the ground and inhabits your nervous system, lighting you up from the inside, reminding you that there is there is no absolute death, but only cycles of renewal and decay.