I can see that the oaks, once part of ancient hedgerows — wavy lines of hawthorn, oak and dog rose — have been set adrift again, floating islands on a furrowed sea.
Spending time in nature is good for our mental health and wellbeing. This might seem obvious, but it’s an idea now supported by reams of evidence-based research. I need to be in the green, but I also need culture and cities and grime and bustle. Is it possible to have both?
On the osteopath’s treatment couch, Louis is rocking me like a parent soothing a fractious child. “I don’t know what to do to make it better,” I say, meaning my problematic joints, meaning myself, meaning this whole shitshow of a world.
It was the middle of May and still there was no sign of the swallows. The roof of the yellow house, where every year since before even Greta could remember, a pair had perched, waiting for each other’s return, remained empty.
When I turned on the radio, the news was of continuing rioting across the country. It had stretched overnight, across the South West, beyond Bristol to Plymouth.
‘When we moved to the village, to our funny house, with all its quirks and corners, steps and riddles, it was the garden that got me.’
“The function of poetry is the function of being human. Of every civilisation we’ve uncovered, the earliest things we detect are not their governments or their money, it’s the things they made, and wrote.”
‘Yesterday blue fought through the cloud and the sun came out. In the walled garden, the birds sang, a hundred tiny voices making a chorus of good news.’
‘In the last week of March the blackthorn flowered. Rosettes as white as snowburied fields burst from stems black with witchcraft, from between the thorns of fairy tale and folklore; thorns whose vicious stab cast Sleeping Beauty into a hundred year sleep.’
I bought a keyring a lifetime ago, from Roskilly Farm’s gift shop in Cornwall. It’s a round ball of smooth, turned walnut, fissured with black
““I’m not a happy camper or festival goer”, I hear myself say over again in the run up to the festival. But as a kid I went to festivals and camped a lot, so maybe that’s not strictly true. Maybe I’d just forgotten how to do it.”
“…it can feel as though we have no control over the climate or our environment, that nothing we do matters; whereas in truth, everything does.”
‘…capitalism can make you feel that unless you’re producing something brilliant, shiny and saleable, then you’re not an artist.’
“Gardening, the act of putting my hands into the soil, saves me time and again.”
“So my mind is full of what home means, whether it’s a place, a person, or a feeling, when the train pulls into the station and I climb aboard, looking for Dad.”
An interview with award winning poet, writer and teacher, John McCullough.
“It was brutal, but wasn’t that what nature was, what we were, made brutal by our drive to survive?”
“Paolo felt for each step like a child in the dark. There was a rattle coming from his insides, like a shaken bag of scrabble letters; clink, clink, clink.”
‘One day Theo handed me a roll of electric fencing. “Hold this for a second, Nels,” he said. “You won’t connect it, will you?” I ask. “Nah, course not,” he says.’
Kerry Priest is a poet, sound artist and playwright. I caught up with her digitally to talk poetry, life and 2020.
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