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.
‘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’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.”
“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.”
“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.’
Jackie Juno is a former Bard of Exeter and multiple poetry slam winner. Always a big hit with audiences, I caught up with her remotely to find out more about what makes her creative heart tick.
