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.
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.
‘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.’
“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.”
“It was brutal, but wasn’t that what nature was, what we were, made brutal by our drive to survive?”
Learning to embrace imperfection in life and writing
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