Wild: An Elemental Journey

I don't normally read travel writing. Probably because much of it seems formulaic somehow: person from country A moves to country B, humorous misunderstandings ensue. This book is not like that.

I work in a bookshop. To be more specific, I am a children's bookseller. That means if you want to know the title of the fifth book in the 'Beast Quest' series or whether your nine year old would be able to read 'The Wee Free Men', I'm the person to ask.

I don't know quite so much about the rest of the books in the store but I do know a little about travel because all the travel books come in with the kid's stock. The first thing I always do when I open a box, is pull out all the travel stock and send it to our travel department on the floor above.

As I was shuffling stock from one box to another two weeks ago, I came across this book. The cover looked interesting and when I opened it up to the first paragraph, this is what I read:

'I felt its urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the colour of ice an invitation: come.'

I wanted to read the rest, so I put the book to one side for payday and continued unpacking.

I was paid a week ago and I started reading this then. The book is divided into segments: Earth, Ice, Water, Fire, Air and Mind and I read one each day (with the exception of my day off). In each section Jay Griffiths visits a place - the Amazon for earth, the Australian outback for fire, etc - and meets with the people there, describes the land and deals with the idea of 'wild'.

Parts of it worked really well for me and parts of it didn't.

There's a lot of anger in this book. Griffiths is angered by what the western world is doing to these people and to the land and, in most cases, rightly so. It upsets me that there are still people considered to be 'savages' in a World where I thought we'd learned our lesson. It upsets me that we're destroying the environment: deforestation in the Amazon, global warming in the arctic, mining in West Papua. It upsets me that to continue with our current lifestyle, we take and take and take without giving back.

The trouble is that this book is so angry about it that I almost gave up reading. Not because it was hard to read about the toll my own life must be taking on these people and places. Although it was sometimes difficult. I almost gave up reading because Griffiths is so angered that for one entire 70 page section, she talks of almost nothing else. Her anger runs away with her and takes the narrative with it.

It also bothered me that, in places, she sexualised the landscape to a degree that made me uncomfortable. There is a lot of discussion of phallic imagery, of a male-dominated world, of exploration as rape and although some of it was necessary, a lot of it was not. It's why I wouldn't be comfortable recommending this book to customers in my store. There were times when I felt uncomfortable reading it and I wouldn't in good conscience be able to tell anyone that it wouldn't make them uncomfortable too.

Also, she has a serious problem with Christianity, which jarred uncomfortably for me with her treatment of every other religion she discussed. She seemed to be completely fair-minded in her treatment of culture except when Christianity became involved.

Having said that, I do think this book is worth reading. It does raise some important points and, more importantly for me, it is well written. Griffiths is well-read, has done her research and often expresses herself beautifully. You just have to muscle your way through the fire sections and onto air, where she writes:

'I remember little about the climb now. I remember it was tough, I remember feeling as if I were a giant, in my seven-league boots, one boot in Italy, one in France, and I remember a feeling of dazzling glamour, brightness dancing outside me, brightness dancing within me. I gasped at a rush of ice on my cheeks. The air was singing in my ears eight octaves higher than human hearing. My cuffs and scarf were covered with frozen diamonds, and I swept up a handful of crushed stars in my hand and in sheer glee hurled them back at the sky. There was ice in my hair and sun in my eyes so bright that snow shone inside me and when I spoke there were no words but only the voice of the wind, and I laughed aloud at my own translucence. So immersed, so unimportant, so careless of myself did I feel that the mountain was all that mattered and it included me in its massif - an elation so enormous that I was utterly lost and happy to be so: so minimal myself, so mountainous.'

Unravelling

In October, I started work on a knitted shawl. The pattern came from Ravelry, where people claimed to have finished it in just a weekend. Or a week. Or a month. I had some red merino wool that I thought would make a beautiful (and beautifully warm) shawl and I told myself I would make a shawl to wear on Christmas Day, as a present to myself.

I started off well; the first ten rows offered no problems. Then I came to the lace section and I made the fatal error of not reading the instructions properly. I knitted along merrily, adding one extra yarn over for every 2 stitches. I had a lot more stitches than I'd planned by the time I came to the end of the section ten rows later. 'No problem,' I told myself. 'It's not a mistake. It's a feature.'

I carried on knitting. I ran out of yarn. I checked the instructions. No-one else had run out of yarn. 'Oh well,' I said. 'I have more stitches so, of course, I need more yarn.' I went back to John Lewis and spent £22 on four more balls of yarn. 'Never mind,' I said, wincing at the cost, and kept on knitting.

I knitted slower. And slower. And slower.

Christmas came and went. I didn't finish.

January came and went. I still didn't finish.

April arrived. I finished.

It didn't look right. It didn't hang properly. All that yarn felt very heavy and clumped together.

And then I realised why I'd been knitting so slowly. I'd known. Of course I'd known. Twenty rows in, at that first mistake, I'd known that the shawl was never going to work. But I'd kept knitting. Partly because, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I am stubborn. I will keep denying the existence of the unicorn even when it is right in front of me.

But mostly the problem was that I was so attached to the idea of that beautiful red shawl, I couldn't bear to unravel my work and start again. For want of twenty rows the project was ruined. I could have undone those few and saved myself months.

I cursed and raged and felt bad and ate chocolate. Then I took a deep breath and pulled out one stitch and then another. Entire rows vanished as I pulled the yarn back into a ball. It's actually almost nice to know that no matter how badly I screwed up, there's no reason I can't undo it all and start again.

I'll cast on again in a little while. Maybe I'll have a red shawl by the time Christmas rolls around again. And you can guarantee that this time I'll be more careful.

In the meantime, if I want something red to make myself happy, I'll have to make do with the strawberries growing in my garden.

Comfort Zone

This is the first house I've ever had with my own garden.

I did once have a flowerbed in my mother's garden. I grew wallflowers and lupins, forget-me-nots and sunflowers that faced the wrong direction to grow tall. My sister had one too but she never did anything with it. She just hated to be left out, I think.

We moved out of that house when I was 12, into one where the garden was so small there was no space I could call my own. I think the new owners let our old garden run wild, the flowerbeds and fruit bushes my mother had planted with such care left to take over the garden. I wonder what happened to my little patch of colour. Whether there's any sign of it, 13 years later.

When we saw the house we're living in now, it was the fireplace that convinced Bill he wanted to live here, but it was the garden that convinced me. We'd been living in a flat (a beautiful flat converted from a listed office building but still somewhere with no ground to call our own) and my attempts to grow herbs on the windowsill had met with nothing but disaster. I wanted some outside space where I could read in the sunshine. I like to be outside but I don't really like to leave my house.

This garden was what I needed. At first, my mum was more excited about it than me. She bought me plants and tools and encouraged me to put things into pots. She also brought me a third generation hand-me-down garden bench that had been my grandad's before it was hers. It's very rickety and old but, when it's sunny, it's a great place to sit with a cup of coffee and a book. Slowly, she's won me over.



I'm not an expert gardener and I won't claim to be one. I'm inclined to be lazy and I already killed my hanging baskets once this year, when I forgot to water them during a warm spell. I hate all the bother of making sure my plants are watered and protected from the frost, but I love having a beautiful space to sit out in. I like the way soil feels under my hands (though not under my fingernails) and I loved that there was a short while when I could cut my own daffodils to put on the mantel. I think if there were a cost/benefit analysis on my garden the plants would probably win.

We rent, so everything is in pots with the exception of a clematis. We inherited it from the previous tenants and, right now, it's beautiful. Pale pink and all over the trellis on the back fence. I hope we can find some way to take it with us when we inevitably move again. Some other gardener must have lived here at some point because the garden keeps surprising me. There were snowdrops pushing up through the lawn in the cold days of early spring and there are bluebells coming up through the gravel now. There's a fushia that looks dead but should come back to life again in the summer.

I never know what might suddenly burst to life in our garden. That's the thing about gardening, it's like making a gift for your future self.

Overthinking it...

I own a lot of notebooks. Some of them are empty. More of them than I'd like to admit are empty.

There's something about starting to write that just makes my mind go blank. I don't want to ruin a whole notebook by writing something stupid. So I'd rather write nothing. Leave it for another time. I'll be better prepared then.

So I'm just going to go ahead and click post. Too much overthinking can lead to a collection of blank notebooks.

Best to just begin.