The easiest thing for me would be to just start writing without overthinking what I’m going to say. The change I want to tell you about. So I’ll start with where I am, here inside the polytunnel on the allotment, while the thunder rolls across the sky outside.
This is where I most often am these days when I’m not at home. It having become a kind of second home for me now. Even though it’s not my allotment at all. I’m the help. It’s Sarah‘s place and has been since she started renting it from the local council twenty four years ago. But over this past year I’ve been here the more often of the pair of us. At first merely continuing with the strimming and bits of maintenance role I’ve long done, and said I’d never do more than. Except gradually over this last year, I have.
How much more I only properly recognised when I gathered all the allotment photographs from the year together, and found there were more than four hundred of them. The best few of which are in this gallery.
FromSpring to Spring: A Year
Spring to Autumn
Autumn to Now
Which saves me explaining the whole year’s activities. Reckoning it’s easier to show you the story of the garden’s year than write some long Monty-Don sort of an explanation.
Because in doing a lot of my writing here from now on, as I intend, that doesn’t mean this will turn into a Gardeners’ World kind of blog. I doubt I’d ever be horticultural enough to do that, even if I wanted to. But I love simply being here, it’s one of the places where I do my best thinking. Another one being the writing space I have at home. And the third, of course, is when I’m out walking. The walks, often as not, ending up here, to write down what I’ve seen or been thinking about.
So anyway, this is me restarting my writing, which has stuttered lately. By resuming the writing of short pieces like this, rather than the recent Magazine and the Life Story before. Doing a good deal of what I’ll write here, as a regular part of my days of caring for this small plot of earth. Along with the planting and watering and digging and watching and restructuring, and all the kinds of things you can see in the photographs. I’ll also be sitting down sometimes to write. About what I’ve been doing in the garden sometimes. But probably more often about what I’ve been thinking, or reading, or listening to.
And not, from now on, published in groups of articles I’ve saved up to put out all together in a magazine. In doing that these last few months I’ve missed doing something as simple as this. Having a few thoughts, fitting them habitually into a day of other activities, and publishing them once they’re written. Without the waiting, over thinking and inevitable repeat editing that stacking things up for a magazine turned out to have me doing. Rather than the shorter pieces of regular writing I so much prefer.
Like this. Writing and finishing these few paragraphs while the rain and thunder had stopped any other gardening activities for a while.
Then pressing “publish.”
To be clear then, I’ve decided to end the monthly “Magazine” experiment and return to writing and publishing individual articles. Like this. A decision which I feel instinctively happy with and suspect will cause more stuff to get written. Which will still be about walking, reading, listening and thinking of course. But without the waiting, over thinking and over editing that a grand title like “The Magazine” ended up causing.
It’s just me now. Walking over to the allotment, and every now and then sitting down to write. As simple as that.