As my coming back here after several months away has coincided with September starting and back to school happening I thought I’d use that old teacher’s favourite of “Write an essay about what you did on your holidays” for the second Quiet article of my return. To tell you some of what I’ve been up to, on a holiday from writing that lasted from early February when I stopped, to late last week when Quiet got going again.
Audio version
This won’t involve tales of funfairs and candy floss, let alone of family visits to foreign locations, as there haven’t been any. Nor will I falsely attempt to engage your continued reading attention to this with the cliché and its attendant exclamation mark “But I haven’t been idle!” Because for much of those seven months away, I have. Assiduously developing my naturally occurring anyway idleness, into an even finer and more expertly honed art form. So there.
But some interruptions to such a busy doing of nothing have taken place. And here they are.
The most frequent of them has been my love and caring for the Allotment. When Quiet last visited, early in February, the Winter was thinking of ending and the snowdrops had just shown up. Since when? Well rather than go all Monty Don on you I’ll include a few photographs next to this writing of what the constant gardening, the noticing and trying of new things out has come to look like. Easily the best and most fulfilling garden I’ve ever been involved in making.
As for what it’s felt like, rather than rely on a hail of adjectives I’ll sum it up with the simple statement that this year the Allotment has become my default place. I don’t go there every day, but I’m definitely at the Allotment more days than I’m not. All walks call in there and no visits to shops, cafés or libraries end without me going to the Allotment as well. “Just for an hour or so and just to see” I’ll usually say. Returning home several hours of “Just seeing” later. Muddy quite likely, tired from bending and crouching so much, but also and always happily fulfilled. Not merely about the plants. Though I’m reading up on, trying out and being careful about them, as well as using Gardener’s Latin in my planting and thorough cataloguing of what’s there, I’m no horticulturalist and don’t really want to be. Because the fact is I’m there at least as much for the reading, writing and the refuge and contentment of being there, as ever I’ll be for saying proper gardener stuff like “The Dahlias were early this year.“ But they were.
So that’s the garden.
And what the Allotment has also been a major contributor to this year has been a level of slowing down in myself that’s exceeded even the slowing down I’d so often write about on here before. While I was away, in short, my quiet life has got increasingly and deliberately quieter.
Some of this is because of my heart. Though I’ve happily been given a year off from the constant checks on my aortic valve I’ve written about on here before (“it’s got no worse” my cardiology doctor told me early in June) I’ve become habitually careful about my heart’s quiet steadiness anyway. No sudden heavy lifting and accepting that some nights these days I’ll be tired and sleepy long before I used to be. All that has become the new normal. But also and as well I’ve noticed the same quiet stillness and steadiness seeping into everything else I do and think of and even how I am. Content now to have withdrawn so far back from pretty much everything I was once involved in, that I can look at my diary for most weeks, see nothing in it and prefer it that way. Reasoning that this is my time now, and these are my years. Fit enough still, mentally as well as physically, to lead an active if thoughtful and quiet life, where all my time is my own. After a lifetime of work and other concerns I’m happy to have spent this year embracing a stillness I’d never thought I’d be capable of. But I am.
“Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go” as Paul McCartney sang on Abbey Road at the end of his Beatles years.
It feels like that for me too now. When the first things I do most mornings are look at the weather forecast on my phone, then go out in the yard and see if what it’s said feels and smells true. Then I’ll decide about the day. Feeling an intense happiness in the freedom to do so now.
So there it is. What I’ve done on my holidays having mostly been decided on the mornings of the days themselves. My long and good for me in every way walks round Liverpool, my days out in other places, or some days just settling down to read and write at home until the sky clears up later. These are mostly what I’ve done. As to the places where the days out have been, how the shapes of my Liverpool walks have changed and what exactly have been the books that most engaged, entertained and engrossed me, well they’re for more writing another time. As will be more about, oh, the Autumn planting I’m now doing as well as many and various other things. Now I seem to have got my writing mojo working again
But all that’s long enough, I’d say, for this back to school essay to be handed in now. Hoping, as ever, for a gold star.
Quiet: Stories from a quiet life. About reading, music, walking around, having an allotment and generally thinking through how things are, now I’m getting older and, mostly, quieter.
Also, four big thank yous are due to some other Substack writers who never failed to engage, entertain and even educate me during the months of my break from Quiet. Thank you very much
, , & Mark from . You’re four of the main reasons I’ve come back.This is also and with love for the youngest of my three grandchildren who’s started at Senior School this week. Here’s your first essay if you want to crack on you’ve been working on an allotment the whole holidays.
And…this just in, as proper news agencies say, the elder grandson’s had a happy morning getting into college. So a good back to school sort of day all round.
Excellent return! I've been reading Susannah Clarke's newsletter since you last recommended it, and very much enjoy it. Not only does it take me back to Orkney every week, which I love, but she has also had conversations with Mark Edmonds, who was my tutor in uni! One of those cosmic coincidences that suggest good things.
A big gold star!⭐Such a lovely return and am very glad you are back.