reader, writer, daydreamer
If you look too long into the green the green will eat you up. It will wind its way around your heart and its splintered roots will lodge inside your bones. Underneath your skull, a whole forest will unfurl and make your thoughts a muddle. You’ll try to leave it, try to live beyond it, but you’ll find your soul ensnared, find it calling you back, pulling you back, painting your blood and staining you through.
The sun is burning hot and the sea shimmers a thousand beautiful blues.
We pick our way down a washed-away jumble of steps and baked mud, beyond a sign that says not to go further. The beach is toasty under my soles and tingly around my toes.
We set up camp half way round the bay and I strip quickly down to my bikini, head straight to the water because if I don’t get in now I never will.
The water is sharp and cold, a shock, a relief, icy as it slicks across my goose-bumpled skin. It cloaks me, hides me. I float, I swim, paddle, sit, stand, wriggle till I’m soaked through to my blood, salty down to my bones.
And I stay longer and longer, a fear bubbling under my skin until the cold forces me to ignore the fear.
Getting out is the worst part because my head hates my body, even though my body doesn’t really deserve to be hated.
Somewhere lost – very lost – inside me, I know that. I know it but still I don’t believe it.
The short walk back to our spot makes me, ridiculously, want to cry.
The towel is my saviour, a shroud, a thin paisley-strewn defence against eyes that will surely hate my body too if they glimpse it.
A book is my saviour too, releases me from my self.
Butterflies dance over pebbles, brush across my knees. They save me as well.
And the skylarks, they save me. They sing and sing, cheep and cheep, and they lull me away from the thoughts that circle round like vultures desperate to pick apart, literally, my flesh.
As we head back, back up those jumbly stairs, back up a very hilly hill, I try to love my legs, love every sinew, every muscle, every bit of cellulite – the real bits and the (apparently) imagined bits – as every one of them helps me back to the car, but I struggle to undo over half-a-life’s worth of muddled thinking. Of being and knowing and believing.
How can going for a swim be so hard?
At 36 pages, Holloway by Robert Macfarlane isn’t the longest read on the planet, but it was one of the nicest reading experiences I’ve had in a long time.
It’s teeny-tiny and delicate and cherishable, something to be picked up and reread every now and then. Something to get lost in for ten minutes. Something ‘within which ghosts softly flock’. It’s kind of like a prayer book – one where God is south Dorset (biased? me? *waves hand dismissively but guiltily*), gnarly knotted trees, sunken many-lives-haunted pathways, friendship, and quiet adventure.
It made me want to escape to the real world.
Just maybe when it stops raining.
The castle looms like it always does, a tangling mess of steely grey rock studded into tufted grass.
I try to ignore my hands as they turn redder and redder, try not to worry about the purple blotches growing in amongst the red.
I collect a ticket and hand it back in a minute later, after the bridge, after the wobbly entrance arch, after getting attached to it and feeling like I don’t want to hand it in (the hoarder in me wants to keep it, as if not keeping it will mean I have never been).
Beyond the entrance, there are stocks to the left. A memory of sticking my head and hands in it years ago flurries round my head. My lungs remember how much my sister and I laughed that day.
Up, up, up goes the path, and I follow.
More paths, more steps.
The views are beautiful. Fields and trees and hills and tantalizing sunbeams falling far away.
Heart slowing, lungs calming, I stop with one hand pressed against a towering chunk of wall that’s angled very unhow a wall should be angled. The picture of it crumbling, the feel of it giving way, floods my head. Maybe it’s best to move on.
Walk, slip, trip.
Broken hallways hiss with icy gusts of wind. Walls are painted green with veils of moss and drip with sticky rain. Elsewhere, they are blotchy with lichen, a mix of grubby white and sickly yellow that blurs into the grey.
The sound of children playing on their lunchbreak twinkles all around the air, filling it with echoes of playful happiness. The sound of traffic buzzes like it buzzes almost everywhere. I wish I could eavesdrop on the sounds of five hundred years ago and five hundred years from now, wish I could know who’s stood here before and who’ll stand here one day.
I take a turn. It leads to a dead end. I head back, try to refind the main path. I attempt to take a shortcut and slide inelegantly between a rock and a hard place. I pray there are no cameras to record my momentary wedgedness between aforementioned rock and hard place. I wonder if walking/shuffling through (getting slightly stuck in) a wall makes me some sort of ghost. I worry I might’ve just frightened someone in the fifteenth century.
Soggy steps lead downwards.
I look up as the sun bubbles through a patch of clouds. It’s framed by one of the many derelict windows and I try to take a nice photo, but, no matter how many I take, none of them look better, none of them shine brighter, than the real-time thing. Away goes the phone.
I head back down the hill, trying not to slide down the cobblestones, trying not to surf down the grass.
The castle looks smaller than it feels in my head when I look back up, and I’m not sure if I’ve imagined it big or my eyes have tricked it small.
I came here looking for something. I don’t know what exactly. I don’t even know if I found it. I hope so.
I do feel better, lighter, clearer.
Colder, redder, and purpler, too.
Roll up, roll up!
Come and walk where the trees burn with rainbows! Join us in a land of magic and wonder, where colours bleed into the sky and claw their way towards the stars, where darkness is made bright! Ladies and gentlemen, follow us to a place where the air is so cold your lungs will turn it white, a place so cold your skin will bump with gooses!
Roll up, roll up, and keep your eyes wide open!
And please, ladies and gentlemen, remember to stay with us on the paths!
For we cannot help you beyond the lights. We cannot help you in the dark.
And who knows what’s waiting for you there?
You know the saying “blow the cobwebs away”? After walking at Durdle Door today, I’m pretty sure I’m sorted on the cobwebs front for life.
It was so – so, so, so – windy. My face hurt. My ears hurt. My eyes hurt. My eyelashes even hurt, as the air tried its best to burrow into my eye sockets and brain.
Between the steps down to Man O’ War beach and the steps to Durdle Door, the air funnelled through so hard it was like being battered in the face and chest. I thought, at one point, my shirt and jacket might sink through my skin, tear through my ribs, and rip out through my spine, leaving a tangly mess of me and my clothes in the churning sea below.
Luckily, that didn’t happen. Which is good, because it means I can go again sometime.
Maybe when it’s a little less windy, though.
Spring is bluebell time of year in England.
Woods and gardens bubble over with purple-blue droplets, speckled against a background of the brightest green.
There are those who say it is dangerous to walk amongst the bluebells. They say some never return from their wanderings, snatched away by fairies.
And if you hear the bluebells ring, it is said, you’ll die before the next morning.
I say, I’m willing to take my chances…
I love this time of year.
Days slowly getting longer. Brave flowers peeping up out of the cool ground. Promising warmth in golden sunshine.
It’s a happy mix of the perks of winter – the cosy evenings in front of the fire, a pair of cold hands kept warm by a mug of hot chocolate, rosy red cheeks from frosty air – whilst knowing that spring and summer, with all their greenness and sunniness and loveliness, are on the way.
A late winter magic.
I try to spend as much time as possible outside at this point in the year, soaking in some much needed sun rays and enjoying all the bursts of bright colour in amongst the greens and browns.
It makes me happy, hopeful, and energised.
Here’s to a good week ahead!
❤
Joanna Corbet 