Time Travelling In Green

I have this long document I’ve been writing into since the pandemic started. It contains diary entries, shopping lists, overheard conversations, prose, memories, dream journals, things me and mum spoke about on our video calls, interesting (to me) sections of my granny’s diaries as I transcribed them. Everything’s in there. Except the things I missed.

Occasionally, I need or want to find something in this long document, so I use the Page Finder function, typing various words for my search. Tomato (34 matches). Mum (311 matches). Green (106 matches). With each word match I am cast about further back in time. April 2020. June 2021. October 2020. February 2023. My laptop whirs and freaks out from the effort. The screen goes blank, then reappears. Tear (30). Henry. (413). Compost (210). George Saunders. Garden. Granny. I fly or am thrown about. I’m crying in the work toilets in London. I’m eating lettuce we grew in Norfolk. I’m five years old at the after-school club. My Granny is alive and she’s slicing me some pear.

It feels like magic to time travel in this way. It’s like shaking a Magic 8 Ball or throwing a dice. Everything is random and disjointed, yet connected in theme. Tear can be crying, or something shared, or the thing I do to letters before recycling them. This process is extremely self-interested and probably only of interest to me or… I don’t know? Writers who like diaries? But I like colliding with typos, falling through the sentences and paragraphs like a heavy marble through plastic straws in that children’s game. Kerplunk! Coming up against this sense of abundance in the document where linear time doesn’t exist, but everything is inside there, unfolding and happening at once. Communicating everything and nothing like synapses or neurons. You know those dreams where you discover a room that was there all along? The room existed inside your house the whole time, as you lived your life around it. Stumbling around this document is like that; opening doors. I find time-travelling in this way deeply comforting but also vivid and wild; I don’t know if that’s simply vanity or a much-needed ‘post’-pandemic therapy as a way of processing how I spent my time and what just happened. Or grief therapy, years after my granny died, or just a way to process what we’re meant to do with being alive. I think it’s everything, and that’s what I like about it. I know I have a problem with collecting. In this document collection isn’t a problem, it’s creation.

Below: Time travelling through GREEN. There isn’t really a point in me sharing these, beyond putting them out there. The whole point in me once again having a blog is to share without too much anxiety or worry about things being astute, decided, presentable, fast and efficient in the attention economy. I’ve spent many years worrying and I’m really ready to give less of a shit. It’s nice to be here. Not always in a grid.

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Instructions For Leaving House

I’ve extended my route back from training sessions, so that I loop through the neighbourhoods past more homes and stretches of pavement that catch the morning sun. I want to see how feasible it might be to walk 50 or 100 Miles for Mermaids in May, in a normal daily way. This walk is also my ‘anonymous early morning retreat’ (AEMR) – a phrase I’m stealing from David Bailey (not that one) because I love it. Like the training sessions, if I do the walk I’m generally happier. Everything out here is unfolding for me, I only need to leave the house to see it.

I need Instructions For Leaving House, otherwise my brain tricks me into thinking that I don’t actually need to leave the house. This is a set of instructions I’m creating for myself, of little tasks to do while walking around the neighbourhood. Look for 10 different flowers. Learn the names of the ones you don’t know. Describe, draw or take a photo of each one with your phone. Notice only pink things. Describe, draw or photograph each one. How many animals do you see? The instructions get me out of the house and lessen to possibility to creating obstructions for myself. ‘I’m not going on a walk, I’m going to work.’ They lend me a structure through tangible tasks. They shift my brain’s focus away from anxiety loops. My jaw slackens. Most importantly, the instructions encourage me to notice deeply, which usually leads to ideas. That’s when we’re really cooking. When I’m walking, and noticing how many people now have those doorbells with cameras or how it’s easy to spot blue things but harder to find pink things, and having ideas and getting excited by the ideas – that’s when I’m really living.

Look at 10 different doorsteps. Describe what you see.

A small ceramic squirrel. Hazelnut brown with a white tummy. Eating carefully from its claws. Faded by the years. A stripey brown and black doormat. Hard bristles. Fallen petals from a bright red, show-offish camellia, in a pot textured like a walnut shell.

Signs in windows. What do they say? Norwich stands with Ukraine. No junk mail through this door please. Have fun. Shake it at your own pace.

For the third or fourth time lately I take a photo of the door of the community centre, where the signs are posted. Turning around, I see a middle-aged man in the upstairs window of the house opposite. He’s standing directly in the sunlight, straight back, hands at his sides. Tanned skin. Baby blue polo shirt. I meet his eyes. I wonder if it looks like I’m up to no good. It’s good to stand like that, washed by the full power of the sun.

There are other homemade signs, quite a lot when you start to look, but they’re not in windows. A brightly coloured, happy poster slipped inside a plastic wallet is fixed to a tree trunk outside the church. “Do something local to celebrate… EARTH DAY.” On several lampposts on this street, and in fact many streets in the area, a woman has taped a CV-like poster advertising her cleaning and dog-walking services. There is a photograph, and her contact details.

Vote Green Party. Stop. Flu jab, no fuss. Chair beauty room nail bar for rent. Want to lose weight? It’s time to experMINT.

It’s an invasion of privacy to photograph posters in the windows of peoples’ homes, but some of them are really good. Kids’ drawings or patronising signs. Britons! Do your duty. Support striking workers. The local elections are two weeks away. This year is the first time I’ve leafletted for a political party. I did it to get out of the house. And probably to try to absolve myself of some guilt or feeling of helplessness. But putting leaflets through doors doesn’t make me feel any less guilty. It makes me feel watched. Most of the houses in this area don’t have front hallways, they just open directly into the sitting room. I push my fingers through the letter boxes, imagining the tips poking through the bristles on the other side. Somebody watching it all from the sofa. Pushing the leaflets, I make a concerted effort to smile for the doorbell cameras, the eyes behind the net curtains. I am representing this party.

All your window and conservatory needs. Neighbourhood watch. We want proportional representation for the general elections. Adopt don’t shop. Norfolk Greyhound Rescue. Allcock Family Funeral Services. Proud to support life boats. Are YOU the next big thing? Have you seen this man? Wanted for theft.

The point is to get outside to see the things. I don’t need to record them. But I have a collecting problem. What if I need them later?

I’m not sure about these cameras. If I’m not photographing the signs in your window, is it right to record me here on the street? They value observation as much as I do. In the name of security, though. Or communicating with the Amazon delivery person, whoever who delivers the post. Would I feel any less unease if I felt the doorbells were here because we all love the world and what unfolds and don’t want to miss a moment of it? In my mind I push the doorbells and whoever lives here answers through the speaker. They’re not at home right now. What can you see? I’m sitting at my desk. Who is there? Lynne and David. What’s under your desk? A pedestal. What’s inside it? Some cereal bars. Pens. Phone charger. My trainers in a totebag. Where are you? Who are you, fuck off. Where are you? I’m at work. What are you doing? Watching my Tupperware in the microwave. What can you see? Sophie reading the Metro, eating a sandwich. Where are you? I’m at work. What are you doing? I’m writing the time onto a clipboard at the end of a bed.

Where to write?

My inbox is where I work, and feel obliged to delete, reply and mark as unread in my never-ending quest to ‘get the number down’. It’s not the place I wish to read deeply, slowly, carefully, and this includes reading newsletters, even beautifully written ones. I still receive Substack and Tinyletters but honestly most of the time I don’t read them, as much as I tell myself I'd like to. Printing the newsletters and reading them on my sofa would be my preference.

Right now I’m going through a period of throwing things at the wall and playing around, prompted by a pretty big mental health wobble at the start of 2023. I’ve been collaging; printing phrases, jokes and ideas from my Canon printer; recording interviews with family; listening to one or two podcasts a day; lots of iPhone notes while walking, learning the vocabulary of arts funding bids; emailing people whose work I admire and asking if they’d like to chat about it; starting to describe my work as ‘my creative practice’ and thinking about how it might exist beyond just writing. Essentially, I’ve started putting my work (and myself) ‘back out there’ again after a good few years of being too scared to. Without being too dramatic the other option seemed to be death. A long, slow, spark-dulling death.

One big question hanging over everything has been where to put this work? Twitter is broken. Email is for work. LinkedIn… (ew). Instagram captions can seem desperate wedged between sponsored adverts for handsome but cheaply made bags designed in Spain (made in China) and that reel of the woman massaging her toddler’s lymph nodes. The work has existed quietly in Google Docs and box files, so I’m hoisting a blog up over my website, a bit like a washing line. I’ll peg the works to air them out, and we’ll go from there. Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind.