Visiting my alternative-timeline life

I spent a lot of March with my parents in Yorkshire, where there was snow and ice and the trees had no leaves and all the buildings and roads were made of stone. My dad was born in Yorkshire but unlike generations of ancestors before him, he left. All those generations must have added up to something though, I thought: while we went for all sorts of reasons, one of them was me wondering if there’s a place on earth that feels like home and if that place is Yorkshire.

It isn’t; or, at least, it isn’t Yorkshire struggling towards spring and me preoccupied by the daily tasks of travelling and not really paying it proper attention or spending more than ten minutes at a time feeling myself alive, now, here in this place.

I did for a bit here though,

and thought that if I walked up into those woods I might find out some things about myself. I never walked up into those woods.

There were a few things I hoped to do while in Yorkshire. I wanted to walk through or over a stile (achieved), eat an eccles cake (yes, but it wasn’t as good as the ones they make at Pigeon Hole in Hobart), and see a stoat or at least a fox (no). I was sad how few animals I saw in Yorkshire. But never mind, because in Paris I made this friend.

I’m going to spend the next little while thinking about nature in England and about my failure to ever have a sense of place and also how much I like to just meet an animal, everywhere I go. And then I’ll write something about it that’s a lot more coherent than this.

Reading

I bought Birnam Wood because all the publicity said it was about climate change preppers. It’s really not, but it is very good, almost all of it. If you’ve ever tried to make your characters argue with one another about the things you argue about with yourself in your head, you’ll be very impressed (I was) at how well Eleanor Catton pulls this off. It made me think I should take ten years to write my next novel and maybe I could do as good a job of dialogue, character and plotting as she did (but probably not).

Also, this interview from Impact about anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation in Uganda. Read it.

Sewing

For about a year I’ve been sewing my own clothes. Sometimes I think about adding photos of them to instagram, but the prospect of taking those photos is so exhausting that I never get around to it. How do you even take a photo of yourself, but far away? Probably I should google this. Anyway, when I was in Hebden Bridge my aunt convinced me to buy a lovely length of locally woven woolen cloth and I’m going to make some pants and a matching waistcoat, but first I’m testing out whether I can actually make pants by sewing Merchant & Mills’ Eve trousers, using some soft brown corduroy from The Drapery. Did you know that Hebden Bridge was once famous for its corduroy, along with all the other fabrics that make up that now-little-mentioned fabric classification, fustian?

Hebden Bridge’s ‘Fustian Knife’ public art.