The luxury of losing ourselves in the minutiae of life

and finding peace by plodding along the fern lined paths of Ilkley Moor under an expansive Yorkshire sky

No filter, just me and my iPhone capturing the view from Swastika Stone across the treetops of Hebers Ghyll on Friday lunchtime

Hello dear reader, how are you this third Sunday in June?

I’ve struggled a little to know how or where to start with this week’s post. It can feel self-indulgent at the best of times to write and send these words out into the world, even more so when the world feels as scary as it does right now. When you can’t not but also can’t bear to watch the news.

On Friday evening as the clock ticked closer to 10pm my husband or maybe it was me, said, ‘Right, we watching the end of the world on ITV or BBC?’.

It looks so flippant written down.

We’d spent the evening walking around the riverside, eating leftovers sitting in the garden, watching Celebrity Gogglebox while the youngest, so close to the end of GCSEs, was out with friends. We were anticipating the ‘Can you pick me up’ text any second. So, so normal.

We opted for neither channel, turning our back on the headlines, figuring we’d heard enough during the day from all the other places we get our news from these days, and wanting to sleep with calm minds.

Instead I took on the job of persuading Bella, our 14-year-old yellow lab out of her bed into the garden with a stream of, ‘Up you get, you can do it, that’s it, yeah you’re doing it. Up onto the grass’ in a voice reminiscent of the one I’d use with the children when they were recalcitrant toddlers.

Meanwhile my husband got in the car to go and collect the youngest from her friend’s house, once home she filled the kitchen with ‘OMG, uh-mazing garden’ with its patios, tree swings, lawn and all backing onto fields.

One physics, two Spanish and a Food tech paper sit between her and a summer of freedom, and the all-important Prom. Bring on Tuesday lunchtime when this ridiculous GCSE marathon ends, in this house at least.

How easily we slip back into the minutiae of our lives, our backs turned away from the headlines. It feels necessary but inadequate too. Surely there’s more we can do other than watch, sign petitions, send letters and make donations.

It’s strange, this powerless space and maybe because of this powerlessness it feels even more necessary to bury ourselves in the ‘Do we need milk?’ ‘How far do you think the dog will walk today?’. It’s why I appreciated Annie MacManus piece on Gaza this week.

Gaza.

I remind myself that this corner of the writing world is about living gently, finding a path through life especially when life is scary. So this week I’m sharing snapshots from my plodding walks, books and other bits and bobs that remind me, reinforce what I know already, that there is huge good out there in the world too, there’s compassion and kindness aplenty, despite the headlines.

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Ilkley moor is where I started writing when longer dog walks with a then spritely Bella were the order of the day. She’d sniff while I’d stop to take photos and tap words and phrases into my phone with an urgency I haven’t felt for a while.

Walks characterised by a visceral need to get all the words and thoughts out of me post-cancer, still felled by grief and my heart and mind not quite having caught up with this body in recovery now living in Yorkshire after those three years by the sea in Bournemouth.

These days I listen to audio books while I walk. I’ve just finished Roisin O’Donnell’s Nesting which was incredible, so so powerful and now it’s Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin’s Ordinary Saints, I love my Irish writers.

Or I listen to the loud silence of nature.

Poetry Corner, Twelve Apostles, the view from Swastka Stone, my favourite five-bar gate, Middleton Woods & the River Wharfe

Away from the walks I spot a Facebook post from my cousin Eleanor Schofield, Director of Collections at Mary Rose Trust sharing that she’s going to on Radio 4 Life Scientific in August talking about her life as a scientist and her work at Mary Rose.

Proud? Hell yeah.

We try to co-ordinate diaries with the eldest so we can help him move into his new house share in Newcastle but he’s away filming at the Great North Swim at Lake Windermere.

Three days of wetsuit clad folk swimming anything from half a mile to 10km with some not content with ‘just’ swimming and opting for the Swim Run. A swim run differing from a biathlon because competitors swim and run in their wetsuits and trainers, none of this getting changed nonsense.

Humans being brilliant in nature. What a combo.

My wild swimming friend is there to swim too and checks in on the eldest, ‘if you see a ginger curly haired young man with a camera, that’s him’ I message her on Friday afternoon. She replies with photos of the two of them together, beaming smiles, curly redheads both, and it reassures me, these photos and messages.

Back in the garden I notice that a couple of my peonies have finally bloomed, not all, but some. It pains me but I have to admit that my sisters were right, darn it, when I spend an initial five minutes weeding and notice how quickly it makes a difference and so I keep going. The hydrangeas now have space to breathe, the mint pared back. The garden so quick to tip from bare to lush to overgrown.

One good turn, Daphne, Tell me Everything and The Rehearsal. Book purchases from Oxfam & The Grove Bookshop

I add the Women’s Prize winners to my book buying list and spend my Oliver Bonas leaving present on this gorgeous copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca with a Neisha Crossland cover and Elizabeth Strout’s ‘Tell me everything’. I add them to the other two book purchases this week from our local Oxfam Bookshop.

But mostly I thank the lord for my sturdy legs that have carried me to Poetry Corner, Twelve Apostles, Swastika Stone, Middleton Woods (minus the bluebells now but still the scent of wild garlic lingering) and the river this week.

I thank goodness for these enormous Yorkshire skies, the ducklings at the tarn and the never not funny sheep trying to hide in the endless waist high ferns edging the paths on the moor. All this in between sitting at the desk, thinking about and writing newsletters for clients, working on a new fiction story of my own, tidying up my work website. Resisting the urge to scroll, deleting apps from my phone.

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I often think about how boundaried my parents were in their news consumption, but then it is ten years since they died. There was the radio in the background, more likely to be tuned to Radio 3 than 4 though, and a newspaper each day that they’d work through separately, coming together to solve the crossword. During the course of their marriage they worked their way through all the broadsheets and back again. I remember mum’s delight when The Independent launched in 1986, a new newspaper to read. They wanted to read and hear different voices, watching the news on the TV always came with an opinion on the newscaster as much on the news itself.

I also remember mum telling me how in the relatively early days of their marriage she had to ask dad that while she really appreciated the early cup of tea in bed before he left for his office at Smithfield Meat Market in London, he didn’t need to deliver it with the news headlines. Death, destruction and disaster wasn’t how she wanted start the day, and this was back in the early 1960s.

I don’t have any answers to any of this but I know how lucky I am to have this choice, to be able to turn my back, even for a short while, on what’s happening. To ration the headlines. How lucky I am to have the luxury of the minutiae of this life to lose myself in, even if switching off feels uncomfortable.

Thank you as ever for reading,

Harriet

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