You're not half bad...

Greetings from the sofa in my kitchen this mid-September Friday afternoon. It’s been a chilly day softened by the welcome appearance of clear blue sky and the all-important sun.

The sofa in the kitchen where I keep an eye on all the comings and goings. The same sofa that sat in my cousins house down the road when I was growing up.

(If this has landed in your inbox, hit ‘View in browser’ for the full experience!)

Dear Charlie,

As much as you confuse me with talk about basketball and ‘getting it in the hoop’ or something like that, you’re not 50% bad.
Love from Olly

I couldn’t remember why I kept these birthday cards until I read the messages inside. My sons’ birthdays are two days apart, Olly first, Charlie second and it’s one of those daft things that gives me a huge amount of joy. I love seeing their friendship develop, independently of me and their dad, and I hope it’s the same with their wider family of cousins, uncles and aunts too.

To Olly,

As much as you confuse me with talk about 3D printers and sciency stuff, you’re not half bad. Love from Charlie

Victoria Arcade, the birthday cards and Corn Exchange in Leeds

I stumbled across the cards yesterday morning as I was rifling through some postcards and greetings cards looking for one to give my cousin who I was meeting in Leeds for an afternoon of chatting and mooching.

This is one of the cousins who grew up with the sofa I’m now sitting on in her living room just a few miles down the road from where I live now. Her home now though is on the south coast an hour’s drive away from where I used to live in Bournemouth. And her parents and one of her sisters live in Buckinghamshire towns along the road from another Buckinghamshire town where I went to school as a teenager.

It’s topsy turvy (and well done if you followed any of the above. I think I even confused myself).

This cousin is one in an army of siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts and godparents that makes up my family web. I guess it means that I’ve always had this feeling of never entirely being alone, a feeling I’ve wanted to pass on to my children.

Even when I’ve felt at my lowest, most isolated, grieving, being diagnosed with cancer, whatever it’s been, I’ve always known that should I want to, there was someone I could call or text.

Someone who’d get it in a way that maybe a friend wouldn’t. Our conversations come with additional layer of, not just our own shared history, but the shared history from our parents, our grandparents. A history and photographic evidence that knits us together, sometimes tightly but also with a fair amount of give too.

There are a number of family WhatsApp groups. Heck there’s even one with four of us cousins that we use to alert each other whenever one of us hears S Club 7’s Reach or Wilson Phillips ‘Hold On’ on the radio. It lies dormant for months on end but will suddenly ping into action and flash with emojis and memes or a single word ‘Banger’. You’re all crackers as their mum would say. Absolutely but boy does it make me smile.

I guess I’ve always known I’m lucky to have this ready-made web of friends dotted around the country, but it doesn’t do any harm to remind myself of that. And that’s what I felt wandering around Leeds yesterday.

Frequent visits to my cousin’s family home for Christmas and summer holidays as a child also meant that I grew up associating this corner of Yorkshire with home and family. The heather covered moorland and ferns. The rocks and paths to scramble up. So different from where we lived in the home counties of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

It’s why relocating here made sense seven years ago when Andy was made redundant and found a job here. It made sense even though none of that branch of the family live here anymore and we’d only uprooted the children three years earlier when we swapped Bath for Bournemouth.

I said at the time that if the job had been anywhere else in the country I’d have stayed put with the children by the sea. Uprooting the children again was a tough decision, but coming here softened the change a little.

Cow and Calf rocks in the 1970s and again this year and the wall in my office with the Mary Oliver quote on the right

We don’t live in a Yorkshire stone terrace like I’d dreamed of growing up, but when I see photos of me and my siblings as young children swaddled in anoraks perched with mum in the shadow of the Cow and Calf rocks, the same Cow and Calf rocks that I see from my daughter’s bedroom window, I feel myself rooted into this landscape in a way that I don’t think I did in Bournemouth no matter how much I love the sea.  

I loved listening to my cousin talk about her teenage hangouts in Leeds yesterday just as I loved walking through Ilkley with her mum a few months ago as she pointed out the estate agents and the dress shop where she used to work, or when my uncle talks about dog walks on the Otley Chevin. I love that there’s something bigger than me connecting me to this place, something that goes beyond simply having chalked up seven years living here.

This theme of family, home, belonging and the landscape we live in has featured heavily in the memoir writing these past few weeks and I loved chatting with my cousin about how different it feels living by the sea versus living by the moor. Yorkshire stone was mentioned a few times. More for me to noodle in the coming week and it’ll be interesting to see what comes out in the writing.

What else has caught my eye this week?

Happy Birthday Mary Oliver

It would have been poet Mary Oliver’s birthday on Monday. It was only after I framed her classic quote, ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life’ and put it on the wall behind my writing desk next to a photo of mum and some of her artwork that I realised one of the readings at mum’s funeral was Oliver’s ‘In Blackwater Woods’. I’d love to say that Oliver’s words pierced my consciousness on the day we buried mum, but I’m not sure they did, I’m not sure much did. Maybe they did what they always do though and simply glided over me, soothing me with their gentle touch. Reading In Blackwater Woods again today in the order of service, I give them space to work their magic again.

I keep Mary Oliver’s A thousand mornings by my bed and have the corners turned down on a few pages. I also love the Mary Oliver Instagram feed where they share recordings of her reading her poetry, like this reading of When I am among the trees.

Three things to remember from Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings

As long as you’re dancing, you can

         break the rules.

Sometimes breaking the rules is just

         extending the rules.

Sometimes there are no rules.

---

This writing, it’s getting easier you know

Talking of rules, I’m finding that it’s getting easier to write this each week and that grasping onto thoughts of what I should write are dissolving in favour of simply writing what’s popped into my head.

I can feel my grip on the writing loosening and that can only be a good thing. I’ve also started jotting down thoughts into my phone as the week unfolds not knowing which one will evolve into a post I can send out. It’s a sort of diary and it’s proving interesting at the end of the week to see that what occupied my mind on a wet Monday afternoon has completely disappeared by the time we get to this point in the week.

This really has felt a little rushed today, half thoughts tapped and typed out onto the screen so I’d be interested to see what you pick up on and if anything resonates. I know I’m lucky and that not everyone has these happy, solid family connections but maybe you’ve found a way to create connections like this in other ways?

Thank you as ever for reading and wishing you a happy weekend, Harriet