Misty-headed

I don’t know if I can still write. Writing requires at least a modicum of free headspace, small pockets of time that can be carved out of busy schedules. To create something new necessitates thinking and reflecting and pondering and appreciating, all of which have felt about as futile as wobbly jelly, carried in my bare hands. I am misty-headed.

I intended to start a book this year, but I only got a short way in before Life - in the form of parenting, a new full-time job, a home renovation, a house-guest who stayed seven months, and an unexpected and forced move out of home that lasted six months - declared it had other plans. I haven’t given it up though. It’s a book I began thinking about during Lockdown, because Lockdown was when my husband and I turned into our parents.

We entered the Covid Years reading intellectual, philosophical, literary fiction and political biographies, and entertaining ourselves in the downtime with over-the-top, fantastical television like Game of Thrones, Vikings, and The Last Kingdom. We emerged on the other side of Lockdown reading stories about old women in department stores and tea-rooms, and biographies of gardeners, and having watched our way through the entire back catalogues of Antiques Roadshow and Father Brown.

No longer did I want to write anything challenging, anything troubling, or anything world-changing. After Covid, all I wanted to write were stories that inspired gentle happiness.

So I began plotting out a cosy mystery about the loveable members of a guerrilla-gardening club in a historic part of Melbourne, who may or may not be hiding nefarious secrets, which would be uncovered by the hapless new owners of one of the centuries-old houses in the neighbourhood. If you can imagine a story that combines historic-home renovation with quirky characters, beautiful Melbourne, a community garden, and a mystery or two to be solved, then that’s the book I’m writing. But I’m only short way in, because, Life.

We are in Bath. We arrived yesterday, and already I am, predictably, in love. There are three dove-grey Persephone books on the kitchen table of our Air BnB, I have blisters on my toes from walking 20 kilometres through town and up around the Bath Skyline, and the children are playing a game they created called “Regency Bingo,” counting the number of people we can spot who are dressed up a la Jane Austen (the current tally is 24).

I want to tell you all about it, but it seems I have forgotten how to write. You don’t want to hear me say “We went there,” and “We did this,” I’m sure. I have forgotten how to tell you the deeper stories underneath the places, the small moments that mean something, the funny anecdotes, the connections we make, and the ways that travel has changed us.

Those things are still happening on the inside, but I don’t know how to write them any more. My words are wobbly and rusty, like an old man who discovers a cobwebby bicycle behind the shed and decides to ride it six blocks to the milk bar, after decades of only walking.

Give me time. I will keep peddling.

And in the meantime, let’s take a stroll around Bath.

(The photograph above is of a “dream house” we came upon after emerging from a remote field. You may have to zoom in to see it. When I win the lottery you may find me here, writing and painting.)