Much as I want to get away from categorisations, it does tend to be the men who find the confrontations of this house more challenging than the women. Excepting being if you’ve grown up here, I suppose, it being deeply in your bones. But it is the men who, on meeting themselves, dig in, become stubborn, project and squirm and find any which way out that doesn’t involve stillness and subservience to the lessons being delivered. A disquiet, a something troubling is blamed on an outside source. A rumbling message coming down the tracks is diverted into argument. I have seen it summer after summer. Some never come back.

I wonder if it’s the fixedness of the cultural conditioning, the allowance to be right and refusal to be wrong, the absolute alien nature of not knowing or whether it is purely biological in that women learn to live with discomfort month by month, are taught to not panic when their bodies take over the reins. Even the close call of that is still a something outside of us as in our physical presence is one step out from ourselves. We learn to submit, culturally and materially and though the entirety of the former is a problem, the latter is useful. This house awakens our shadows. Year on year women put their heads in the mouth of the demon while men revolt and find fault with anyone but themselves. There is a humility required to be here. Digging in never goes well.

But I don’t want to gender it. I am against gender full stop. It has served its purpose and let’s move on. It is a polarisation we don’t need. So let’s instead call it a fixedness of nature as opposed to an agility. A stubbornness that requires relenting. A wide open vista that only needs stepping into. Summer after summer Les Aumarets sits quietly while her contents meet themselves. She is my reset. My inside out.

Andy and I got up earlyish for an adventure on the bike over the mountains on an unusually overcast day, rain and low dark cloud, the beach when we reached it almost empty but for a family of many small children, parents grateful for the shade. As we put-putted on the Enfield up the dirt track we could have been in India surrounded by jungle, so deep and untrodden, such sheer crowded drops into the belly of tangled trees. There will be hares here (here hare here) and wolves. There will be wild boars. The day feels silent as the contents of this house settle into submission. I can feel a knocking. I am watching. There is confrontation rumbling down the tracks.

Eleanor

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