So he’s been arrested. I might have been the last person in the UK to hear this, my day being spent well away from ticker-tape streaming breaking news and anything resembling The State of Things bar the small and flighty references made by me and P as we walked in the woods, marvelling at moss.

I’ll start at the beginning.

It’s reading week and the farm has been peopled by a herd of Yoot, friends of B arriving by train and bus and car. In the run up I did a lot of shopping, three goes at the supermarket knowing I couldn’t carry it all at once. The freezer groaning, the fridge lit up, the larder toppling, my waking brain full of casseroles and soups. Were there vegetarians? Who doesn’t drink milk? None of this in my day business; I remember my mother catering for a summer house array of celiacs and Hep C’s, vegans and dyed in the wool carnivores with a deadly night shade avoidant thrown in and her outrage on hearing that someone else didn’t eat flour. Nut allergies hadn’t made their way into the 70’s and thankfully, and they didn’t this week either, just a quiet preference for tofu, and another retreating from dairy. These we can handle.

They’re messy and bright and young and grown up and at the beginning and also already begun. They eat a lot. They’re loving with each other. They get up late and go to bed when I am nearly at my full night’s sleep. I hear them larking about in my dreams. They study together, laptops open on their knees in the sitting room, the stress of an assignment due today put M on the floor with a blanket over her head. Broth was required and a gentle closing of the blue light. They work hard and take it seriously.

I find myself drifting quietly about among them, loading and unloading the dishwasher, putting lids on things and wiping surfaces, thinking about supper. Slowly, like animals peeking out, they’ve each found me in the kitchen for conversations that matter to them. I think of the horse whisperer and Robert Redford in the long grass. I listen and don’t say much. They are each flighty, in their own way. Aren’t we all.

Amongst this I’ve been to London for the launch of Catherine: a retelling of Wuthering Heights by my friend Essie Fox: TALKING THE GOTHIC , held at Goldsboro Books, which was fun in all the right places, and included an early drink with AW (one of my favourite ways to spend an hour) and a chance reconnect with Louise Fein whose latest Book of Forbidden Words will be out next week. We hadn’t seen each other since our debut days. Both Essie and Louise will be guests on Substack LIVE, keep your eyes out 👀 for schedule and links….

I was hosted by Lindsey Trout Hughes and the London Writers' Salon on Substack LIVE on Tuesday night - have I fully expressed the joy of talking to a curious and brilliant mind who’s read FALLOUT and loved it? Perhaps I haven’t. Perhaps the happiness is impossible to relate. This, when Lindsey holds up my book and is smiling and hugging it like a treasure of love, this is what it’s all about. For the work to be got, the intention understood, the words to land and the whole to be embraced with that objective joy that is nothing to do with glorifying the writer and everything to do with loving the living breath of a work of literature, this I can let land in me, too. This is how I feel about books I love. I stroke their covers like the neck of a horse come to stand beside me. I glory in them. (Thank you Lindsey.)

London Writers' Salon are running weekly prompts for free subscribers, and a competition for paying subscribers. I’m delighted to be this month’s guest judge on the theme of The Fence. Details on their Substack.

While riding J rang to say he’d got into UAL!!! 👏👏👏 and I couldn’t be more proud of that boy who is taking life by the lapels and saying, Come on then. Who is turning up. Who is being bold in the face of risk.

I finished a draft of the new piece of work I’ve been playing with for a year, and sent it off to AW before I changed my mind. It’s short. 32,000 words. A small book that asks one, very big question. I love it, as I should, and am enamoured by its clear intent to not be any bigger. I am a novella, it says to me again and again. Okay. I hear you.

P swung by to pick up her copy of Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón and we talked about the rarified air of poets and how lichen is part fungi part plant and how moss makes us want to be little people and headed off into the woods to prove it.

Chat with AS & SLB yesterday - they’re at Les A, such a joy to see them, the house, them in the house, know that most holy of places is being filled with brilliant life. We are making plans….

Last night was supper made from leftovers and Yoot overwhelm floor-lying with blanket over head, and life-giving broth to bring her round. I am just as vulnerable to this blowing up of things that on my deathbed I will not remember. I think this as waves of urgency and panic hit me in the run up to pub day. It matters hugely to me and simultaneously, in the vast and rolling scheme, it doesn’t matter at all. And then I went to bed, leaving them all too it, hearing laughter replace stress, and opened iPlayer with thoughts of a comforting half hour on the bobsleigh or curling or with Clare Balding’s hair and what should great me but Breaking News and an inch by inch description of the days events on repeat and That Photograph of him in the back of his car attempting to lie flat or is it hide or is it so knocked over by entering a police station that hadn’t been newly painted he couldn’t work out what the smell was until he discovered it was him.

I’m no royalist, but god love Charles’ statement. And I’m no believer in the state, but holy smoke this looks remarkably like holding to account. Not a single Yoot mentioned it all day so I wonder if they don’t look or maybe they don’t care and perhaps both of these are signals for a bright and burning future.

Welcome to the year of the Fire Horse.

Eleanor

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