Category: Adventure

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Pandemic Pause (Part 1)

When I started my new job in the café, I was so grateful to have work, let alone a job that didn’t come home with me like law did, I didn’t even think of having to set boundaries. I was so sure that, from now on, my writing career was my absolute priority, but I hadn’t worked out yet how to defend that priority from the demands of the work that paid my salary.

The thing with café work is that it attracts teenagers looking for their first job, students looking to fill a gap year or a summer holiday, people who can spare a couple of days a week and just need to make some money. So, if you’re willing to work full time and you look like you’re here to stay, you rise fast.

Within a month, I had a promotion, a pay-rise and a strong and enjoyable place within the team. After three months, I had the prospect of becoming assistant manager to the manager I really liked, and a steady 40-45 hour working week that ate up all my time and energy. At best, I spent one day a week writing and, at worst, I didn’t write at all. Progress on my novel was slow and stuttering and I felt a constant sense of guilt for not prioritising it like I said I would and a growing imposter syndrome for having claimed my identity as a writer and then, almost immediately, almost entirely, stopping writing.

In my previous jobs I had worked through every lunchbreak, I’d worked overtime without pay, I’d worked nights and weekends for so long that I didn’t actually know how to stop. I couldn’t even feel the boundaries being crossed anymore so how was I supposed to defend them?

At the café, we would be short-staffed and my manager would ask if I could possibly work 6 days that week? Just as a one off? Yes, ok, I guess, it’s only one week. Then, on my one day off, someone would call in sick and no-one else could cover the shift. Well, ok then, I don’t want the team to struggle.

We stopped getting paid fifteen minutes after the café closed but that wasn’t nearly enough time to clean so, as the shift leader, I’d always end up sending the more junior staff members home when the pay stopped and I would stay late (and unpaid) to make sure the shop would be ready for whoever opened up the next morning (which might well be me). Bleary-eyed, I’d be behind the bar and ready to serve at 6.30am having only locked up the night before at 7.30pm. Days blurred into weeks and weeks into months and I would realise I hadn’t even opened my laptop. The demands of work were right out of control and I had no idea how to stop them.

Why had I left law again? So my job didn’t take over my life right? So I could prioritise writing right? Wasn’t that it? But when had I last written anything?

Eventually, I spoke to my manager and asked if I could go down to a four-day working week. She winced but I knew she would find a way of making it work if I insisted. This was important. I wouldn’t ask if this wasn’t important. But I also knew how much she struggled with the rotas each week. I compromised: “I’ll work all the long shifts – I’ll still do a 35 hour week, just condensed within four days.” But I knew I hadn’t timed this well, an experienced team member had just left and her replacement hadn’t even started yet, I hedged: “It doesn’t have to be right away. After the new person starts, after she’s been fully trained.” And so even my big, bold attempt at setting boundaries crumbled away. When the new person had settled in, someone else left and we were short-staffed again. OK, I thought, I’ll cut my hours when their replacement has been trained. But then someone else would leave and the cycle would go on.

Seven months passed and I felt as settled into the situation as if I had been doing it for years. Seven months and I was used to my 40-45 hour week on my feet. Seven months and I was depended on by the team. Seven months and my writing had ground to a halt.

I kept thinking I needed to get myself together, I needed to make a change that would mean I was writing regularly again but, then I’d think, a real writer wouldn’t be in this situation. A real writer would always make time to fit writing in every day, a real writer would always have the energy for it, a real writer wouldn’t sleep in on their one day off but would be up at dawn and tapping away on the keyboard. A real writer would bash out 500 words while her uniform went through the spin cycle. A real writer would say no to meeting her friend for a coffee, or walking with her sister, because she had to focus on the next chapter of her book. If I wasn’t able to do these things, maybe I just wasn’t a real writer.

But then something wildly unpredictable happened.

The pandemic hit.

I was in Germany when northern Italy went into lockdown. It was weird. A little bit scary. But mostly, a problem abroad right? I’d heard a bit about this virus in China but viruses happen all over the world all the time. It was curious it had spread to Italy, but nothing to worry about.

In the UK we have this islander’s viewpoint with no real sense of connection to any of our neighbours. So, when Italy went into lockdown, the Germans I was spending time with were talking of neighbours who had family there, friends who holidayed there, family who worked there but, to me, it all felt like a very distant curiosity. Things that happen in Europe don’t cross the English Channel. Fact.

The next day I happily hopped onto a train in Munich and travelled to Frankfurt, then Brussels, then London, then Gatwick, then home. There were moments when someone coughed and everyone looked at them suspiciously, but it was nothing serious, nothing to really worry about.

The next week two friends of mine had their civil partnership ceremony and I celebrated my 31st birthday. I was out for meals and drinks and then, suddenly, the virus had crossed the border. (Brought over by lackadaisical travellers like me, sorry!)

Pubs and restaurants closed, ceremonies were off, everyone seemed to be working from home or being furloughed (had anyone else in the UK ever even heard that word before!?) but cafés were still going. The government hadn’t specifically said they had to close. They said selling food was an essential service and there was to be no sitting in. So, Head Office gave a thumbs up, we sell toasties, we can do take-away only, we’re staying open!

Everyone was pretty scared, but it was only going to get scarier.

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While the Light Lasts

I was sitting cross-legged on the sleeping bag on my air bed, my spaniel snoozing fitfully beside me. Neither of us had slept well for days. The air bed was too squashy, the forest floor beneath it too sloped, the woods around us filled with unfamiliar night-time noises so, if I slept through them, Daisy woke me in her uncertainty. And, to top it all off, it had rained for three days. Everything was damp. Damp and muddy.

So, that afternoon, while the warmth of the day crept into our forest home, she slept and I listened to the drips from the branches above onto canvas and tried to check my emails on my phone.

There was beauty here. Deep green light filtered through the tree canopy and made the earthy pine needle scent rise off the spongey forest floor. And, last night, there had been a lull in the constant rainfall. Enough of a lull to light the carefully protected firewood and sit by the flames and let the night fall around my shoulders.

And, the day before, I had taken a pilgrimage to the home of one of my heroes: Agatha Christie. A talented, insanely prolific writer who also lived the fullest life. If you doubt what I’m saying here, look it up, she did everything and wrote hundreds of books too.

I took a boat down the river to her boathouse. To the green slope up to her home. To its creamy yellow walls and valley view. And, afterwards, when my clothes were hanging off me with rain, and Daisy’s fur had become slick to her skin, a café in the nearby town welcomed us both and gave Daisy treats and let us sit and steam until we’d dried and one of the staff even leant me his phone charger so I could re-awaken my dead mobile.

So, you see, there was beauty and memories and inspiration and companionship and generosity and kindness. Just as in the last six months of my life there had been beauty and encouragement and inspiration and adventure. But I was struggling too.

After taking six months out of work to pursue writing, my life would never be the same again. I would never be the same again. But, here I was at the end of that time and I had a book, and hope, and new courage and a collection of amazing, terrifying experiences, and a gaping overdraft and no savings left and no job.

Because that’s the truth of it sometimes. You can pursue your dreams, you can give your time to what you love, but you still need to make money, you still need to support yourself, and you still need to go outside even when it’s raining.

So, I sit on my lumpy sleeping bag beside my tired dog under damp canvas and I summon all the data I can to check my emails because, before I came here, I saw a sign in a shop window: staff wanted. Before I came here, I put together a CV and sent it over.

And then it comes through. Can I come in for an interview?

Because, although it’s not the dream to work for a chain of coffee shops in your thirties while living with your parents (it’s really, really not) sometimes you need to go out in the rain to do what you love.

P.S “While the Light Lasts” is a short story by Agatha Christie and, I think, one of the best things she wrote. Read it if you can.

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The Black Forest Adventure

So far, this blog has been about doing big scary things. I have abandoned my law career for six months of voluntary unemployment in order to actively pursuing my writing career. But, doing the big scary things made me wonder about the small ones too. I suddenly started thinking of all those things I had said I’d like to do, or to try, and chickened out, or made excuses about why I couldn’t do them even though I’d like to. I started exploring the option of actually just doing them. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? I signed up for evening classes, I took up running and ran a 10km mud run and I began to dream of even more challenging adventures. I had always wanted to travel but, growing up in a family where our annual holiday was always under canvas and always within the UK, it seemed a daunting prospect; too daunting until now.

In May, I booked a seat on a cheap flight and set off, alone, for the first time. I wasn’t brave enough to go totally solo yet so I met my sister in Germany and, together, we disappeared into the woods for a two day hike. 28 miles over the first, third and fourth highest peaks in the Black Forest.

The closest I had ever come to this was a three day hike with my Dad on the South Downs when I was in primary school and my sister had never even come that close. Between us we had two broken pairs of boots, one borrowed map, one cheap rucksack, and one no-longer-waterproof raincoat (my sister bought one on sale the morning we set off so we eventually had one each).

We knew we wanted to mostly stick to the WestWeg path and we had made a booking at a guest house on top of the Stübenwasen for that night and that was the sum total of our knowledge setting out.

So, inexperienced and ill-equipped, bellies full of creamy, cheesey käsespätzle, we set off, climbing up the slopes through the pines.

The first day, we had to cover 16 miles and climb the highest peak: Feldberg. Our trail wound past chocolatey-red squirrels and flat stones piled up in precarious stacks and lonely houses with the chalk markings of Epiphany scrawled above their doors. We walked fast because we had no idea how long the walk would take us and, the further we walked, the more dangerous nightfall in the forest felt.

Eventually we made it to Feldsee; a circular, glacial lake like a thumbprint pressed into the side of the mountain. On almost all sides the crystal water reflects layers of pines towering over it up the dazzlingly steep sides of the Feldberg. And, above the trees, rises the pointed, snowy peak of the mountain itself. Everything we had seen so far had been beautiful but it was worth the march through it to get to this point. It is everything you hope to discover on a Black Forest adventure.

After lingering in the lustre of Feldsee for a while, we curved around the shore of the lake and into the forest once more, zigzagging up the side of the mountain. Trees had fallen across the way and rockfalls had made the route invisible in some places but we scrambled our narrow path up, trying to ignore the perpetual drop beside us down to the milky-blue water below.

At last, we came out into the snowy open and, weary now, approached the wooden veranda of the café on the way to the Feldberg’s summit. It was closed. Windows shuttered and door locked. We flopped down onto one of the wooden benches outside and anxiously stretched out the map to check our route.

There was a young man nearby chain-smoking and building a handrail out of thin silver birch trunks with their silvery skins still intact. After a moment he approached and asked if we would like something to eat. We said we would, but the café was closed. He held up a key and smiled, “what would you like?”

We sat with chips and hot chocolates and slices of apfelkuchen wrapped up for the journey and the sun came out from behind the clouds and gleamed off the snow and warmed our arms and faces. It was a glorious moment but we could see the sun was getting lower in the sky and we still had miles to go.

We now walked at the highest point of the forest and the views were stunning. We crunched through snow along the top of the world, looking across the valleys gilded with the light of golden hour and counting seven layers of blue mountains in the distance. The wonder of what we had seen so far filled us and we still had more to see: a golden statue of Jesus on the cross rising from the mountain-top, a capercaillie performing to his would-be mate at the edge of the tree-line and the sound of his cane-dropping call. Then, eventually, we rounded a corner and saw the welcoming wooden face of our guest house.

Not a moment too soon either. By the time we had deposited our rucksack in our room beneath the eaves and settled at the table in the bar with cups of hot black tea, night had fallen over the mountain and rain began to beat the earth outside and the roof above.

We fell asleep that night with the rain as our soundtrack, content with hot showers and clean sheets and tired legs.

The next morning, we enjoyed a classic German breakfast: boiled eggs, an array of bread rolls, cheese and cream cheese and jams and Nutella and apple puree and muesli. I love the simplicity and the variety in a German breakfast buffet and, for me, breakfast is an elastic feast – best stretched out for as long as possible. But, there was more of the world to see, so we packed our one bag and set off again.

It had rained all night and streams ran down the mountains and cut across our path. The mountains sat in cloud and, all day, we walked with only the ghosts of trees and the soft drips through leaves onto the scented pine needle floor for company.

It became eery. In some places, the pristine trees gave way to the venting ground for angry giants; trees split half way up, bark shreds hanging down like streamers, some fallen into others and some hanging two or three feet from the ground.

At one point were curving up a mountain on a logging track, a rockface rising up to our left and a severe drop through the trees on our right. Suddenly, a roaring sound like the wind rushed upon us from behind. We turned and the dazzling headlights of a logging truck burst through the mist as it tore, full speed towards us. We flattened ourselves against the rockface just in time and it blazed on up the track and out of sight, unaware we were ever there.

Our isolation continued all day. Even the café we planned to stop at for lunch was closed and, when we detoured a kilometre off the trail to another one we came up against more bolted doors and shuttered windows. We sat, a little demoralised, on a small bench and ate the heart-shaped shortbread biscuits we had in our rucksack instead.

Going on through the mist we sang songs to distract us from the ache in our feet and in our stomachs and dreamed of the strudel and the cable car that awaited us at the top of the Belchen – our final mountain to climb. And, as it turned out, our steepest climb yet.

The path criss-crossed tightly all the way up. Fallen trees and huge root networks, as well as the swollen streams and waterfalls that had developed overnight, meant we had to scramble our way up using our hands now as well as our feet.

Eventually, the path stopped rising and, instead, curved round what seemed to be a plateau.

“Are we at the top?” My sister asked but I didn’t know. Visibility had been limited to no more than two metres all day and I couldn’t tell if we were even on the right mountain, let alone at the top. We moved along the trail, the white blankness of our surroundings unnerving now we couldn’t even discern the trunks of trees or hear any streams crossing our path or trickling beside us. We were two lone explorers and we didn’t even know what we were exploring. It started to press in on us that we hadn’t seen a single other human being all day. (Unless you count the one driving the truck that nearly ran us down but neither of us really saw them.)

Suddenly, out of the wet white air, loomed a huge man-made structure: a smooth curved metal zephyr-thing hanging still, and silent, in the space in front of us. It was like coming across an abandoned building on an alien planet. The cable cars. And they weren’t running. The restaurant we found behind them also had its lights out and door locked.

Still, at least we knew we had made it to the right place. We had reached our final summit.

Now, we just had no choice but to walk down the other side.

As we walked it began to rain hard. We were both tired now. It had been an adventure for sure but, when we finally reached a road at the bottom of the mountain, we stopped the first bus that came and got gratefully aboard without even knowing where it was going.

We sank into the bus seats and looked through steamy windows at the views we had been walking over all day on our path in the clouds. They were beautiful. Wide valleys of sweeping grass slopes, white-walled buildings with pointed red-tiled roofs, sandy brown cows with doleful eyes and bells around their necks.

The bus reached a train station and we stumbled on seizing legs onto the platform and the first train we saw. We meandered our way home on three more trains and, eventually, supermarket pizzas in hand, walked the last road to our base camp.

We had done it. We had pushed ourselves physically and emotionally further than we imagined we could go and it had worked. My feet hurt, my brain hurt, my back hurt and my stomach clawed at itself in hunger but, honestly, I couldn’t stop grinning. Even at the top of the Belchen facing disappointment and isolation and uncertainty I couldn’t help but feel elated.

If I could rise to this challenge as ill-equipped and inexperienced as I was, maybe I could do anything.

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The Writing Experiment (Part 2/3)

I took six months out of work to focus on my writing career and I thought it would change my writing forever. Mostly though, it changed me. I kept a diary throughout the six month experiment and I’ve compiled the highlights (and lowlights) so you can see how it all panned out.

30th March (Day 1)

Today I wrote a list. A list of things I was 100% certain I wanted. That’s 100% certain. No room for doubt or outside influence or expectation. (Try it, it’s surprisingly hard.)

My list had two entries:

  1. I want to live with my dog.
  2. I want to write.

April

I had absolutely no routine this month. I went to bed at 1 or 2 in the morning, slept late into the day, wrote sporadically and, overall, had a prevalent sense of failure and anxiety. I started this experiment desperate to escape from the life that was making me miserable but it seemed the misery was still in me and the need for escape was still very much running through my veins.

May

Something had to change to make my take this more seriously. I started actively nurturing my creative side: joined two new writing groups, spent a whole day at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre watching the history plays and I began to explore poetry – a previously highly neglected form of creativity for me.

My writing became more routine. I began to average 1,000 words a day.

I sated my need for escape by planning an adventure: my biggest yet. My first flight on my own, followed by a two-day hike through the Black Forest. I will write a post about that adventure soon. It was utterly terrifying, intensely hard and absolutely amazing.

In the airport before my flight I wrote:

“I feel full like I’m truly satisfied. I feel pregnant with possibilities. I feel open; acutely observant and expansive. For the first time in years: years and years, I feel wild.”

June

Something about risk-taking had got me hooked and I spent a lot of time riding my motorbike this month – a relatively new and frightening activity!

One afternoon I rode to my sister’s house and the journey shook me up so much, I almost chickened out and asked for a lift home. I left her house when it was dark. I put on my gear and started my bike and set off into the night. As I pulled out of her drive, there was a rumble of thunder. Within minutes I was riding through the most dramatic lightning storm I’ve ever seen.

Jagged forks of light struck the ground and strange spirals and circles of lightning popped into the darkness above me. But, somehow, riding through the lightning, I reached the eye of the storm of my own fear. The situation had become so intense I no longer felt afraid. I rode through the darkness and light, hearing the crackle of raindrops on my visor as if they couldn’t touch me, feeling completely calm. I was filled, instead, with wonder at how amazing and beautiful it all was.

I felt a powerful desire to capture it: all of the madness and beauty and my writing began to reflect this new approach to fear and beauty and freedom.

This month changed me: I never wanted to go back to life how it had been before this. Not now I knew how it felt to live life in pursuit of what I truly loved.

July

This was perhaps the hardest month I have ever experienced. It came right out of nowhere and blind-sided me. I felt intense anxiety and extreme vulnerability. I kept writing, just the same, but I had never felt more inadequate. I was 30 years old, single, unemployed, living with my parents, and had no linear plan for any aspect of my life. What’s more, my adventuring had rinsed through my savings faster than I had anticipated and I was now officially in my overdraft.

One afternoon I found myself riding to the small white chapel on a hill – the place a lot of my family are buried. It was a blistering day, well above thirty degrees, and the crickets sang loud in the long sand-coloured grass as I climbed the hill.

I sat on a bench in the tree-shade and looked at the grave of my grandfather: he spent his whole life running a farm and his family of 10 and preaching at the local church – giving his time to what mattered to him. And, a few stones down, my great aunt, who ran a health-food shop before that was even a thing, and got into politics so she could give the voiceless a voice, and poured all her energy into charity and helping anyone she saw being overlooked. I had never felt so low and so worthless.

But, when I picked myself up off that bench, walked back down the hill and rode the winding back-lanes home, I had somehow come to know deep in the core of myself that, no matter how low I felt, I could and would finish this novel.

That sense of capability in my writing, that determination, is something I had never felt certain of before.

And that sense of determination meant that, when my sister wanted to come home from Germany at the end of the month, I drove out to get her. A road-trip that marked the end of my engine stalling, and the start of moving forward no matter what.

August

One morning I rolled out of bed, groggy as hell, threw on some not-that-clean-actually clothes and wandered out to walk my dog in the park. I walked around like a shell of a woman and thought about how sorry for myself I felt. And then it happened: a strange sense of bubbling emotion deep down in the pit of my stomach, building up and up until it covered my chest and rose to my throat making me want to laugh.

Somehow, I had reached an emotional rock bottom and I felt an undeniable, effervescent joy at everything life had to offer. Now I knew I was on the right path. I knew it with the same physicality and certainty that I knew my feet were on the ground.

But, my time on this writing experiment was nearly up. Next month was judgement time: would the agents tell me I had spent my time well, or would they laugh me out of the room and tell me to go back to lawyering?