Month: July 2021

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5 Things My Dog Taught Me

We were at the park, and she was quite young, and everything there was more exciting than me. I called to her and she ignored me. The rabbit scent trails, the dropped food-scraps, the squirrels, the lost balls, the other park users, they were much too interesting to leave behind. I was having a bad week and I was tired and I had places to be and the last thing I needed was a stroppy dog wanting five more minutes’ play time when it was time to go home. I called her again and again and still, she didn’t come. Eventually, I found myself standing in the middle of a public space yelling at an animal until my throat hurt. (Who was the embarrassing one in this pairing anyway?)

After a while, I was too tired to shout anymore. I sat on a bench and put my head in my hands. “Come on, please be reasonable.” I moaned, “If you could just stop doing this and come here, I can stop shouting at you and we can enjoy the rest of our walk home.” (She has a very advanced vocabulary). I looked up and there she was, sitting on the grass in front of me, and it hit me.

Everything is better when you speak with love and compassion. That means being patient, not losing your temper, and giving praise when someone tried even if they failed. (And talk to yourself that way too)

How many times in your life have you felt like approaching the furious, screaming lady? And how much more likely would you be to approach the calm, patient parent?

I, of course, still lose my temper and forget this lesson sometimes. But, from that day on, I have tried hard to remember that speaking gently gets a better, quicker response than yelling. It works with small children too. And with yourself.

When I drag my reluctant body out of bed in the morning and force myself to run. And when that run is a fiasco from start to finish (the desire to vomit, the dripping sweat, the point where you’re running up the hill and an old lady with a walking stick casually overtakes you). Those are the times where I could find fault, I could think I should be doing better, but I try not to. I try to feel proud that I made it out to run at all and pushed myself to do more than I thought I could. (Before I collapse onto the floor and pant for half an hour.)

And that’s the other thing I’ve learned:

Nature makes us better. Get outside, every day, no matter what.

Even if it’s pouring with rain. Even if it’s so icy cold it makes your sinuses sting (anyone else get that?). I have never regretted the time I have spent outside in nature, but I have regretted the times I didn’t go out. Even if it was just so Daisy could stick her nose into a hedge. Because that’s her thing. Every morning we walk past the same hedge. Every morning she puts her face into the same gaps, the same rabbit holes, she carefully inspects every piece of litter thrown from passing cars, she gets excited whenever the same sheep or rabbit or neighbourhood cat moves through the branches and makes the leaves shake. Every day this hedge is fascinating. Her tail alters weather systems with the amount it wags and her ears practically vibrate with the sounds they are pricking for. This is the excitement and fascination I would like to approach life with, even if it’s the same hedge I walked past yesterday and every day for the last 9 years.

Because everything is interesting. Take your time. Enjoy the view. Smell the air. Be curious.

And this is something I’ve explored a lot so far on this blog.

Life is not about survival: give time to the things that make your life worth living. You are in control of how you spend your time – choose well.

I was running late. Anyone who knows me IRL will know I’m always running late. The thing is, no matter how much of your life you spend being late, you never really get used to it. At least, I don’t. I hate being late for things; the anxiety and stress it causes sucks. But, I’m just not very good at not being late. Especially when I don’t really want to be wherever it is I’m going. Which was the case that morning. Being late for work would be an uncomfortable experience for everyone (most of all me) but being at work at all was so unpleasant my body seemed to resist the experience at every step of my morning routine.

But now, I was finally ready to go, finally running for the door. And there she was, on the door mat with her big soppy spaniel eyes looking dejectedly at me.

“Oh no Dais, I don’t have time for this!”

And she rolled onto her back and put her little rabbity paws in the air and waited for me to rub her white fluffy belly.

And I thought: what would I wish I had done more of in life when I’m on my death bed?

Because there is no chance I will ever wish I had been more punctual for work. But there is every chance that I would wish I had given more time to connect with the people I love. Whether that’s going for coffee with a friend or babysitting my nephew or rubbing my dog’s belly.

So I rubbed her belly. And she was comforted. And I was very late to work. And, well, we all know how that worked out don’t we?!

But that’s the thing about dogs, they never hesitate before asking for something they want. They never think that it might be better not to ask in case the answer’s no and they have to face rejection. Daisy asked for a belly rub as soon as the thought struck her. Every day, hundreds of times a day, she asks for what she wants. And sometimes the answer is no. But it doesn’t deter her from asking the next time she feels a need. But humans are so frightened of rejection that it often stops us asking, or taking a risk. And it’s not an irrational fear, rejection hurts. But isn’t it worth an occasional rejection for the number of times we might get the thing we’ve asked for?

Fear can unnecessarily stop you having great adventures.

My dog is an anxious little beast. The first time she ever saw a rabbit, she jumped out of her feathery skin and ran behind my legs. She won’t step into water unless she knows she can keep her paws on the bottom. She won’t walk over bridges or up staircases if they have gaps in them (even tiny, tiny gaps that an ant wouldn’t fall through). And she won’t trust a bridge if it’s not at least twice her width (which makes the hundreds of planks over streams we encounter impassable). She doesn’t like the sound of the metal sticks my Mum uses to walk with, or the wheels of her mobility scooter, and she jumps whenever a branch brushes her unexpectedly from behind, or a feather falls through the air in front of her nose. (Oddly though, she’s hard as nails when it comes to loud bangs like fireworks, thunder and gunshots…)

It is my dearest wish that I could one day take her on my paddleboard but, to do that, I’d have to spend a long time helping her over her fear of water (the feel of it, the movement of it and the sound of it) and then get her used to the concept of floating things (she seems to think anything that floats is witchcraft to be barked at and avoided at all costs). But think of the wonderful adventures we could have if she wasn’t afraid of everything!

And then I think about the times I’ve been afraid. Afraid of publishing a blog post for over a decade. Afraid of telling people I wanted to be a writer. Afraid of being single. Afraid of allowing myself the vulnerability of falling in love. Afraid of travelling abroad. Afraid of asking to reduce my hours at work so I could focus on writing. Even afraid of admitting that I’m afraid sometimes.

And how are these fears any more rational than Daisy’s? How many times have they been justified? And how many adventures and opportunities have I missed out on because I was too afraid to even test the water?

So, in nine years, I’ve taught her to understand me (mostly) and how to live alongside me. And she has taught me so, so much more about what it is to live a happy life, and maintain loving, functional relationships and how to provide more than a creature’s basic needs (including my own).

What have you learned from the animals around you?

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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 3/3)

September

It had all been gearing up to this. This was the moment that would decide my future: was I cut out to be a writer, or had I just wasted a decent law career, six months of work and thirty years of dreaming?

I know that sounds dramatic. But that is how it felt; packing up my car with all my most flamboyant clothes and earrings (because that’s how writers dress isn’t it?) and hundreds of notebooks and pens ready to learn everything I could from the real writers at the festival. I had my coffee and my playlist for the road and I set out to York.

The agents had my submissions, they would have read them by now, already formed their opinions, they were ready to tell me: success, or failure.

I walked into my meeting with Agent One undecided if I would be able to speak or if I would just vomit on the desk in front of her. I refrained from vomiting. She was nice. She loved my style and prose but wasn’t blown away. Ok. Well, she didn’t laugh at me or tell me to give it up, but she wasn’t that reassuring either.

Later that day another agent read my work and gave me feedback. This was a bonus chance – an opportunistic moment for unplanned feedback. After talking to Agent Two I went back to my room to have a secret cry. She was lovely but she really didn’t get my book. Said she didn’t see how my idea was unique. It was not for her.

I hyperventilated my way into meeting with Agent Three. She sat across from me and beamed. She loved, loved, loved my first three chapters and my soul swooped high above the room on the lake where we sat.

But, she said, she wouldn’t have got past my synopsis if I was submitting under normal circumstances because it didn’t show why my novel was unique. My soul hit the floor hard.

Then she said the dreaded words, the words that tipped me so easily into my worst nightmare, the thing everyone talks about at writing festivals but I never worried about because I would make sure it never happened to me,

“I didn’t really get any sense of a unique selling point from your synopsis but I feel like there is one judging by your first three chapters. I wondered if you could explain to me now what makes your story unique?

What’s your elevator pitch?”

The elevator pitch. Quite possibly the worst three words an introverted novelist can hear. The succinct and perfect one sentence hook for your 100,000 word novel. The thing I have never, never ever, managed to satisfactorily create.

And now my whole success depended on it.

I opened my mouth – as dry as my hands were wet – and words came out. Words that felt like silt at the bottom of a stagnant pond. I stuttered out my sludgey pitch and waited, heart forcing its way out of my throat, for her blank stare and disappointed judgement.

“Wow!” She said, “well, if that had been in your synopsis I would have requested your full manuscript today. Is the novel finished?”

“erm, not quite,” I said, wondering if she had heard something different to what I had said, “but nearly,”

“Well, when you do finish it, please send it over to me. And, the beauty is, you don’t need to pitch it to me again because you already have!”

When I regained the feeling in my legs I walked back to my room.

I walked into that room a different person to when I had left it that morning. I walked back into that room as a writer. A writer with a plan. A non-linear, completely insane plan. But now, I realised, I was totally on board with that. My insane, non-linear plan so far had been a wild ride and I’d take the lows for the highs any day.