When did I forget how to read...?

Books, March foraging, and small rebellions

Sunny Saturday mornings in March are for pyjamas tucked into wellington boots, mugs of tea in the garden, and other such small rebellions.

We dragged ourselves through slow days, grasping at every sign of winter waning, and suddenly it’s March. Here in the South most of the long awaited snowdrops have grown, bloomed, and gone over, the slow emergence being replaced by a surge of crocus, daffodil, young nettle, and hawthorn bud-burst. Brimstone butterflies have joined the big fuzzy bumblebees on the wing, and blue tits call constantly from the pear tree, their breasts forsythia-yellow against the blue sky. It is the time of multiple seasons a day: minus temperatures if night skies are clear, dawning with sharp frost, with coats and jumpers being shed with gay abandon by lunchtime, before a damp chill descends with the dusk.

My garden is slow to start; north facing and chilly. But the cold frame is positioned to catch maximum sun, and is full of sweet pea seedlings, and young plants of sweet violet and foxglove destined for border projects. The first edibles have been sown too, tiny seeds of lettuce, cut and come again salad leaf, and rows of long purple radishes all destined to fill spring plates and lunch-boxes. Whilst I wait for those to germinate, an earlier batch started undercover is almost ready to provide the first few baby leaves, to be supplemented by a garden graze… nettle, lemon balm, parsley, dandelion, chives, hawthorn leaf, primrose flower, mint, garlic mustard, chickweed. Trips will be made to find the first wild garlic, and maybe gorse flowers.

I have started to switch from soup to salads in my weekday lunches, and am dreaming of the days to come, when local tomatoes are back in season, or asparagus and strawberries appear at the roadside stalls.

Left to right: A bumblebee pollination peach tree blossom, young plants in my coldgrame, a tiny posy in a teacup for my Mum on InternationalWomensDay just as I made when I was little, a colourful pot of spring bulbs gracing the garden table.

I have also started to read again. One might expect reading to be an activity for long dark cosy winter nights, to be cast aside, dog eared and spine-bent, once spring coaxes us outside never to return except for meals and to reluctantly put the laundry on. In fact, reading used to be a year round pastime for me; there was little I enjoyed as much from early childhood than a good book. But somehow over the last few years...I forgot how to read. I don’t mean I forgot the words; literacy thankfully has never been an issue for me, but I forgot how to sit, how to disconnect, how to allow myself to be absorbed, transported, forgot how to see the words on the page in my minds eye. I’ll pick a book up but the words will run off about the page – I’ll read the same line three times or find I’ve skipped two and have to scan back to try and find my place, and before long I’ll loose interest or perseverance and the book will be abandoned by the second chapter. (I have had more luck with audiobooks through the winter listening to everything from Kate Humble to Agatha Christie) “Buying books and reading them are two separate hobbies!” is an oft worn out joke in our household, but one that rings with a hollow truth.

There are books on almost every surface of our home; my husbands wide ranging historical subjects, my natural history field guides. There are novels and childhood favourites, gardening manuals, cookery books, biographies, and modern nature writing non-fiction. Herbals and poetry volumes, self sufficiency guides, and penguin classics.

Books are a lifestyle, and I couldn’t be without them. So why have I been avoiding reading? An overly busy mind, or a fatigued one, perfection-based procrastination, productivity guilt, and phone screen addiction, all play their part. It’s not the books that are the problem, it’s me.

My to-be-read list

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

My husband recently came home from errand in our local town, with a gift. A small copy of Wuthering Heights, with a tactile leather cover, gold letting, and age softened pages, all complete with a brown cardboard slip case. It is a truly beautiful book, and its small size feels perfect for curling up with in bed. The story is of course famous, but I have not previously read it, so I am attempting to conquer the challenging language and am already finding the tale gripping.

Across A Waking Land – Roger Morgan-Grenville

Military veteran turned author, Roger Morgan-Grenville gave a talk recently in my parents town, and having enjoyed it immensely, they gifted me a signed copy of ‘Across A Waking Land’. The book is an account of the writer’s thousand mile journey across Britain, from one conservation or environmental story to the next, travelling at approximately 20 miles a day. Or the rate of Spring, charted by the emergences of oak leaves, from South to North. He was looking for hope, and the inspiring efforts of people across the country fighting to protect nature and landscape, and ultimately our future.

The Women Who Saved The English Countryside – Matthew Kelly

My Parents again. Mum and Dad went last week on a kind of pilgrimage to a bookshop. Sherlock and Pages is an independent concern located in the thriving Somerset town of Frome, and specialises in books about place, people, nature, heritage, and those special connections in between. Inspired by hearing that the retail giant Amazon sells over 500,000 books a day, they challenged themselves to sell 5000 books in the weeks running up until Christmas*. It was their social media around this, that first brought the shop to my attention.

This book was one of the many that filled the shopping bags my parents retreated with after their visit, and I am looking forward to getting my hands on it. So far I have only seen the front cover, but I am already intrigued!

“Long Live The Hedgerows”**

*I’m thrilled to say they smashed it! Find out more @sherlockandpages on Instagram, or visit sherlockandpages.com (Not and Ad, just a fan)

**Anyone who follows Luke, the face of Sherlock and Pages, will recognise his sign out!

The case-book of Sherlock Holmes

This green-and-cream Penguin paperback is currently residing on my bedside table, waiting for me to finish struggling though the complex sentences of Wuthering heights. There is something very comforting in the familiarity of well known characters, and indeed in read something so well known and well loved as to have been read by countless others. It feels like being in good company.

I also have a few books that I wish to re-read; books that had a significant impact on my thinking first time around and I am interested to see what I gain from them on another visit. Among these are Chris Packham’s ‘Fingers in The Sparkle Jar’, Kate Bradbury’s ‘The Bumblebee Flies AnyWay’ (I will follow this with Kate’s new book ‘One Garden Against The World’ which I’m very much looking forward to.), Henry Williamson’s ‘Tarka The Otter’, and Kathleen Jamie’s two books ‘Findings’ and ‘Sightlines’.

(My husband is currently reading Terry Pratchett’s ‘Disc World’ series, frequently interrupting my typing this by reading aloud particularly amusing segments, usually involving witches, Luggage, and trees that tell you firmly that they don’t talk…)

The dream of the bookshop

I once woke up from the most vivid of dreams, one which has stayed with me ever since in clear detail. (This dream was only beaten in vividness by the one I’d had a few years earlier of battered sausage and chips, in paper, beside the sea. Best chips ever. I could smell that sausage, and was just about to close on the first bite when I was woken up by my mother. I have just about forgiven her.) In this dream, I was the proprietor of a book shop. It had a bay window onto a cobbled street, and a swinging metal sign above the door, which in turn would open with a cheery jangle of a bell. Inside was filled with shafts of golden sunlight pooling on wooden floors. There were tables, shelves, and stacks of books. A black cat called Hector. I was setting up a creative and enticing autumnal themed window display, and outside regular customers would wave through the glass as they passed; mums with young girls, or boisterous groups of boys that loved stickers and reading clubs. Old folks, who came in for a chat as much as to browse for a forthcoming nieces birthday gift. The chap who had pre-ordered the next in his favourite series, and popped in to pick up the brown paper parcel from behind the counter. The shop had all sorts of quirks and character, smelt of that peculiar sweet-spicy bookshop fragrance that would be impossible to bottle, and seemed to hold innumerable titles of different genres. It was a haven, both for me and for the people who found their way through the door. In so many ways, it was exactly what a bookshop, and books, should be.

I dearly hope that, when I am older, when my body protests too much to allow me to work the garden, that there will still be bookshops (with glowing windows on cobbled streets) where I might gain employment, or at least while away a March afternoon, or an October Saturday.