I work in a city, and I’ve worked in that same city for 20
years. It’s a small city which has changed little despite the time that has
elapsed and the impact of the bombing seventeen years ago which shattered glass
and buildings but left the essence of the city intact. In that time I have come
to know the city well and consequently there is little left to surprise me. This
is proving a problem for me. As part of my desire to adopt a more ‘writerly’
life, one of my goals is to walk more frequently. There is much to be said for
leaving the office for a little while during the day, even twenty minutes away
from the desk can be restorative. Walking comes highly recommended as a writerly
kind of activity, as the body is occupied and the blood is pumping but the mind
is free to wander. So I made myself a deal, and that deal was that I would go
for a long walk at least three times a week. This is easy at home where open
green fields, country paths and shadowed tree-lined walks are within easy
reach, but the city, sadly, I find quite boring. There are shops and there are
streets. The architecture is very familiar to me. There is a sad absence of
green space and what green space remains is shrinking. I have walked this way
and that and, though I try, I find it very difficult to see the beauty in so
much steel and concrete. I can walk, of course, simply for the sake of walking.
I can set myself a time limit and tromp around and pay little attention to
where I am and the quality of my surroundings. There is something quite
soulless in this kind of walking, the kind that is just about the exercise. For
my walks to work, for me to gain true benefit from them, they have to offer
something more than just the distance from A to B.
In the past I used to spend a lot of my lunch breaks in the
library. There were lots of books and lots of nooks and crannies I could hide
in and read a chapter here or a poem there. Then the library closed and three
and a bit long years later it re-opened. I waited until the second day to
visit, and since that day I have been trying to get my head around what exactly
is wrong with it. There is a deplorable absence of books, but that alone isn’t
it. Ostensibly it is the same building, but it is like they have taken the
shell of it and scooped out all the warmth and humanity and left a lifeless
husk behind. I imagine it like being confronted with a loved one suffering from
amnesia or dementia: you look into those familiar eyes only to see a stranger
staring back. Perhaps that sounds a little dramatic, but it is a fair
representation of how this new version of the building makes me feel.
So walks to the library are to be done sparingly, which
leaves me with a glaring lack of motivation to get away from my desk. The promise
of books, their fine-leaved loveliness, is enough to get my feet moving. This
is why I hang around in bookshops. I am lucky to work in a town which has a
huge book shop, three floors with shelves and shelves of books and lots of
chairs and sofas where you can haul up and read the first few pages of
something. I have discovered that I can take a long walk, the leisurely way
around, and end up at the bookshop somewhere towards the end of my walk. It is
a nice place to take a rest, to have a browse and indulge in one of my other
favoured activities: future book collecting. I love making lists of books I’d
like to read.
I recently discovered an interest in nature writing, and
books about travel and journeys. This discovery surprised me; I have always
been a staunch fiction reader but my encounter with Sara Maitland’s Book of
Silence changed everything. These days I hang around, often, in the nature or
travel section, both of which are upstairs which adds neatly to my exercise
quota. Consequently my ‘to read’ list is growing, with lists of titles like ‘Otter Country’, and ‘Gossip from the Forest’ and ‘Eight Feet in the Andes’ slipping their
way into my wish list. I find these books surprisingly meditative, peaceful.
the literary equivalent of lying in the warm sun by the banks of a meandering
stream, listening to the bees buzzing, caressed by the long grass with the
smell of wild honeysuckle in the air. You know what I mean. I remain focused on
reading books by women writers, though sometimes I find my mind playing tricks
on me. I see a book by ‘Sarah Gartfield’ only to take it from the shelf and
find it is, in fact, Simon, but despite these little deceptions I have found a
wealth of new books to read. Names like Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy, Olivia
Laing and Jean Sprackland will soon be as familiar to me as Jane Austen and
Charlotte Bronte, Helen DeWitt and Tove Jansson. Old friends, side by side on
the shelf. Last weekend I was lucky enough to find a copy of Out of Africa by
Isak Dinesen for £1 in a secondhand bookshop, and despite the fact that I’m not
buying books it found its way into a little slot in my library.
I can’t afford to buy any more books. I can’t afford it in
many ways. It is not just the money, though that is a consideration of course.
I don’t have the space. Neither do I have the time to read them all. I have
managed to accumulate a lifetime’s worth of reading material already. Sometimes
I wish on myself some kind of debilitating illness which keeps me in bed all
day for a year so that all I would have to do is lie there and read. Of course
I know that is silly. I would be bored within a week. But there is something
infinitely pleasurable in the idea of having nothing else to do in the world
but read and read and read.
So I will continue with my walking, I’ll carry on hanging around
in bookshops. I will continue to graze the shelves and make my lists and finger
books and read first pages and not, not buy anything. Well, mostly.