There’s another writer who we can think with when it comes to understanding and perhaps mourning the losses of childhoods. He speaks to these dual senses of loss: to our own sense of a lost innocence in becoming ‘grown-ups’ and to the loss of possibility for kids today in modern Britain. Specifically, I want to examine John Clare’s (1793-1864) long poem ‘Childhood’—written in the middle of his poetic career—and see what it reveals about his world and our own; about childhoods then and childhoods now.

Clare’s poem is intensely nostalgic. It begins by claiming that ‘[t]he past’ is ‘a magic word/Too beautiful to last’ and the poem will circle back to this reflection in its closing lines. In this opening phrase, the ‘past’ is clearly flowerlike in its splendour—its beauty is concomitant with its own short life; you will not have one without the other. Just as the flower fades and dies, so does this idealised personal history. Several times in his poetry, though, Clare shows his readers how the obscure and overlooked flowers are what persist in sites of what is otherwise bare ruin and destruction. So, too, here the past ‘looks back like a lovely face’. It has, despite its own brevity, the flush of beauty at least in the memory of the one who remembers. But Clare is a great elegiac poet, writing often of decline, and so the face ‘looks back’ rather than merely looking (my emphasis). We are left with the sense of a glance over the shoulder of a face lost to the march of time; a face like those Clare will later describe as ‘beauteous still…/[the] faces loved in youth.’

When this initial statement—that the past is too fair to last—is reprised in the poem’s closing verses, we see that memories of the past bestow pleasures beyond merely this fleeting beauty on those who can partake in them. It also contains treasures far beyond anything that ‘wealth can crown’ and far beyond any written record, even if ‘muses wrote them down’. Clare isn’t saying that memories of the past are richer and more potent than poetry; he goes much further. He here claims that if even the sources of poetry itself—the ‘muses’—were to personally inscribe what they saw in the past, still the personally-held memories would outclass these scribblings. Reality is above our poetic attempts to capture it. In fact, as Clare affirmed back in the second verse, the poet’s ‘speaking pens/Can ne’er call back a thousand part’ of the reality of the past.

The past to which Clare feels so attached is that which makes up his subject—childhood. Childhood for Clare is a thing divorced from reason. ‘Reason’ in the sense of enlightenment style capital-R ‘Reason’ and ‘reason’ in the teleological sense of purpose. Clare was delightfully ‘reason’-less in both of these senses as a child, and his inability to get back to this former place is what he now laments. There is a wonderful image in ‘Childhood’ of happy purposelessness in which Clare remembers how, as children, he and his friends ‘our scraps of paper burnt/To watch the flitting sparks’. As adults, we might appreciate a fire for its warmth or its glow, but Clare and his closest friends put paper into a fire and their delight is in the behaviour of the fire itself. The mere utility of the fire is not what draws them, it is their wonder that something so amazing exists. This deep and pleasant purposeless act of putting paper scraps into the fire reminds me of another image from another one of Clare’s great elegies for declining nature and lost innocence, ‘Remembrances’. In that poem, Clare says that he and his friends ‘threw the pismire crumbs when we’d nothing else to do’. (Pismire is an archaic word for ants.)

In both of these moments, what Clare is describing is not exactly deep, ecstatic feeling or poetic beauty, but more simply childhood boredom and what it can cause us to do. If there is one thing that I am worried that childhood has lost in the modern world, it is this boredom and, most importantly, social boredom. Clare rarely describes isolation in this childhood—although having been born into poverty to farm labourers he must have felt it at times—he describes the coming together of he and his friends. The poem affirms multiple times that they, who are poor in property, become rich in their imaginations. Nowhere does the social aspect of boredom occur more frequently than in the lap of nature. For now, let us leave aside the less savoury activities that Clare and his friends inflicted upon the natural world, and which he regrets in his writings. Let’s instead, for the moment, examine the remarkable stanza when Clare and his companions go nesting:

And o’er the first bumbarrel’s nest
We wondered at the spell—
That birds who served no prenticeship
Could build their nests so well.
And finding linnet’s moss was green
And finches choosing grey
And every finch’s nest alike
Our wits was all away.

Worth noting, first, is that clever dual meaning at the very end of the verse. Clare was inordinately fond of puns and double meanings, and this one reveals much of the workings of Clare and his friend’s minds in childhood. In the ‘wits’ that are said to be ‘away’, we could see simply the young naturalists becoming ecstatic and losing their ‘cool’ over these discoveries. Or, we could see this as the wits being ‘away’ as in now ‘underway’ in a way which they were not before. They are becoming little scientists—their wits now taking flight. The simple word ‘away’, then, conveys both the ecstasies of the children’s imaginations and their burgeoning sense that the world is there for their discovery. How many children nowadays have the chance to uncover things in nature like those that Clare did with his young friends? And, if they do, will they find that these ‘blow their minds’ in the same way that a new video game would? John Clare’s poetry—such a vital source to take seriously in our desire to prevent the worst of planetary degradation—could only have arisen from a childhood of both sensitivity and this outdoor exploration and wonder.

Clare laments that his adult body no longer performs the actions that it used to as a child. As a ‘happy roving boy’ he ‘had used to lie’ in the ‘fields’, but ‘that hath been long by’ now. It is not just that adults do not very often lie in fields, but that, in the technological society that we have been building, where kids are increasingly isolated by their devices, they don’t get much chance to lie outside either. If we are to become custodians and guardians of the world, we need children who have not just had imaginative childhoods, but childhoods in which they appreciate what the world is like outside their bedrooms and the bedrooms of their friends. Adult John Clare laments that he no longer literally embodies the kind of frame that delights in lying in a field (and he laments much more besides) but we in turn seem to be expecting children to be adults before their time when we societally deny them the chance to explore and act in this childlike way. We have designed ways for them to never be bored and, if they so choose, never need to be outside for longer than is necessary. But this change seems to me, as much as anything Clare is remembering, like a loss.

Clare’s own sense of distancing from his childhood self is so powerful to him because he still haunts the places that he used to as a child. The ‘daisy’ that still ‘looks up in [his] face/As long ago it smiled’ still ‘takes [him] for a child.’ And yet, he has now ‘grow[n] a stranger to [him]self/In these delightful hours’. The hours themselves are still full of joy: happy times carry on with or without our participation in them. What Clare is describing is a depressive mood in amongst things that ought to bring him joy. Perhaps the most poignant moment of the poem, then, comes when Clare notices the ‘joys in youthful smiles’ which ‘appear/To mock the change in me.’ In other words, the children alive during his adulthood are still joyful and, we might assume, still enjoy the wonder of the natural world; but Clare knows that he can’t. At least, not in the same way.

Clare is the opposite of reactionary in this. Rather than lamenting that children no longer feel the joys that he used to feel, he is instead painfully aware that they may do and that he no longer can. He doesn’t blame the children, or claim that their joys are bastardised versions of his own, he simply notes with sadness that these ‘seasons sweet’ are, for him, ‘out of blossom’. Which isn’t to say that Clare didn’t see a decline in children’s appreciation for nature in his time. But, what’s crucial is that he identified the culprits of this change in his day, and they are much the same in ours—only on a grander scale. The ‘spoilers’ of nature and of childhood were for Clare one and the same. We might call them AI corporations and social media companies, Clare called them ‘enclosers’ of common lands. But it’s the same principle at work: things are being made to operate for the sake of money rather than for the sake of community.

So, what can John Clare teach us about childhood? Well, he can lament the ways in which it dies—both for him personally as he grew into a adulthood of turbulent moods and psychoses—and for us, now. But, I hope that this lamentation might be something like a map towards a better future. Clare was the first to admit, as I implied earlier, that he and his friends were far from the best stewards of nature as children. They encouraged dogs to tear after cats, they stole food from insects and terrorised beetles, all to great mirth. So, perhaps all we need do, wherever and whenever we may live, is to foster a kinship with nature that goes beyond this casual cruelty into more of what Clare undertook as an adult. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes time and again of the ‘reciprocal’ nature of this kinship in Braiding Sweetgrass. As adults, we must resist the despondent tendencies that would keep us quashed by big companies. We should try instead to cultivate a way for nature to inspire and guide us. From my own childhood, which was split between video games and books on the one hand and nature on the other, I see that I owe as much if not more to the latter half of this equation. We should try to inspire children to love the world because it might love them back, as Kimmerer would phrase it. The idea of a world indifferent to the existence of life, particularly human life, is a fairly recent one, and not the only way of looking at what we are doing on the earth.

We need John Clare’s voice now more than ever.

- Angus

For anyone who hasn’t heard of this film, it follows a robber of ancient Etruscan graves, Arthur, and his motley crew of partners in (quite literal and involved) crime. Almost all of the film’s dialogue is spoken in Italian, but its star is British icon Josh O’Connor, who learned how to converse in the language for the film. His character is, in some ways, a strong, silent type who exudes a traditional sort of masculine energy. But in other ways, he is undermined and even emasculated.

When we first meet him, he is mocked for smelling bad by another character on a train. His rageful outburst here gives us a sense that his dignity hangs by very little. We learn moments later that he has very recently been released from prison, undermining him a little further as a classic hero in our eyes. Meanwhile, he appears to commune with dead spirits, something associated with female characters in Greek myth like the doomed prophetess Cassandra.

Classical stories are never far from the surface in the film. I was struck on this second viewing by the undercurrent of Arthur’s anger and this brought to mind the anger of Achilles. The first word of The Iliad, which largely tells Achilles’s story, is ‘mēnin’ (rage, wrath or anger). Insulted by Agamemnon over the theft of his ‘war-prize’ Briseis, Achilles seethes in his tent, deserting the battlefield for a time while his men suffer defeat after defeat. The fragility of his warrior status is matched only by its revival when he begins to fight at Troy. He is a fascinating figure for study in terms of masculinity, and sits pleasingly alongside O’Connor’s character in that Arthur, too, comes alive again to resume his questing and struggle after a period of laying low.

Arthur, like Achilles, is defined by the women in his life in interesting and complicated ways. One of the central themes of the film is Arthur’s ‘search’ for his girlfriend, Beniamina. The mother of Beniamina, Flora, seems to care more for Arthur than for her own daughters, and he is looked after and doted upon by her. Considering that Arthur’s ‘profession’ is rather dastardly, Flora’s preferential treatment of him makes it appear that he is deliberately obfuscating the reality of what he does in order to manipulate those around him to care for him. As the only male figure in the large household, which includes a student-cum-servant called Italia, Arthur is denied male companionship in a domestic setting. This, coupled with his babying by Flora, serve to make his character somehow more isolated in his masculinity, and thereby more precariously masculine.

At the same time, however, whereas in films by Christopher Nolan, principal characters are defined by their relationship to dead or missing women in a way that is problematic at best, in Rohrwacher’s film, the subtlety of Arthur’s ties to Beniamina are woven quite beautifully into the narrative. Arthur is not driven to do all that he does by love for a woman who is pointedly missing, but rather his fondness for Beniamina leaves him with a deepened sense of melancholy. Rather than a missing woman being the driving force behind the plot, Beniamina is instead almost a deterrent for action in the first place. (For an insight into Nolan’s less artful depiction of missing female characters, I leave the reader to investigate ‘fridging’ in their own time, should they so choose.)

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Ancient Greek society viewed war more favourably than our own modern world not only because it gave men a purpose, but also because it brought spoils. So, too, does Arthur’s robbing of ancient Etruscan graves give him and his friends a common purpose and guaranteed treasure. But, if the business of communicating with ancient spirits and stealing from their graves all sounds a little too strange and magical, I want to reassure the reader that the film handles these themes lightly and deftly. So lightly, in fact, that you are never sure where imagination ends and magic begins. Meanwhile, the ethical murkiness of graverobbing is not something that is celebrated by the film uncomplicatedly. Indeed, the thought that stealing from those who died thousands of years ago might not be a wholly savoury activity is something the film probes closely, particularly in its final third.

The fact remains, though, that so many of the things for which I prize this film most highly come towards the end of the story. Discussion of these would certainly spoil an experience which I think everyone should have the opportunity to enjoy, and so let me lay by the juicy happenings of the film’s denouement in favour of something else: a consideration of the film’s effect upon me.

When I was describing La Chimera to my brother and his partner in preparation for us to watch it (and for me to rewatch it), I said that it was a bit like Indiana Jones if Indiana Jones were depressed. Now, this does a disservice to both Rohrwacher’s film and the Indiana Jones franchise, but like lots of flippant comments, it contains a sliver of truth. Because La Chimera is hard to categorise in its own right, it does seem to help to compare it to things. I think, having seen it again, that it actually has more in common with Pan’s Labyrinth than with Indiana Jones. Not only because it has a Romance language at its core, but also because it shares elements of magical realism that reward consideration and pondering. Like del Toro’s masterpiece, La Chimera drops clues and subtleties that I entirely missed on my first viewing, and I feel sure that were I to watch it again I would see new things once more.

Several of these subtleties have to do with dreaming and dreamlike moments. It has sometimes occurred to me, thanks in part to Mark Kermode’s astute criticism, that films are a lot like dreams. In my experience, revisiting dreams can be bewildering and, often, disappointing. I do not mean revisiting through recollection in the harsh light of day by merely thinking, but revisiting in actuality: in sleep. I don’t have a large number of recurring dreams to draw upon as evidence, but more often than not when I do have one, the following will happen. I will be dreaming of something and suddenly slip into realisation that I have dreamed it before, or that I had dreamed something that preceded or in some way linked directly to this moment that I am now dreaming. It is a little like déjà vu and a hyperreal anxiety rolled into one: you suddenly realise that you really have been here before—though you had forgotten it. Whereas with déjà vu, there is always the cognisance (no matter how slight) of the fact that this familiarity is mere illusion, in a dream you have no such comfort until waking.

When rewatching La Chimera, then, I was afraid that I would find in it not nearly so much to enjoy and chew over, but I found instead quite the opposite. The emotional core of the film, particularly towards the end, is so strong that watching it felt a little like coming home or, indeed, returning to a dream of some fixity in one’s mind. Whereas redreaming something is by turns troubling, exciting, frightening and uncanny, watching a film that you have loved but have not seen for a while can be purely rewarding. It is frightening to think of all the works of fiction—films, books, TV shows, games—that I have loved which may not stand up to such re-scrutiny, but the fact that La Chimera did, I feel speaks to its dreamlike qualities. Freud wrote about the ‘dreamwork’ as being the various emotions and connections we make when we speak of our dreams and, in light of this, I feel grateful to Rohrwacher’s ‘filmwork’ for giving me (in the form of a story) the words that I could scarcely speak surrounding what it was to be in the midst of depression. Incidentally, I feel this same way about another film which I saw shortly after my first viewing of La Chimera: Aftersun. But that may be a topic for another newsletter.

- Angus

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I came closer when I began learning a simple piece for two hands called ‘Largo’ on the piano when I was around eight. Mum told me that the tune came from a larger piece called ‘The New World Symphony’ by someone called ‘Divore Jack’, or something of the sort, and that it was about America. We listened to it on car journeys and I was transported—emotionally, musically and, of course, physically.

I already had had access to my brother’s iPod shuffle by this stage—another early source of musical discovery for me—but again the music on that device was largely his. It wasn’t until my aunt gave me Josh Ritter’s Hello Starling that I found myself face to face with the first piece of music that was really, truly a thing I could cherish for myself. Something I’ve been thinking recently is that even things that we might consider ‘masterpieces’ can grate after too much listening, watching, reading or generally experiencing. There’s so much music that I love, but have overplayed. It then takes a surprise encounter with this music for me to truly enjoy it again—a burst from a radio station, or a sudden but pleasing shuffle on a playlist, for example.

If I were to lay out a personal ‘Desert Island Discs’ now, I would probably put on songs and pieces that have ‘stood the test’ of repeat hearings. Some things that would have made it on before, The Beatles’ reconstructed classic ‘Real Love’, for example, would not make the cut anymore. Oddly, arguably embarrassingly, a song called ‘The Cave’ by Mumford and Sons (a band I no longer greatly care for) would. That song brings me back to the feeling of being ten and thrilled with the prospect of the wide world like no other sound ever will. But there are other songs in their catalogue that I used to like much more than ‘The Cave’. Did I overplay them? Is it possible I outgrew them?

Or is something else happening? The sound may have lodged itself; got caught up in childhood’s thrill and trapped in amber. At the time that I was listening to the rest of Mumford and Sons’ then two-album catalogue, I was living a more unhappy life than when I only knew ‘The Cave’. Is that why I hear hope when I hear that sound; feel a thrill at those opening guitar notes? Sometimes, we all long for the times in which we were not yet hurt; had not yet had our knees scraped by life. Some of us are lucky to have such times to think back on, but not everybody is so blessed.

It strikes me that I ought to be so grateful to have had broadly happy and healthy early years. Not only that, it also occurs that the privilege of listening to music from the get go (and Mum said I used to hum melodies back to her before I could speak) is not something afforded to all humans in all times and all places. It is not even guaranteed for each of us in the modern world.

Technology is so often a drain on our lives that I often find myself overlooking the everyday wonders it performs. The ability to listen to music over and over again whenever one wants is very recent and very amazing. Perhaps I have listened to Fleet Fox’s Helplessness Blues one time too many in recent months, and maybe knowing all the words to an album does reduce its effect. But I find comfort that those songs will always be ready to wrap me in their warmth again when I feel ready to be re-immersed.

‘Professor Skye’ on YouTube said that music has not only life-enhancing, but also life-lengthening power. I don’t think he meant this in the flippant way of a health fad. But, he did mean that music really can make one’s life richer, make one happier, reduce stress and slow down the ageing process. It is certain that if an individual finds the right sort of music for them, then they will have a community and—in the pieces of music and the songs—lifelong friends. Recorded music is such a privilege in this way—I think I would have found it hard in a world where concertgoing and church services were the main sources of musical stimulus.

Which brings me back to Josh Ritter’s CD. I really feel that that album gave me its gift of song but it also gave me a kind of poetry. It’s perhaps an accident of time that ‘Rainslicker’ would also be one of my desert island picks, but I do not want to diminish the song, simple as it may be, by saying that it just met me at the right time of life. As with ‘The Cave’, ‘Rainslicker’ was not my favourite song on the album from the outset. But it has the staying power of a lifelong companion.

The opening song, ‘Bright Smile’, was my favourite when I first heard the record. It contains a beautiful, enigmatic quatrain that I have always loved. The first four lines set up two people, ‘Imogene and Abelard’, but then the singer hints at a third—she of the ‘bright smile’ of the song’s title:

But there’s another one
That brings me to your door
And the boat she weaved from the tidal reeds
Was always tied to shore

I’ve always seen Moses in the bulrushes—or, tidal reeds—in these lines, right from the first time I heard them. I’m probably not supposed to, but this gets at something very fundamental that I think is worth celebrating. Joshua B. Ritter, born in 1976 in Idaho, wrote those words sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s. They would probably never have reached me if we’d both lived one hundred years earlier. But we have music from all over surrounding us at all times, now. Its untamed presence can be part of the difficulty of modern living—its unending cacophony and the way it squeezes and reduces moments for silent reflection. But the passage of thought, of phrase, of melody from one mind to another is a gift. It has been a privilege, then, to ‘misinterpret’ Josh Ritter’s phrase from afar—to have drunk in his song and been thankful.

- Angus

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I do also love reading stories and poems and watching films and the like, but not in the same way that I feel a critic loves these things; at least, not since I laid down my critic’s pen. In the simplest terms, a critic will examine and try to appreciate a work of art because they want to comment upon it, want to interrogate how it made them feel or how they think others ought to feel about it. This often, though not always, encourages them to deconstruct the work of art, sometimes piece by piece, to see how it works on a molecular level. This is still something I find pleasure in doing, and something that I hope I have done a little of since leaving university in these posts. I am not saying that I do not enjoy playing the role of critic, but I am saying that I no longer see this role as something that I am naturally disposed to.

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On a related note, just this morning, I finally finished my readthrough of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. It is a book filled with activities, many of which encourage the reader to consider their life and identify the places that fear has been allowed to take a chokehold. In these areas, so Cameron claims, we have become ‘blocked artists’. Her definition of artistry is pleasingly broad and she claims we can all partake in it. Indeed, as a spiritually-minded writer and teacher, Cameron feels that ‘artist’ is our default state and that when we deny ourselves the potential to express ourselves in whichever field we choose, we are in conflict with our deepest impulses. When Cameron’s book lays out its premises, some of it sounds a little hokey, but I have to say that I have been greatly inspired by what she has written. It is no exaggeration to say that my concept of what writing is has changed. It is this that I will expound for the rest of this piece.

When I was eighteen and I was reading David Copperfield, I thought that the way to become a writer was to learn the grammatical devices and structures which underpin good writing. Later—as I learned more about them—I subconsciously expanded this view to incorporate rhetorical devices. But I didn’t see this as a thing which could be easily achieved. Indeed, I felt that I would never come close to this ‘proper’ writing. Prose of this kind, let alone poetry, was a thing which I could only dimly understand and should never attempt. Speaking with a friend at Cambridge, she said that great writers, amongst whom she would not have counted herself, astounded her with the sheer brilliance of each sentence after sentence. By considering these two positions, I think it is possible to form an impression of what I thought it meant to be a good writer back then. I thought quite fundamentally that Coleridge was a sublime writer because his prose style was, as one supervisor put it, ‘wretched’. I thought that his sheer force of wit was so great that it was natural that it would contort into these scarcely-decipherable sentences which we mere mortals were too obtuse to comprehend. Incidentally, I held the same opinion of John Stuart Mill.

There’s a little bit of truth to this view, I must add. Highly-educated people back then were reading and producing more longform prose than we do nowadays, and thereby naturally picked up a way of writing that is stuffed with subclauses and words which, indeed, we have never encountered. But my view went a bit deeper than awe at the ingenuity of these people’s writing. I felt that I had a mind that sparked off into disparate ideas and spiralled round itself in worry and that these were not the markings of a writer at all. Again, there’s some truth to this view, in that being focused on describing an external world is an incredibly important skill for a writer, and anxious people will find this harder.

I also felt, oddly, that those who write less write better. I had a good friend at university who was so anxious about writing essays that she was genuinely ill on occasion as a result. And this is only an extreme form of the perfectionism that I saw all about me, and a good amount of which I detected in myself. However, I think my own perfectionism is a selective perfectionism. I can write for a long while without worrying too much about what I am producing, and then suddenly I hit a sentence and it takes me just as long as did the previous flow of sentences to work out what I am trying to say. At its worst, I start to doubt why I wanted to say any of these things in the first place. I think I idolised the writing of the friend who struggled to write not only out of admiration for her bravery, but also because the scarcity of her prose seemed to give it a value that my efforts lacked. (She was also incredibly smart.)

Around this time, I went to a writing advisor with a piece of work which I was very unhappy with and got back feedback that I still remember to this day. I had been ‘throat-clearing’ and ‘hedging’ in this piece. But this feedback, far from deterring my efforts, only made me want to improve my abilities. Since then, I have had a bit of my writing read by a real-life playwright, and I have received feedback from him and others that was far denser than the writing advisor. Each time, I have never felt dismayed by their words, but only encouraged by them. Speaking with the playwright about my writing was a thrill. The fact that he had read my work in the first place meant a huge amount, and then the fact that he had taken it seriously and thought about it was more than I could hope for. I feel, now, that writing is not the practice of crafting perfect sentences, but can be more accurately encapsulated as a process of talking to oneself on paper. We draw on our reading, yes, but we also draw on our whole personality and our beliefs when we do this work.

Before, I thought that Charles Dickens and Coleridge had a uniquely perfect understanding of grammar and rhetoric and that this allowed them to do something utterly magical and baffling. Again, yes, but I see now that the hardest part of writing is summoning the bravery to write. I believe Cameron when she says that we are many of us blocked artists if only we knew it. Her definition certainly applies to me, and I am trying my darndest to unblock the artist and let them express themselves. When I was having compassion-focused therapy in 2023/4, I learned from my therapist that writing would be like my ‘final boss’, the area of my life that I would find my inner critic had the most liberty to tear me down. For this reason alone, however, it was worth pursuing.

It’s a relief to think that I don’t have to memorise every grammatical term or rhetorical device in order to write something that someone else might want to read. It’s also heartening to think that just because I haven’t read as much as I dreamed I would have, that doesn’t preclude me from writing in the first place. Writers spend a lot of time by themselves thinking about their lives and, if they are good (or lucky), the lives of others. The most hopeful thing Cameron has given me is the sense that writing is a way of learning who we are and, most importantly, of sharing that with others. That seems to me a brave undertaking.

- Angus

The story follows 11-year-old Albert Mallory—known as Mouse because he is so small. In some ways he’s quite a typical preteen boy: his room is always messy, he spends a lot of time daydreaming and his favourite thing to do is play on the iPad. But it is that daydreaming that sets him apart. Because whilst a lot of young boys may lapse into reverie extensively, for Mouse it is his default state. Indeed, the majority of the narrative is (depending on your reading) either a recollection or a narrativization of a protracted daydream.

The story starts off ordinarily enough. It is Christmas Eve, and Mouse, his sisters Violet and Esme and his Mum are packing to head on a short car journey to see ‘Granny’ and ‘Gramps’. Mouse, as usual, hasn’t packed in time because he was… you guessed it… daydreaming. The family are all in the car, but stress levels are raised by familiar sibling squabbling as well as a snow storm. But when the Mallory’s car skids off the road, events start to take a turn for the truly dramatic. Mouse is thrown from the car (and concurrently back into the Middle Ages), while his family are stranded in their upturned vehicle. Things only become stranger as he encounters various human-sized versions of his toys and a character from his favourite iPad game. What’s more, he’s wearing armour and carrying a sword. What could be going on?

So much for the setup, the rest of the book is an unravelling and exploration of this intriguing premise. But you may wonder at this stage where psychosis could possibly come into all of this. Well, it comes (at least to my mind) in the blurring of what could be real and what is imagination. Because there are times when we flash between the quest narrative and the real, drab and harrowing scenario of a family stranded in their car and a child in the snow. It is these moments of oscillation that are so redolent of my lived experience of psychosis that it seems hard to believe that Torday didn’t do research into the qualia—the subjective properties—of this phenomenological state.

How can I explain this?

When you are ill with psychosis, you understand that you cannot fully trust your experience of the outside world which has become populated with your thoughts and the physical manifestations of these—auditory and visual hallucinations. But you also cannot help but believe in these things. Not merely because they are present, but because they are urgent and terrifying.

How was it that I came to believe that the whole of the UK had been hit by a nuclear strike and that I was the only thing holding us back from the threshold so that we did not slip into oblivion? It seemed that life had been paused, that time itself had paused. Like the blast of the bomb had been deferred whilst we (or really, I) atoned for its detonation. How could I then reconcile the evidence that everyone around me was living and breathing with the thought that a bomb had killed us all? How could I believe both that I was in some kind of ‘new earth’ afterlife and also that we were all still alive and in immediate danger? Well, I believed these things in the same way that Mouse can know that he is lost in the snow but still imagine that he is a brave knight and that the toys he is clutching have come to life and are helping to guide him from waymark to waymark, cairn to cairn towards the castle that ‘may’ be there.

Because psychosis is the brain’s educated guess at what will reduce the suffering of excessive stress and (in my cases) mania. It says, ‘Okay, this isn’t working. We are so dysregulated and worried that the only option is to flip the switch on all these problems and detach from their reality.’ Or, really, detach reality from them. Because the problems still exist, only they are experienced entirely differently. In 2022, when my second episode began, it didn't change the fact that I had still broken up with my ex-girlfriend. But, when I fell ill, I no longer had to face the psychic pain associated with the breakup head on. Now I had a whole set of new and unexpected ways of dealing with the issues I was facing. Not that these ways were remotely enjoyable or, in the short term, helpful. But, like Mouse’s journey from his literal car crash and my journey from my metaphorical one, it is only the imagination that could steer us through.

Indeed, the book itself inherits and taps into a rich vein of imaginative literature. Mallory as a surname ties the central family to Thomas Malory who transcribed, embellished and largely popularised the Arthurian legend in England. Similarly, at one point in There May Be a Castle, a character in pink armour literally loses their head, picks it up again, puts it back on their shoulders and continues on their way; thus mimicking the ‘Green Knight’ from that 14th century romance masterpiece Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. These nods cannot be incidental: they are the literary touchstones which tell us that no matter how mad we may feel, there are heroes who have been there before us and who pulled through.

- Angus

The first third of the book is unrelentingly bleak and dark. It largely portrays Arha scurrying about an elaborate, pitch black labyrinth and serving malignant spirits known as ‘The Nameless Ones’. It was a clever trick of Le Guin in Tombs to make it seem as though her work was revelling in the evil she envisions. Had I been a teenage reader, I might actually have put the book down from the sheer claustrophobia caused by the text’s malice. But I would have been wrong to do so, because the wickedness does not go unchecked forever. When it comes under the full brightness of goodness, we feel the relief of being no longer ‘involv’d’ in evil’s ‘rising mist’.1

Indeed, perhaps subconsciously I am drawing on Milton here because his approach to writing Satan provides an interesting comparison more broadly with Le Guin’s way of depicting her forces of darkness. Where Milton sometimes makes the very wrong seem strangely attractive, in part to pose a challenge to his early (largely Christian) readers, Le Guin more often shows evildoing in its obvious repulsiveness. But the effect is a similar one: we feel trapped by the evil. In Milton’s poem, this is because we find ourselves—to our shame—tacitly endorsing it, while in Le Guin’s book we are pounded by the deluge of darkness until it becomes almost unendurable. But, as I say, the opposing techniques bring about a common end.

Oddly, I’ve been having a somewhat comparable experience while reading the Bible recently. Yes, the actual Bible. I have done the thing of starting at Genesis and I’m now on 1 Kings. Much of the destruction and death in the stories has left me feeling a little hopeless at times—in the manner of Randy Newman when he sang:

Cain slew Abel, Seth knew not why
For if the children of Israel were supposed to multiply
Why must any of the children die?2

It’s a good question, honestly. Because why does anyone have to die in order for God’s plan to come to fruition? But, at the same time, I occasionally feel a sort of terrible thrill in the comeuppances of the forces of evil, both in the Bible and in Milton and Le Guin’s works. I fluctuate between feeling sorry for, say, the Philistines when they are routinely slain by the Israelites and then also finding a glimmer of hope in the fact that through this destruction, some kind of message is getting through.

It’s in this that I come to see what a wonderful leap of imagination it was for Jesus to say that ‘all who take the sword will die by the sword’. Given the extent of the normalisation of violence, indeed the flat endorsements of it, that his times and, indeed, his culture had fostered over millennia, it shows his moral genius that he could reject it in such powerful terms. I don’t find his insight to contradict the destruction portrayed in the earlier parts of the Bible, in fact. Because, when I lament that anyone has to die to bring about God’s plan, I am omitting two key points. Firstly, the God in the Bible never wanted humanity to have to die (cf. The Garden of Eden debacle) and, secondly, he felt this so strongly that he became involved in the world and went to his own death.

Now this impromptu foray into Biblical accounts of evil has arguably been a tangent as Le Guin was famously an atheist all her life. But, then again, she was also greatly influenced by the many forms of religion which she rejected in her writings. To get back on track, then. As well as its deft intermingling of darkness and hope, Tombs also contains attractions at a granular level. Both the descriptions and the dialogue are a heady sort of music. Take this elegant passage of a character in a mountain pass:

There was a litter of larger branches under the little trees, which she gathered. Scooping out a pit in an angle of earth-embedded rocks, she built up a fire, and lit it with her flint and steel. The tinder of sage leaves and twigs caught at once. Dry branches bloomed into rosy flame, scented with resin. Now it seemed quite dark, all around the fire; and the stars were coming out again in the tremendous sky.

This extract is an example of one of my favourite sorts of passages: it follows in simple, visually engaging language a step by step account of something as it occurs. Yes, it’s not got all the majesty of the grander parts of the book; it’s hardly going to be highlighted for its quotability. It can’t be noted for its elaborate description of a new fantasy element or magic system or even any insight into its characters. But works of literature are not made up of grand moments one can quote. They derive far more from these small moments which, when laid out together, make what we can agree is a work of art. Even the buried metaphor of the branches ‘bloom[ing]’ into flame in the above passage, as though fire were a red flower à la Kipling, displays the subtlety of Le Guin’s craft. The language remains unadorned but beautiful.

As I said in a previous post, I hope to write children’s fiction of my own. Reading a book like The Tombs of Atuan was perhaps a silly idea in this regard. It is too pure a text to try and emulate in any meaningful way. It is almost entirely devoid of comedy, aside from the occasional blackly funny moment, and this is arguably what I admire most in it. Because it is a book that takes its subject seriously, but I only ever felt engrossed in it, and never detached from it as a book that is trying too hard to be something it is not. This is not to say that I prefer books without comedy (far from it, actually), but it is true that I don’t understand how one can become so potent a writer that you can sustain the reader’s attention, along with a book’s overall tone, without once breaking into self-doubt and interjecting something light-hearted or trite.

I think, then, that both A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan should be seen as literary classics. Yes, they are written for a young audience, but many of the best works are. At the very least, many of the best works appeal to younger readers. I think it is the unflinching look into the dark heart of Atuan’s Tombs and, concurrently, into evil itself that makes this series as good as it has been so far. I am excited to read the third book, and I can only imagine that it will have more to say about some of the key themes of these first two. Most especially, I hope it continues to engage me on questions of what it means to grow up and to propel the feud between good and evil into even more nuanced territory. I think fantasy is uniquely suited to these ends, and I trust Le Guin’s judgement supremely.

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This metaphor of a creative ‘well’ has been interesting and helpful to me. I have, in the past, found that my well has run dry. Indeed, such was the case when I spoke to my university teacher in the first place. In order to fill the well again, I needed to read the thoughts of others or consume new ‘art’. When it comes to writing or creating, an overfilled well is as dangerous as an empty one. If your well is bursting with the water of others’ thoughts, then you can find that these things spill over too directly into what you produce. Then again, if you are stuck in the vacuum of your own thoughts without external input, you can feel that you are scratching the bottom of the well for any inspiration.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my day-to-day thoughts and how helpful they really are. Keats once lamented that ‘but to think is to be full of sorrow/And leaden-eyed despairs’. John Webster, meanwhile, wrote that ‘reading brings us to a truer sense/Of sorrow.’ And he should know. I think my attitude to reading and thinking when I was younger was that more thought and more reading was pretty much always a good thing. But I don’t feel that way now. It’s not only that the well can become overfilled, it’s also that thinking can itself become a prison. Dostoevsky knew this first hand. In Notes from Underground he wrote that ‘to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease’. I have to say that I agree with the sentiment.

I do want to live a more present life; to find myself stuck in my head less and, instead, grounded in my body. Although there are several things which conspire to prevent me from accomplishing this aim, they are all ultimately to do with deferring the time that I will take care of myself until later. I tell myself that I can’t meditate now because I have important things to do today. I say that I will practise focusing externally when I’m out and about, but I don’t even try it when I’m at home, in the kitchen, say, and I allow my thoughts to swirl around and around themselves. This brings me to an interesting piece I read here on Substack the other day about being addicted to thinking. I believe that this addiction runs deep with me.

In 2024, I bought myself some binoculars to go birdwatching. More recently, I have been making good on this purchase and getting out into nature more and more. It has provided many joyful moments, but I still find that being with my own thoughts can be exhausting. Focusing on the birds does help a little, but my enjoyment in looking at them is inversely proportionate to the number of thoughts in my head. When I am truly present, the experience can be transformative, but when I am distracted by all the thinking inside me, it is something else entirely: it is painful.

Can the ‘well’ help with this? Not in my experience. I don’t find that I enjoy a walk more when I try to recite a poem in my head as I go. Nor do I find that humming over the lines of a song time and again brings me any more happiness than simply being in the moment. The well allows me to be creative, but creativity becomes its own source of agonising thought if you let it. I can puzzle over the plot of a story or lines of poetry that I have written and wish that I hadn’t. All of this isn’t to say that I want to be less creative, but rather that I think I could be more creative if I were to clear my head of thoughts more often, rather than indulging in thinking every second of the day.

So, what am I going to do about this? How do I intend to clear my mind while still keeping my well at the desired level? In order to do this, I hope to start up a manageable practice of meditation again. The last thing I need is more time to devote to looking inwardly; I hope rather to truly clear my thoughts as much as I am able. I am inexperienced at unguided meditation, but I do know the core principles. My main aim will be to connect with my body in a way that I am able to with my mind. I don’t want to feel confined to my mind anymore, I want to experience the joy of body and mind working in tandem. There’s no doubt that my reliance on thought will be hard to break, but I think I can cope with the momentary boredoms if they lead to a calmer and happier time overall.

Meanwhile, I hope to fill my well with Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Wildwood by Roger Deakin in the next few days. I can only imagine that these works will find their own ways into my future pieces. Above all, I hope to strike a balance between acquiring new thoughts and not thinking at all.

- Angus

Firstly, they allow me to get a better grasp on the aspects of my life that I have been overlooking or neglecting. Externalising my thoughts makes it harder for me to carry on lying to myself day after day. I can sense a momentary hesitation before writing certain sentences, and this often (though not always) means that I am coming closer to working something out.

When I’ve occasionally read back the pages (which I’ve written for the past few months), it’s been interesting to note just how many of the shifts in direction and the inciting ideas have originated there. This is another fact about them which I enjoy—yes, I am able to think critically about aspects of my life, but I am also able to conjure up new ideas for where I should be heading. Often, I’ll forget that I ever dreamed up these ideas first on paper, and so I feel surprised anew when I revisit them and see that the concentrated half hour it takes to write the pages seems to help more on average than the time I spend thinking without writing.

The pages also tie in with a broader thought which has struck me repeatedly for well over three years, now. Even with multiple exposure, however, it’s hard to locate or describe the thought exactly, but I’ll do my best.

I think a good place to start when describing this recurring pattern of thinking is an examination of what can constitute a ‘life well lived’. As someone who has struggled with mental health difficulties for a long time, the proposition takes on a meaning for me that it might not have for those who have not suffered the same or similar tribulations.

Because life for someone who has had psychosis isn’t really a continuum in the traditional sense. I feel that I have had breaks in my psyche—breaks, indeed, in my time—during which I was definitely present, but was so distracted from my normal tracks of thinking that I can in a very real sense affirm that they constitute gaps in the narrative that I call ‘myself’.

This pertains to the recurring thought which I am about to describe because the thought is accompanied by a feeling which is not quite jealousy, not quite regret and not quite sadness, but which bears a slight resemblance to all three at once. But it mixes in with those bitter notes a morsel of joy and a hope that things will right themselves again; that simply having a mind and a body is a sufficient foundation upon which to rebuild and for personal growth to resume.

When I think of these gaps I have experienced, and when I think of the amount of effort it has taken both times to claw myself out of the trench of psychosis, I do feel at a disadvantage to those who have not suffered these setbacks. But I also feel something else. I feel a gratitude that I have what I have now—my sanity—and that I was delivered out of thought that was only coherent to myself and back into the world of shared understanding.

What does a ‘life well lived’ look like when these gaps, these lacunae, break in and threaten to smash up all that had been so carefully constructed? The pages don’t help to answer this, but they do reflect back what life has been. The most recent time that the overarching thought I am still tapdancing around came to me was when I was with two dear friends. We were walking through the woods about a week ago and we were nearing a duck pond, and there it was again.

Here is the thought, then, distilled as much as I am able to:

What does knowledge afford us? and what kinds of knowledge are most useful or, more importantly, most valuable?

Now, those words do not resemble what I chew over silently when I think this thought, but they do get to the heart of what’s at stake in these moments of reflection. When I was walking in the woods with my friends, I was thinking about the deep value of local knowledge and how ‘book learning’ is a far cry from intimate and ancient understandings of, say, the place where one grew up. Both of these friends have great knowledge of the local area and of the natural world, and I would say that these far exceed my own.

Another time that this thought has come to me was when two other friends came round—incidentally shortly after my second episode of psychosis. These two people are distant friends of mine, really, and they are very learned and very bookish. Once again, I was struck by the feeling, the sadness and regret mixed with immense hope and inspiration, that is common whenever these moments come on. It occurred to me then that I would never be as knowledgeable or as clever as these people and yet even as I knew these things, I felt no distress. It is at times like these that I feel I can see myself most clearly. I am no longer defined by my desires to be ‘Angus the scholar’ or ‘Angus the fount of local knowledge’ or even ‘Angus the naturalist’.

Instead, where I had been striving for deeper and deeper understanding, I am able to take a step back and appreciate the importance of community, of shared knowledge and of people having different strengths. I feel, at these moments (and perhaps oddly) more like an artist than at any other time. When I am confronted with these troves of things that I have never considered and with which I wouldn’t know where to begin, then I feel the most excited to use the data of my life and turn it into something like art. It is here that the daily pages can re-enter.

The pages are not art. They are very far from it, in fact. But, they are a record of my thoughts for thirty minutes most days and they are a way for me to try and reconcile things with myself. There, I can reflect on the experience of gaps in my life—the way it feels as though I have lived three distinct lives separated by two catastrophic nightmares. I can dwell on the joy of shared knowledge—my friends spoke at length about the naturalist Gilbert White and his The Natural History of Selborne, which they have been reading. Above all, I can think over the good times and the times when deeper and deeper understanding comes to seem irrelevant—when all that matters is that I am present now with a dear friend and we are taking pictures around Cambridge with a disposable camera.

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- Angus

Or, most of the film. We still have a few pickups left to do. It is a strange thing, though, making a movie. Strange to see just how many people rallied round, simply because a friend and I had sat—mostly in his childhood bedroom—and dreamed a world onto a page. Strange, too, to have found three people willing to come together and speak the words you scarcely dared to hope they might in front of a camera.

So much of the filming process was overwhelming and so much was stressful. But it was also life-affirming and thrilling—breaking me down in order to build me up again. Today, I want to reflect back on the week I just had and, more broadly, what writing this film has meant to me over the years. The process has also made me reflect on an insight which I have been overlooking for several months.

Before I get to that, however, I should introduce the film more concretely. Solstice is a short folk-horror film (though heavy on the folk and somewhat light on horror). It is set entirely in and around ‘The Stiperstones’, a set of peculiar rocky hills in south Shropshire. The story follows Anthony, a man who returns to this area in which he grew up. Now with a young family of his own, he comes back to attend the funeral of his neglectful father. Things, well… things go wrong from there…

There were many realities about the filmmaking process which I knew theoretically when going in to making Solstice, but most only made intuitive sense once I was actually immersed in the production. For example, I knew that most of the time spent making a film is devoted to standing around. But until you are on set, you have no idea how this is going to feel. I also knew that my official role on set as ‘script supervisor’ would require me to look for story inconsistencies that might appear on screen in any way that I could. But I couldn’t have known quite how practical my help would be at times. In many ways, I was a runner as well as a script supervisor, which suited me just fine.

I think my most important contribution to the final film was realising that, as we weren’t going to get any fog on ‘The Stiperstones’, we had to film in such a way that it made sense for the central characters to lose each other without any low visibility. I sent a message to Ollie, who was co-directing, at about 11pm on the night before we filmed this sequence with ideas of how to solve what seemed unsolvable. I think this miniature crisis and its resolution encapsulate the combination of stress and joy that filmmaking is, or, at least, was on Solstice. All members of cast and crew had these brainwave moments in their own way. Whether it was an actor nailing the delivery of a particular line, the Assistant Director working out whose car could get someone from ‘A’ to ‘B’ at the right time or the ‘gaffer’ and ‘spark’ working together to bring to life a complicated lighting setup on the fly.

All of these calls had to be made, but I think my best decision throughout the entire shoot was to jump in the car with Ollie at the beginning and at the end of the filming. On the way up towards the road near ‘The Stiperstones’ where the shoot began, we were able to chat through our worries about the project and our hopes for the schedule and the way the story would land. Then, on our way back from the final day at the reservoir (which, more on that later) I jumped in again with Ollie and we chatted over what we can take away from the experience. Ollie is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and talking through the many things which went disastrously and the mini miracles of those which went well was cathartic, poignant and emotionally necessary.

Ollie was a hero throughout the entire process, taking on three enormous roles—producer, director and cinematographer—of which he normally only performs the third. The experience has made him realise that he doesn’t want to produce films and that his strengths lie in the visuals, rather than in people wrangling. We’ve learned so much about writing, too. We’d like to carry on writing together (and I’ll do much by myself as well), but I think we’ve realised that the film we wrote and the film that exists will be quite different. This means that the minutiae of the writing matter less, perhaps, than we’d appreciated. It matters more to get good ideas down than to have the perfect film in our heads. In fact, as fellow perfectionists, it might be helpful to have a project on which we haven’t spent years in advance. I think collaborating with a team earlier in the process will be especially helpful if and when we do this all again.

Some of you may be wondering why I claim in the subtitle of this article that I was ‘in’ a movie. It’s not a trick of prepositions, I promise; I really did have a role as an extra in Solstice. You see, the second major scene of the film is the funeral of Anthony’s father and takes place in a small, bare, 17th-century chapel. I played one of the service attendees.

At one stage during the scene the camera was pointing directly at me for the start of one of the takes. All I had to do was get up and leave the church with the rest of the congregation. However, the spotlight effect of the lens gave my brain the impression that I was going to be truly acting again! It was oddly exhilarating to be back in this headspace, even though my head was really all over the place in terms of what else still needed doing that day. I did a lot of acting at school, particularly around the age of fourteen, when I played the lead role of Stanhope in my school’s production of Journey’s End. Even though it was only an illusion, for a brief moment I did feel like I was that boy back on stage. Maybe there’s a world in which I audition for small roles and do some amateur acting again. But lay that aside, for now.

The lake scene (shot at ‘Snailbeach Reservoir’) which ends the film was stunningly beautiful. The water was surrounded by snow, which had fallen just the night before. Our actors were really very cold, but compared with the gale force winds on ‘The Stiperstones’ the day before, they were in comparative comfort. The mother of our child actor, playing the role of Molly, had even sown thermals into her daughter’s costume which was a very clever idea and another one of those brainwave moments which were all over the set and which allowed for the film to happen at all.

I walked back from the lake with said actor’s mum, and she asked what I’d be up to in the next few months, once Solstice was over. She knew by this stage that I had written the film. I told her I hoped to do more writing, amongst other things. When she asked what kind of writing, I didn’t have to reach for the answer, as I normally do. Normally, I mention Substack and I mention film writing and poetry and yada yada yada… but filming Solstice had given me a clarity. ‘I want to write books for children.’ When I thought about it, I realised that my favourite book is really a story for children—Don Quixote. I realised, too, that my imagination is, in the nicest possible way, a child’s imagination. I realised what I’d always known, that ‘youth is our home-land: we were born/And lived there long’.2

This was a little unexpected because, when embarking on the read, I was most excited for the middle section. All I really knew going in was that the book was about trees and how they connect people. Because I saw that the first hundred-and-fifty or so pages would set up all the individuals in what were effectively a series of short stories, I was most looking forward to the moments where these narratives would begin to overlap.

But, in fact, it was getting to know the characters from scratch that felt most compelling. Meanwhile, the section with the most page-turning thrust was definitely the dénouement. I still enjoyed the middle section, but I found the connections between the characters became a little more predictable than I had hoped they'd be before I began.

With all of that said, and as with the sonnets last week, I don’t want to analyse the book, but more to respond to it. There is darkness in the book and many of its central themes have to do with the atrocities that humanity has inflicted on the natural. It is a novel that provides no tentative solutions to the ecological problems that it raises. It would rather document sad realities than twist itself into a tale of naïve hopefulness. The front of my copy says that the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019. I do wonder if a book with more hope would have fared so well with the critics.

At times, it felt like I was reading an essay on why trees are our most overlooked and crucial compatriots. But this is not a criticism per se. If it were, it would be a bit like when I used to get slightly hung up on the script of The West Wing for being filled with facts and statistics. Gradually, I realised that this tendency was really necessary. Because, if you are writing polemically, you must have some form of evidence. In The Overstory, then, so much of the book is devoted to learning outlandish facts about trees. But what would we be left with without them? Only a story of people linked by and making sacrifices for things we barely understand and often overlook.

I feel underqualified at the best of times to talk about the natural world. Although I love it and wrote a dissertation about ecological themes in the writings of John Clare and Mary Webb, I know so little of its vast data, recognise so few of its many species. What I do know, though, is that when I was about six, I began writing a story called ‘The Googol Bird’. I think it was around the time that I had learned, from a friend, about the huge numbers googol and googolplex. And so, with this new knowledge, I developed the idea: a young boy sees a bird so rare that he is the only one to ever witness it. This, to my recollection, predated my obsession with Pokémon.

What all of this says to me is that somewhere deep in my psyche has always lain a fascination with the rare, the threatened and the natural world. I spent so much of my early years thinking about animals. What started as a kinship with ladybirds and squirrels later developed into a fascination for marine life and, later still, birds. I definitely have Steve Backshall to thank for much of this burgeoning interest. His programmes on CBBC conveyed his love for the animal kingdom and his relentless positivity was infectious. I still remember what a shock it was, then, to learn in the final episode of Deadly 60 that humans were the deadliest animal. And that it wasn’t even close. After weeks of speculation among me and my friends as to who would be the deadliest, the truth stung like a scorpion.

I also remember singing a song called ‘From the Tiny Ant’ in assembly at primary school. Many of the songs we used to sing were about being good guardians—of our school, of our faith and, above all, of our planet. The hymn encouraged us to care for animals as various as the ‘common tern’ and the ‘white rhino’ in a series of barely-rhymed call and response verses. There was no mention of trees.

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In a separate assembly, and when I must have been five at the oldest, I remember a teacher telling us about climate change and earth’s dwindling resources. Specifically, the lesson had to do with oil and the fact that by the time we reached sixty, the age of our teacher, there would be none left. I have gone through phases of how I feel about this assembly experience. To begin with, I was struck with the urgency of the message. Nothing else seemed to matter for a few weeks but that we all stop using oil.

Later, I saw the message as an irresponsible thing to bring to bear upon children aged between four and eleven. Irresponsible in the same way that the ‘carbon footprint’ messaging was cruel. The ‘footprint’ seemed to radically shift the focus of blame for climate change onto ordinary individuals and deflect it from corporations, for a time. What did we children have to gain from an understanding of the potential for our planet to become inhospitable to humans?

Now, though, I am glad that I was met with the realities of the climate emergency after I’d only just gained consciousness. Not because it has made an impact on my behaviours (though it certainly has), but because it is exactly the sort of nightmarish tale that children can understand at a visceral level, if not a scientific one. If I’d only learned about these things much later in science lessons, I don’t think I’d have been frightened and desperate in my longing to make all well. More likely, I’d have been cynical, depressed and scathing. A five-year-old is almost never these things, but thirteen-year-olds often are.

This brings me back to The Overstory. Characters in this book have complex relationships with trees—some devote their whole lives to their research and protection, while others barely notice them until they are directly confronted by their importance. Some characters have tree-piphanies, and others are won over gradually. One of the most compelling aspects of the novel, then, is its depiction of the various ways in which a radical ecologist is made. Never is violent dissension condoned or condemned, it is simply shown, with all its adherent repercussions. This is why Powers’ book is a story and not merely a fact-file with some plot thrown in for good measure. Nor is it yet a parable with an all-too-clear message. Moral greyness saturates the book—neither side is entirely right or entirely wrong. Our civilisation relies upon trees being cut down, and yet we cannot do without them.

The book speaks to my five-year-old self, then, worrying about running out of oil and the collapse of our species and to my teenage self, sickened by the reality of these stories. But it goes beyond both of them, too, and it speaks to me now. I’m twenty-six, and I’m both more hopeful and more despairing than I’ve ever been about our future. A not insignificant part of the book records something very like the video game-ification of reality (or arguably a fledgling AI takeover). But the character behind these things loves trees as thoroughly as almost any of the others.

Nobody is always a hero, but everybody is sometimes a villain. Or so Powers would claim.

- Angus

Fernweh - Ger. (lit. ‘far pain’) ‘homesickness, longing for home’

I have read through Don Paterson’s slim book 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney. Of those hundred-and-one poems, twenty-three of them stood out as my favourites. Among the poems that I chose, some I already knew and loved. But most were new to me.

In the introduction to the collection, Paterson writes that the ‘elegiac’ tone in poetry is so widespread that ‘we’ve almost stopped hearing it’. It’s as if to write poetry is by its nature to lament, to elegise. The poetic voice, according to this view, tends towards the melancholic and functions first as a soothe to old wounds and only second as a delightful and melodious tonic.

I don’t want to analyse the poems in the collection, but I am going to write short reflections on a few of them. I hope you’ll agree that the works discussed here are not all only melancholic in nature. (I’ve embedded links so you can go and read them for yourself.)

The Silken Tent by Robert Frost

Comparing his love to a tent was perhaps an odd choice by Mr Frost, but he handles the extended metaphor very delicately indeed. I would like to feel as held by the world as the presented tent is by its guy-ropes. I long to feel connected to ‘every thing on earth the compass round’.

The poem feels Shakespearean to me, somehow. Or, at the very least, it feels Elizabethan. Something about the earnestness of the conceit and the lengths Frost goes to trace his love into each stage of the simile. It occurs to me, too, that the male strength depicted here is something that is both threatened and threatening in our modern political times. But this poem would want to challenge any dismissal of male leadership which we might make out of hand. A good leader, the poem proposes, is one who can guide their people in such a way that they scarcely feel that they are led. A good leader is not brash and does not impose cruel restrictions. They allow the tent to stand free in the wind. Free, but anchored.

A central, unspoken kinship with God likely also underpins the poem. There’s a moment in Paradise Lost where God says of man that he is ‘Sufficient to have stood though free to fall’. This strikes me as less pleasing a way of depicting free will than Frost’s tent analogy. Milton was poetically peerless, but his theology is a complex mess, to put it kindly. Meanwhile, Frost dubbed himself an ‘Old Testament Christian’, and would have well known of the tents that frequently serve as spaces where a chosen few witness God in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Tents are, quite unrelatedly, places where the divine may be encountered in small ways, too. The stars are more easily glimpsed when camping in a way that they are not when we stay put in our houses. At the same time, we allow nature to surround us when we lie in a tent. Maybe we learn to see God in the ladybird that snuck its way in overnight and greets us, crawling over the sleeping bag in the morning.

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Noon by John Clare (this online version is heavily edited, unfortunately)

Speaking of nature, how about something from one of the best nature writers in the language? This is a great poem of moment. I think too much has been made of ‘golden hour’ and not enough of that harsher light—the one seen in the middle of a summer’s day. Clare’s natural world is never idyll or stereotype, he is too honest a poet for that. There is very little that is golden-hued in Clare’s poetry, especially his later output.

This matters. The world is hot and getting hotter. We seem hellbent on worsening the climate crisis, and those in power don’t care a jot that thousands of our fellow species no longer exist. John Clare gives us elegies to lament the faltering natural world. ‘Noon’ is not one of these, though. It is nor hopeful nor sad; neither celebration nor elegy. It is—like so much of the best poetry—observation.

Because I want to love humanity, I choose to believe that we can and will avoid the worst that climate change threatens. But the world that Clare observed is already gone. He recorded his moment with attention and a brilliant reluctance to embellish it with prettied verses. Yet, would he recognise the fenland country that he knew if he saw it today? And what would he make of our continued exploitation of the planet—nascent in his day? These are not questions without answers. We know that he would feel ashamed and estranged; perhaps even ‘homeless at home’, as he once wrote.

But there are John Clares to this day; people who are quietly documenting and counteracting the ravages of what we are doing. People who, in spite of stacked odds, continue to do the work anyway.

Swineherd by Eiléan Ni Chuiellenáin

This poem is an elegy in the sense that its speaker wants to be somewhere else. The place they long to be is an impossible place—a reality where cream crawling to the top of a jug and water lying in a cistern make sounds.

But I think I get it. Have you ever wanted the constituents of life to be otherwise—not the things that make up your life, but those that comprise life itself? I know I have. One of the facts of living I have struggled with is our species’ need to consume constantly. My personal swineherd would want to ‘retire’ to a place where we didn't have to eat to sustain life. I feel similarly about the consumption of goods. My swineherd would want to inhabit a world where people—himself (myself) included—owned only what was necessary for life to be sustained. I'm not saying I want to sell everything I own except the clothes on my back. But if it were possible to live like that—were life not so precarious—I think it would be pleasanter than our current addiction to things.

A word on how all of this makes me reflect on the pace of life. My swineherd would also want to move into a world where it doesn't make sense to rush—where meditation and existence would be quite synonymous. So much of what I do seems fraught with worry and speed. Retiring to a place where nobody has heard of the swineherd’s ‘special skills’ implies that their relentless drive to be always achieving and rarely enjoying would finally be over.

‘That Time of year thou may’st in me behold’ by William Shakespeare

Paterson's book features just one poem per poet. How do you capture Shakespeare’s huge contribution to the sonnet in one poem?

In his introduction, Paterson notes that Shakespeare's choice of subjects paved the way for all the freedom poets now find in the sonnet. What started (from an obscure song form in Italy) as a poem where a man could showily set down his love for a woman, became a form of fourteen lines that could encompass anything at all. I think this poem gives one of the most perfect senses of how Shakespeare bridges that gap.

When people enquire as to why Shakespeare is known as the best writer in the language, they find a range of answers. The scholar Emma Smith argued that his ‘gappiness’—his refusal to provide answers to key questions and his lack of stage directions, for example—are as good a reason for his longevity as any other. We can bring a lot of ourselves to him, she argues. Other more typical answers often have to do with what he has in abundance that others have only in part: linguistic inventiveness, beautiful turns of phrase, characters who are somehow ‘persons’. Incidentally, Smith takes issue with all of these elements as markers of Shakespeare’s brilliance.

I think my own view is pretty nicely held in this short poem: Shakespeare is the genius of noticing and he is the genius of describing. In this sonnet (number 73) he describes desolation overtly—winter birds become ‘bare ruin’d choirs’. But he also shows his knack of noticing the concordances between his subject and his image like nobody else. In #73, he imagines bodily decay as not only like the ashes left after a fire (many could perhaps have made such an observation), but he also notices that it is the ashes that consume a fire, just as the body consumes itself with age. In sustained argument, richness of metaphor and sheer wit, nobody compares.

The Skylight by Seamus Heaney

But of all the poems in Paterson’s collection, this was the most spinetingling. Heaney captures love (as sonnets have done for centuries) but his approach feels unique. How can something so simple as a house renovation cause the poem’s speaker to feel total elation and renewal? It’s simple. Love is surprise. It is the life-transforming miracle that comes into a home of cheerlessness and recasts it again and again.

- Angus

I’m still working out what this means for me, day by day. I admit, a large part of it is purely selfcare. I’m trying to get better at doing all of those basic things that I know help me. Above all, though, I’m after the kindness that spreads outwards. Of course, in order to be this sort of kind, you have to have enough understanding of what kindness towards a specific person means. It isn’t enough to hit and hope.

But there are times when being kind to oneself, too, can be a challenge. For instance, I know that it is a kindness towards me to feed my curiosity—perhaps the kindest thing that I can do for myself. But the skill then comes in feeding the curiosity with the right things. When viewed this way, reading is no longer the self-absorbed method of increasing knowledge or insight, it is a way to ensure that I am caring towards me and thereby able to care for others. After all, ‘the opposite of depression isn’t happiness, the opposite of depression is interested’.

I have struggled with allowing myself to feel that I am good. This is especially due to some anxiety. Particularly as an anxious teenager, I wanted to say and do kind things, but found that when I went to speak or enact them one of two things occurred. Either I held my tongue or failed to act at all—out of embarrassment—and thereby any potential kinship was cut away before it could have taken root. Or else, if I did act ‘kindly’, I would critique (and even cringe at) my words and actions at every stage—before, during and especially after them. I was certainly stung sometimes for trying to be kind, but my memory is that I was in fact most affected when my honesty and kindness were themselves called into question. Because I agreed with those people’s assessment: I wasn’t the person I wanted to be, the person I tried to present as. But I felt I lacked the reserves of will to be otherwise. One of my phobias, then, became my own potential for cynicism and sarcasm.

With all that, I do now think being kind to oneself means accepting one’s failures and feeling regretful sometimes. I don’t want to hold myself to that old standard that I am incapable of ever reaching. If I think about the figures who make me want to be a better version of myself, they are not perfect. They are often not actually what we would stereotype as ‘successful’. I keep coming back to Leopold Bloom feeding the gulls with his sandwich in chapter eight of Ulysses. I think, too about a lyric from the Jeff Rosenstock song ‘Healmode’ describing the aftermath of a storm:

I'm wondering if the neighborhood coyotes found a good place to take cover

Or King Lear’s realisation when seeing the impoverished Tom O’Bedlam:

[…] O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this.

It’s not for nothing that two of these examples exhibit care for animals. Indeed, ‘Poor Tom’ himself, and humankind with him, is described by Lear as a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’. It is these kindnesses which spring from nothing—from even delusion and psychosis in Lear’s case—that I feel most drawn to, most inspired by. It doesn’t have to be kindness that reaches down (or magnanimity) for it to be notable to me. Leopold Bloom is, in the eyes of his Dublin, beneath many of its inhabitants. But he excels them all in thought. Not because his thought is brilliant and insular, but because it is ordinary, often kind and outward-reaching. As a teenager, I generally cared too much about whether I appeared interesting and likeable to pause and look beyond and around myself. I’m still fighting this tendency, this worry, but I do seem to be improving.

Before I thought about writing as something I might actually be able to do, I wrote a short piece about wanting to be kind rather than brilliant. That piece is now lost forever, and in many ways I’m glad it is, but I stand by what I set out there. Oddly, I think Marcel Proust (of all people) would have agree with my claims. As I said last week, I’m only about halfway through his massive novel, but if I’ve learned anything from it thus far, it is that he wants to record the minutiae of experience not as an ostentation, but because it allows him to bridge the world of the self and the external. His protagonist is as flawed as us all, but in the quietest moments, all of the fuss and feathers and the casual cruelty seem to melt away into the buried goodness of Marcel.

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The world in the mid-2020s can be such an unkind place, and the steady churn of work can cozen us into thinking we must be productive before all else. But I want to resist the societal tendency to always be working on myself, striving to achieve some unattainable future happiness. There’s a video by Nathan Zed that I watched the other morning which really takes this idea and runs with it. It’s a neat little thought experiment, part of which suggests that some dreams may be composed of nothing more than deep-seated insecurities.

Taking inspiration from this idea, I’ve spent the past few days re-evaluating a few of the things I thought I wanted. Do I really want to write prolifically, or do I just like the feeling I get when I have written a story or a poem? I know that I don’t much enjoy forcing the things I have written onto others—so that would suggest that I’m not after success in a traditional sense. One thing that hasn’t changed from this reflection, though, is my desire to be kind—to forgive others and myself. To worry, with Holden Caulfield, what happens to the ducks when the lake freezes over. To wonder if the neighbourhood coyotes found a good place to take cover.

- Angus

These will be little weekly essays on literature and music written by a recent graduate in English from Cambridge. I hope you will enjoy what’s in store.

This first piece will be something of a pledge and a hope for what my reading, listening and watching life will contain in 2026. In this way, it will also be a preview for some of what lies ahead with this newsletter.

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As a volunteer bookseller for the past two years, I have picked up books (arguably too many books) in that time. Since downloading Letterboxd, I have also accrued a watchlist that is over nine-hundred films long. Meanwhile, my new MP3 player is waiting for my musical discovery to resume.

Reading

I want to read the books I own and not get distracted by ‘grass is greener’ books. This means not buying too many more books and resisting putting something down before it is finished.

With that said, here are a few things I would like to read this year, and why:

Fiction

1. Proust

I’m halfway through Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—more precisely, I’m at the midway point of volume four, Sodom and Gomorrah.

Why I want to read it: Because, having started it over two years ago, some of the passages and moments in it are more marvellous and moving than anything I have ever read. My English teacher from school recommended it back at the end of 2023 because, in his view, it captures and recreates conscious thought in a way that no writer has done before or since. It has great swathes that are often accounted boring, a view I can agree with, but these parts manage to heighten the tender moments.

2. The Overstory

My current read. I’m about a fifth of the way through—in other words, at the start of the book’s largest section ‘Trunk’.

Why I want to read it: My mum read this in lockdown and loved it. Simultaneously, I want to develop my kinship with nature this year. My third year dissertation at Cambridge focused on ecocritical readings of the poet of nature John Clare and the lesser known Mary Webb. Having read much of Clare’s oeuvre now, I want more and more to connect with the natural world around me. This book gets the tree knowledge across amongst a story, which is doubly enticing.

3. Le Morte d’Arthur

I have read the final two books of this before for university (but in the original Middle English).

Why I want to read it: When I read the final two books a few years back, I found the characters and stories very weird but, equally, inspiring. My favourite book is Don Quixote, so the chivalric elements are familiar territory, and this only makes the strangeness of the whole thing that much more intriguing. I am interested to see how the archaic nature of the language reads in ‘translation’ to modern English.

Plays & Screenplays

I have dreams of writing a feature screenplay. I’ve written short ones and I hope that I will continue to do so in 2026.

As scripts are often available online for free as PDFs, I would like to be more consistent in reading them this year. You can learn a lot from reading a script and thinking about how it relates to a film you have seen or, alternatively, reading one for a film you’ve never seen.

Non-Fiction

1. Six Facets of Light

I actually only have this on Kindle, but I’m including it as I do read on that device quite often.

Why I want to read it: I’m interested in books like this which are essentially essay collections. I thought about putting Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence here, but went with ‘Six Facets of Light’ in the end. This is a book which examines views, both modern and ancient, on what light might be and why it behaves as it does. I’m not much of a physicist, so I’m hoping that it will favour the poetic over the scientific. I imagine it will, though.

2. Ellmann’s Joyce

I have never dipped so much as a toe in this, although I have read an LRB article about its creator, Richard Ellmann, which made me want to read it even more.

Why I want to read it: My second year dissertation was on Joyce’s Ulysses, specifically on how food helps us understand theories of masculinity expounded in the book. It came together very late and I feel I still lack the comprehensive view of Joyce’s life that this book promises. I know that some of the stories recounted here have been questioned, possibly even disproven, but it wouldn’t be Joycean without such things, would it?

3. Essays of Elia

Charles Lamb has always struck me as a figure, rather like Keats and Clare, who could be a kindred spirit.

Why I want to read it: I bought these essays back in 2023, when I was struggling with depression. I think I read two or three of them before deciding that I wasn’t ready for them, yet. This is not because they are especially heavy in their subject matter, but rather because they are dense in their language. At the time, I felt that I lacked the mental space to absorb the words here. Now, however—and especially after having ‘skipped’ the ‘Long 18th Century’ paper at Cambridge in favour of ‘Old English’—I feel I want to try again.

Poetry

Many different poets, including: Paul Celan, Lucille Clifton, John Donne, Emily Dickinson etc.

I also want to learn more poetry this year. Some of my favourite poems give me two strange senses. Firstly, when I first encounter them, they make me feel like I have read them before, even sometimes giving me the feeling that I’ve always known them. Secondly, they make me feel that every word and punctuation mark is in its perfect place, and reading them becomes an overwhelming experience. I’d like to commit more of these sorts of poems to memory, line breaks and all.

Viewing

Films

I’m currently watching Tarkovsky’s films. I’ve seen Stalker and Solaris thus far. I loved both of them, and next on my list is Mirror.

Overall, though, I want to watch films that make me happy or make me think (and preferably both). I saw The Holiday over Christmas for the first time and thought it was delightful, in all honesty. I don’t often rewatch films, but I’d like that to slightly change this year. What are my comfort films? I don’t know, but I’d like to find out. Meanwhile, Mirror is the favourite film of one of my best friends, so I’ve got high hopes for it.

TV

I often say that I don’t want to watch TV when asked. I’d like to change that, as well. If I can cultivate a patience for slow-form content again (like the patience I have for reading) I think I’d be all the happier for it.

I’d like to watch Downton Abbey. I’ve never seen more than a few minutes here and there, and I realise now that it is far more compelling than I gave it credit for when I was ten. I also want to finish Better Call Saul. It’s a compelling show, but I put it down in 2024 (during series 4, I believe) and haven’t resumed. I don’t watch very much TV, so Saul’s story is slightly blowing my mind with its twists and turns.

Listening

Music

This is possibly the biggest area of transformation on this short list. I want to listen with more attention and intention this year.

I want to listen to more classical music and try and get out of some rabbit holes that I have been down for years now. It’s not that I now dislike Bob Dylan, Sufjan Stevens and The Beatles—far from it, they remain my favourites—but I do want to expand my horizons. I want music that fills me with optimism and hope or salves pain in difficult times. There are certain things that I normally dismiss out of hand, and I want to stop doing this and start trying to understand or appreciate. Trumpets in jazz? Yes please! Romantic symphonies? Why not! Acid trance music? Okay, maybe not acid trance music. That one just might not be for me.

- Angus