We are entering Week 4 of lock down in London and the weekend weather has been kind, giving us sun and light in place of muted grey and drizzle. BBQs and sunglasses have replaced jumpers and socks. People are out sunbathing while others are dying.
It's very odd.
Our household, for now, is free of illness and so I have been reading in the sun. Newspapers, books, magazines. One particular sentence that zinged through me was by columnist and author Deborah Levy who wrote:
We will have to investigate the magic of the universe from home.
Surveying my To-Read pile, I pulled out two books that have been gathering dust for many months, mainly because I had never felt in the mood to read them since purchase - Island Home: A Landscape Memoir and Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir, both by fellow West Australian, Tim Winton.
Who knew that it would take a global pandemic to put me in the mood?
I was less than a third of the way through Island Home when it clicked that the sentences were slaking a thirst I didn't realise I had. I drank it whole and moved swiftly onto Land's Edge.
Both books took me to a place and time outside of corona virus, lock downs and social distancing. They evoked a craving for the West Australian landscape that germinated in me as a young child exploring bush land near our suburban brick and tile home. They made me long for a coastline that leaves your mind blank when you look at it.
I wrote about this longing after my first few years of living in London; about missing the brand of wilderness that raised me. It took about five, six years of London life for the oasis of a coastline to ebb in my mind.
Fifteen years on, I thought I had adapted to my new environs and that the zest of daily London life had put to bed the craving for wild.
I was wrong. It was just subsumed. Waiting.
As Mr Winton wrote in Land's Edge:
In Europe I tried the landlocked existence. In Paris I experienced my first apartment and my first truly dispiriting body of water, the Seine. The city itself was a revelation, an astounding and beautiful place, but after six months I found myself crazy for the margins.
It's no coincidence that during this marginal existence we are living, waiting on the edges of our lives for the threat of covid to recede, that I yearn for the spaces that make me feel outside of myself. To be overwhelmed in nature as opposed to being overwhelmed by a virus.
Something has come full circle. And it's only week 4.
It's very odd.
Our household, for now, is free of illness and so I have been reading in the sun. Newspapers, books, magazines. One particular sentence that zinged through me was by columnist and author Deborah Levy who wrote:
We will have to investigate the magic of the universe from home.
Surveying my To-Read pile, I pulled out two books that have been gathering dust for many months, mainly because I had never felt in the mood to read them since purchase - Island Home: A Landscape Memoir and Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir, both by fellow West Australian, Tim Winton.
Who knew that it would take a global pandemic to put me in the mood?
I was less than a third of the way through Island Home when it clicked that the sentences were slaking a thirst I didn't realise I had. I drank it whole and moved swiftly onto Land's Edge.
Both books took me to a place and time outside of corona virus, lock downs and social distancing. They evoked a craving for the West Australian landscape that germinated in me as a young child exploring bush land near our suburban brick and tile home. They made me long for a coastline that leaves your mind blank when you look at it.
I wrote about this longing after my first few years of living in London; about missing the brand of wilderness that raised me. It took about five, six years of London life for the oasis of a coastline to ebb in my mind.
Fifteen years on, I thought I had adapted to my new environs and that the zest of daily London life had put to bed the craving for wild.
I was wrong. It was just subsumed. Waiting.
As Mr Winton wrote in Land's Edge:
In Europe I tried the landlocked existence. In Paris I experienced my first apartment and my first truly dispiriting body of water, the Seine. The city itself was a revelation, an astounding and beautiful place, but after six months I found myself crazy for the margins.
It's no coincidence that during this marginal existence we are living, waiting on the edges of our lives for the threat of covid to recede, that I yearn for the spaces that make me feel outside of myself. To be overwhelmed in nature as opposed to being overwhelmed by a virus.
Something has come full circle. And it's only week 4.
