The story so far: a freelance writer and editor for 20+ years, I jumped ship in April 2015 from bricks and mortar to live on a historic narrowboat – currently permanently moored in a busy marina in greenest Staffordshire.
Wednesday 22 April, 13 degrees, mixed sunshine and clouds
This month I’m participating in an online course called Connect to Nature, Connect to Self, which has been my reward to myself for going through the fire of moving house. I’ve done this course run by two multi-talented artists, Jaime McDonald and Morwhenna Woolcock before, and love it. Since its focus is on spending time in nature doing quirky and artsy things, I thought it would be a great way to get to know the marina and its environs.
So at three o’clock this afternoon, in intermittent sunshine and full of cold picked up on the tube at the London Book Fair last week, I wandered off to my self-chosen nature spot where the marina meets the canal. Participants are encouraged to find a specific place in nature that’s near to where they live and which feels like home (park, woodland, back garden or rainforest: any green site will do) and frequent it during the course to play their way through a series of friendly adventures.
Today’s was to create something called a sound-map. I plonked down on picnic bench by the canal, closed my eyes and listened. Having tuned into to birdsong, quacking, the hum and saw of traffic, dog barks, a lawn strimmer and, far off, people talking on their phones, I got out a box of wax pastels – purchased bizarrely for a writing workshop I ran in a women’s prison two summers ago – and chose colours to describe the varied sounds on paper in a sort of synaesthesic way.
What I like about this exercise is that, even done badly, the resultant drawing resembles a treasure map. Mine had lime green stars for birdsong, dark green swirls for rustling trees, and a dense blue circle when a Canada goose almost fell from the bank to the water next to me, as they do, and then skidded over the canal marking deep furrows in the water.
When I’d finished, I watched the geese. The males (I think they were males) held their necks so they became taut and muscular and threatening looking, then writhed them around so they resembled vacuum cleaner tubes with air pumping through – there seem to be a lot of threesomes at mating season: lone males hanging about to get lucky. A lone male jumped into the water to chase after a pair. The two males mirrored each other with their wriggly neck suction dance. Or maybe this was a male and a female courting. Who knows? I hope to find out though not by getting up close.