I’ve decided to showcase a different writer at the end of every month, beginning with the talented and hard-working Ruth Loten. Ruth was a fellow student of mine on the Masters in Creative Writing cohort who graduated in 2020, and she is currently a valued member of the Twenty-Twenty Club, a group for MA alumni to give writing feedback to each other. Since then, she has continued writing prolifically alongside co-founding and co-editing the literary magazine, Makarelle. She has also worked as Writer-In-Residence at Brightlingsea lido. Her most recent project is setting up an independent publishing company with her friend, Jane Langan, called Castle Priory Press. Scroll down to find out more about Ruth and her writing, including one of her stories and an in-depth interview containing many insights into the life of a writer.
BIOGRAPHY
Ruth was
born in Saltaire, West Yorkshire but grew up in Cleveleys, Lancashire. She
graduated from Exeter University in 2000 and qualified as a Religious
Studies teacher in 2001. Having met her future husband at university, they got
married and moved to the South East - him to do his MA and her to start her
teaching career.
Ruth worked full time as a
teacher, writing odd bits here and there whenever she found the time, in
between the job, the dogs, the husband and the small boy who was added to the
family in 2005.
In 2014 she gave up teaching to
become a full-time writer, but after a few months, life decided it had other
plans for her and she went back to running around after another small boy. At
the same time, the family moved to the Essex coast and started building their
family life in a new town.
When the littlest member of the
family started pre-school, however, it was time for her to dust off the
fountain pen and notebooks and start writing again. She decided to study for an
MA in Creative Writing with the Open University and in December 2020, she
graduated with a Merit.
Since then, she has published
two novels for adults, one for middle grade children, and a children's picture
book, as well as being involved in editing and publishing various anthologies.
Along with Jane Langan, Ruth has just launched the hybrid publishing company
Castle Priory Press.
Publication and links:
QR codes which should take you straight to Ruth's books:
Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram): @lotenaut
CASTLE
PRIORY PRESS:
When Jane
and I decided we wanted to venture into the world of publishing, we were very
clear that we wanted to do the same for novelists as we had done for short
story writers and poets during our time at Makarelle. We know that
publishing your own work is hard and requires a particular skill set that not
all writers have. Consequently, it can be an expensive business. We wanted to
target people who wanted to retain control of their work, set their own
deadlines and produce a professional product, but didn’t necessarily have the
skill or the time to do it themselves and can’t afford the potentially
thousands of pounds it costs to use vanity/other hybrid publishers.
We are not looking to make a fortune out of other people’s work and so we have set our prices as low as possible and long-term, our aim is to grow a conglomerate of authors who cross-promote each other’s work so that everybody who publishes with us gets maximum exposure. Eventually, we also hope to be able to offer editing services alongside our publishing ones, but for now we are focusing on the publishing side of things.
Here is a sample of Ruth's writing:
THE FEW
I stare at the sky; clouds chasing each other,
vapour trails cutting a path across the wide blue expanse. The sun is warm on
my upturned face but I am cold. I stretch out my suit-clad legs, the thick
black fabric scratchy and unfamiliar on my skin. I’m more at home in blue
chinos these days. They’re comfy, you see. Soft. Not like the blue trousers
from then. They were rough and didn’t fit properly. That’s the one thing they
never get right in the films – those fighter pilots all look very handsome and
terribly British. Most of us didn’t have that plummy accent and our uniforms
never fit as well as theirs do.
1940 was a scary time for
all of us and it feels odd to sit in a cinema and watch it dramatised. No
matter how exciting the plot is, the fiction never comes close to capturing the
heart-stopping terror we felt. Not that I ever see much of the action. As soon
as it starts, I close my eyes and I’m back in the skies, a Messerschmidt 109 on
my tail. Every burst of machine gun from the surround sound has me flinching in
my seat, certain that every bullet is tracing straight for me. Why do I go, you
ask? In some ways, the answer is simple and, in others, it’s complicated.
The simple answer is: to
remember. Every death played out on that screen I saw tenfold. Such films are
always dedicated to the memory of ‘The Few’. Those few were my friends.
The complicated answer is
that I can’t help myself. I tell myself not to go. That it doesn’t help. It
won’t bring them back. And yet every time a new one is released, I’m at the
front of the queue, urgently thrusting my money at the ambivalent cashier.
Sometimes they note my age and comment.
‘Reliving old glories,
Sir?’
I smile and nod.
‘Something like that.’ I could never tell them the truth. That there was
nothing glorious about it. It was nothing more than a fight for survival. And
now I see it all happening again. Different arena. Same lies. Same disaster. It
never changes.
I remember because I
can’t forget. And I wouldn’t want to. When we forget, we don’t learn the
lessons. We make the same mistakes.
There was only me and Fran left from the old days. He never went back after the war. What would have been the point? He was the only one of his family left, so he stayed here with me. We muddled along alright together, him and me. We didn’t talk much about the war and he never truly understood my need to see the films, but he was my best friend and now he’s gone.
František Svoboda 1921-2022. Beloved and much missed.
It’s not much, is it, for a lifetime of companionship? It’s more than many of the others got though, so I don’t complain. Churchill famously called us The Few and I was proud to be numbered among them. It may have been a living hell at times, but I’d give anything to go back and be with them all.
The Few.
The Fewer.
The One.
[first published in Makarelle, and also in the anthology The Silent Pool And Other Stories]
And finally we come to The Big Interview, where Ruth kindly answers writing-related questions and lets us into some of her writing secrets...
How old were you
when you first knew you wanted to be a writer, and what set you off down that
journey?
It wasn’t something that I considered as a career when I was younger – I
was very much told that I had to do a degree that would lead to a ‘proper’ job
– but when I gave up teaching in 2014, the plan was that I would write books
and attempt to make a career out of it. I was extraordinarily naïve about it,
but did start going into my local school for author visits and to work with
gifted creative writers. I wrote a few children’s books and self-published
them, but did almost no promotion of them, so unsurprisingly they didn’t sell
massively well! It wasn’t until my youngest son went to pre-school in 2018 that
I started to really take writing seriously and applied to do a Masters in
Creative Writing with the Open University. Doing the course made me realise
that I could actually write and I just needed to work at it, if I wanted to
turn it into a career.
Tell us about the
books that have shaped your life and your writing career.
Books have always been a huge part of my life and every book I’ve read
has influenced me in one way or another. However, if I had to just pick a few…
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books taught me about the importance of
world building, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series taught me about
weaving myths and legends into my children’s books and Kate Mosse’s Languedoc
books taught me about the beauty and importance of landscape descriptions and
how they can be used effectively to reflect the plot/atmosphere of a story. On
the MA we had to write about authors who had influenced us and it was Cooper
and Mosse I wrote about. (https://www.reloten.com/post/writing-a-picture-how-the-themes-style-of-susan-cooper-and-kate-mosse-have-influenced-my-writing)
In terms of my writing, Stephen King’s On Writing gave me the
push I needed to become a more ruthless editor and Save The Cat! Writes A
Novel gave me the help I needed to sort out the structure of my books.
Definitely! The Reign of the Winter King started life as a book
for my eldest son (The Forest Children) and featured him and his
friends. When I decided to rewrite it and turn it into a proper book that other
people might enjoy, I added my youngest son as a character and included King
Arthur as well. Elements of the original story are there, but large parts of
the plot have changed beyond recognition and it’s become the first book in a
planned trilogy (The Courts Series). Whilst I’ve made it clear to them
that the characters are inspired by my boys, but are not meant to be
them, much of their personality did seep into the characters. In fact, when I
had it edited by someone who knows my boys, she told me I had to make changes
to them, particularly the eldest, because he wasn’t demonstrating typical
teenage behaviour. Her comment read something along the lines of ‘I know
they’re based on your boys, but your boys aren’t normal!’. Of course, she was
absolutely right and they found it hilarious, but I did make the changes she
suggested.
Does the place you
live have any impact on your writing, do you think?
Location is always something that is hugely important to me in my
writing – far more than the characters in many ways because I think everybody
is shaped by where they live. Although I was born in Saltaire, I grew up just
outside Blackpool and I’m very conscious that I view it in a very different way
to my husband, who has only ever been a visitor. Consequently, the Blackpool I
described in Unforgettable is my Blackpool. My latest book Folly
is set in a fictional version of Brightlingsea (where I now live) called
‘Avonstow’ and is inspired by much of the town’s history. I was meant to be
starting a book set in Cornwall, but we had gone back into Lockdown and I like
to visit the places I’m writing about, so – as I couldn’t go to Cornwall – I
decided to put that book on hold and write Folly instead. We have a
little flat in Cornwall, so there are lots of ideas in my notebook for novels
set there, but I have at least two more books in the Avonstow series
left to write and two more to finish of The Courts series, so Cornwall
is going to have to wait for a while.
How would you
describe your own writing?
When I’m writing for adults, I like to have dual stories going on,
preferably across different time periods. At the moment, I’m very much writing
historical fiction, although I am collaborating on a romantic comedy and have
the basis of an idea for a cosy crime series, but I think I’m more comfortable
in historical based books. I also like to use real history where possible as a
backdrop for the story, so in Folly, the 1917 story was set during the
time the ANZAC soldiers from the Australian Engineers Training Division were
based in Brightlingsea and the 1995 story used the real Brightlingsea protests
against live animal exports as its basis.
Are there certain
themes that draw you to them when you are writing?
There always seems to be an element of romance in my writing, but the
actual romance isn’t usually the main theme. It might be the catalyst for the
action, but it’s not often the action itself. In Folly, the love story
of Alice and Will drives what happens, but the story is as much about John’s
obsession with Alice and Alice’s desire to be her own person. There is a hint
of romance between Jack and Ellie in the modern half, but when I was editing
the book, I took out most of it because that part of the book was about Ellie’s
quest to uncover the truth. I’m now writing the sequel and after much debate
with myself, although there are a number of relationships within the plot,
ultimately it’s about the two main character learning to love themselves and
make peace with their pasts.
Tell us about you approach to your writing. Are you a planner or a pantser?
When I first started, I was very much a pantser. I knew where I was
going to and sort of meandered my way through the story to get there.
Unfortunately, it often meant I got to about 50,000 words and then got stuck.
More recently, I’ve known the basic plot, but ‘pantsed’ it to halfway as I got
to know the characters and then plotted the second half. With the current novel
I’m working on, however, I had a much clearer idea of the plot and so I started
to plan properly after about 20,000 words. Because I was writing it in two
sections, however, I have to plan them separately and the 2017 story I have
planned out before I’ve actually started writing it, which is a first for me! I
think the more I write and the less I worry about whether or not I’m capable of
writing enough words for a novel, the more I plan before I write.
Do you have any
advice for someone who might be thinking about starting to write creatively?
Don’t be afraid, just do it! So many people worry about whether or not
they are capable of doing it and whether it’s any good or not, that they become
paralysed and end up writing nothing. Lots of writers say that a blank page is
the scariest thing they face, but for me, that’s the exciting bit. There are so
many possibilities, so many directions to take your story in and anything can
happen. The scariest part for me is hitting the ‘publish’ button because after
that, my babies are out in the world for other people to judge!
Are you, or have
you been in the past, a member of any writing groups, online or face-to-face?
Do you run any? What do you think is the value of such groups?
I’m a member of two face-to-face writing groups and two online ones –
one via Zoom and the other via email. One face-to-face makes me write short
stories, which I would rarely do otherwise, and the other one is encouraging me
to write in a different genre, which is very much out of my comfort zone. The
online ones are both focused specifically on novels, so it’s nice to have
people who understand the structure look at your work and give feedback on
specific elements you’ve asked them to consider for you. All four are
invaluable to me because writing can be a very lonely profession and building a
community around you helps alleviate that. It also means that you can talk to
people about your work without sounding crazy. Fellow writers understand what
you mean when you say that your characters are arguing with you and deciding
where they want you to go with it, or telling you that they simply
wouldn’t react in the way you’ve written. I’m also very lucky that people from
all of these groups have contributed to other projects I’ve been involved with
– they’ve contributed to anthologies I’ve been putting together and allowed us
to publish their own work through our imprint.
You have an MA in
Creative Writing from the Open University. What do you think you have learned from such courses? Do you think they
are worthwhile? Have you ever done any teaching of Creative Writing
yourself? If so, did you enjoy it and did you learn anything yourself?
The MA is the only Creative Writing course I’ve done and I learnt a huge
amount from it. It gave me the confidence to accept that writing was something
I was good at and people weren’t just being nice to me! Having the
qualification has also opened other doors for me and I’ve been given
opportunities that I simply wouldn’t have had without it. It made me far less
sensitive about criticism and helped me to move from the thinking of ‘well it’s
just rubbish’ to ‘it’s good but this is how to make it better’. I have taught a
handful of creative writing workshops for both adults and children, most
recently as part of the Brightlingsea Literary Festival, which I was involved
in setting up and running. I’d definitely recommend doing writing courses, for
the simple reason that they do help to improve your writing, but more
importantly they give you confidence in your own abilities and get you used to
the idea that a critique is a positive thing!
What do you think
about getting feedback on your work from other writers and/or non-writers? How
often do you act upon suggestions made by feedbackers or beta-readers?
In my experience, it’s incredibly difficult to get good quality feedback
from non-writers. It generally tends to be along the lines of ‘it was really
good and I enjoyed it, can we discuss X plot point because it was really
interesting’ rather than ‘there are too many adjectives and there’s a glaring
plot hole between X part and Y part’ which is often the kind of feedback you
really need. Consequently, I use different people for different purposes. I
have one reader I use to make sure the book is readable and engaging and others
who I ask for more ‘writerly’ feedback and then I have Jane to sort out my sex
scenes (I hate writing them but sometimes they’re necessary) and to do my
detailed editing before I send it to my copy editor who checks for any SPAG
mistakes I’ve missed. I’ve used professional editors in the past as well – once
to untangle a plot I’d got in a muddle with and once to do a final structure
edit. Both were helpful and relatively inexpensive.
You have experience
of editing a literary magazine (Makarelle) and of self-publishing. What have
been the challenges and rewards of such experiences?
Working on the magazine was an incredible experience. I learnt so much
from it, both in terms of my own writing and of the wider publishing world.
However, in the end, we all found that it was taking over our lives. It was
incredibly time consuming to read all the submissions, make decisions about
them and then actually put the magazine together and promote it. We had gone
into it, wanting to have a platform to showcase our own work and that of
others, but we ended up only writing the stories we did for the magazine and
ultimately, that was why we stopped doing it. We loved working together, but we
just weren’t writing what we wanted to. Learning from that, when Jane and I
decided to launch Castle Priory Press, we were very clear about the amount of
time we were prepared to devote to it each week and agreed that if we began to
get lots of submissions, we would simply close submissions until we were ready
to open again. It allows a far greater degree of flexibility than a magazine
that has to be out on a specific date.
In terms of advice, the main one would be that if
you’re going to do it, make sure you do it with people you genuinely get on
with. Jane, Dini and I never fell out over what we were doing – we had a policy
in place about the criteria for accepting a piece and we stuck to it. Our
friendship was far more important than the magazine and even though Dini isn’t
involved in CPP (she’s having a great time travelling the world) we still
message each other and we still have our group chat, it’s just that now we
share cat memes and funny anecdotes rather than questions about Makarelle.
The rest of it, I’m afraid, is learning on the job and being prepared to put an
awful lot of hours in!
Where do you get
your ideas from?
Usually from places I visit. I’ll quite often walk into somewhere and
think ‘I have to write a story about this place’. Unforgettable came
from me visiting Beth Chatto Gardens – I was walking round and had a vision of
someone walking in, seeing someone on a bench and falling instantly in love
with them. The other half of that book came from me sitting in the ballroom in
Blackpool Tower and realising that, much as I loved the place, I’d never
written anything that used it as a major setting. The novel I’m currently
editing, Blythewode, was born from a visit to Warley Place. That version
didn’t work (I now have another idea for a novel set there) but I went on a
writing retreat to Northmoor House in Somerset and everything suddenly fell
into place and I wrote the first draft in six weeks.
They say that
successful writers need to be selfish. How far do you agree with this?
I think there is definitely an element of truth to this. I have to fit
writing in around my family so I tend to try to write Monday-Thursday in school
hours and on Fridays, when I’m in the Lido Café as part of my Writer in
Residence role, I tend to do admin – book reviews, social media, editing for
other people etc. I need quiet and an extended period of time to write properly
so I don’t get a lot done in the school holidays – I do a lot more reading
then, so I tend to use holidays for research, note taking and planning.
However, I have said that if I need to, I’ll either take myself down to the
flat for a week or go to the library in the holidays to get on with some
writing. By choice, I write at my desk in my study, although if I’m writing
about a particular place that is local to us, I take myself off to write on
location. On an ideal week I aim for a minimum of 2,500 words a day, but often
other commitments get in the way. If the writing is going well I’m pretty
disciplined with it, but if it’s not going smoothly I find myself doing lots of
writing related things that don’t actually involve me writing the novel – in
the first two weeks of March when I was struggling, I managed about 2,500 words
in total. In the last two weeks, despite meetings and other distractions, I
added 7,500 words and planned the second half of the book in detail!
I know you’re
interested in history and often use historical settings in your writing. What
sort of historical research have you done in connection with your writing?
I’m hugely interested in history – most of what I write is historical in
one way or another and in researching my Avonstow books I’ve learnt lots
about our local history, but also about wider historical events. Over the last
few years, I’ve researched, amongst other things – alcohol prices and pub
opening hours in 1917, various WW1 battles, the history of RAF Duxford and RAF
Debden, the work of the Double Cross team in WW2, the history of the WRNS, the
history of Lidos, Australian trench slang from WW1, live animal exports and the
moral debate behind it, the history of Essex railways and army camps and
pre-WW1 Melbourne. If I can visit a place I’m writing about, I will, simply
because I want to describe the feel of a place as much as the bricks and mortar
and it’s not always possible to achieve that just by looking at photos. As I
said before, much of what I write, both in short and long fiction, is inspired
by real events, which I then fictionalise and adapt for my own purposes. As to
whether writers need to know about historical events, I think that depends on
what they’re writing about – if it has an impact on their characters, no matter
how small, they need to know about it. If the book is set in modern times then
it is important to be aware of what’s going on in the world, but perhaps not to
the same degree. If you’re writing a rom-com then the war in Ukraine might be
going on, but unless you want to refer to it directly it’s not necessary to
research it in detail. A character might make a passing comment about the price
of cereal rising because of it but that might be it. The problem that this
causes of course, is that it very much locates the book in time and it may date
quickly as a result. The same applies to Covid, Brexit etc.
How did the Covid
pandemic affect you as a writer?
I basically didn’t write very much. I was home schooling my then 4-5
year old who wanted to do all the work, all the time, so I did nothing but home
school and read for the most part. I nearly had a nervous breakdown in the 3rd
lockdown and reading was the only thing that kept me sane. However, there were
two quite big things that came out of it for me. One was that I realised how
much my writing and my mental health are linked. My sister died unexpectedly at
the end of 2019 and her funeral was in January 2020. My family are spread all
over the country and so I didn’t physically see my brother or my mum for well
over a year after the funeral. During that time, I was writing the final
assessment piece for the MA and my first draft was incredibly dark. It wasn’t a
pleasant story anyway, but by the end the characters were all left in horrible
places in their lives and there was no sense of anything but tragedy before
them. My tutor told me I needed to lighten it up and inject some sense of hope
at the end and by the time I came to edit it, I was in a much better place
emotionally and was able to do as he’d suggested. The benefit of this first
draft though, was that I’d poured all the hurt and negativity into the
characters and their story and worked through my own grief by writing about
theirs.
A more positive thing to come out of it was that the rise of online meetings meant the birth of Makarelle and from that came my role as Writer in Residence at the Lido, my first proper venture into self-publishing and everything I’m doing today in my writing career.
There is a lot of
talk at the moment about political correctness, about the Woke movement, about
cultural appropriation, about diversity. What are your thoughts on this, with
regard to writing?
This is a really difficult question to answer and one I’m continually
wrestling with. I am a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, middle-class female
and in all honesty I would find it very difficult to write about characters who
are not within my own life experiences. Unforgettable was written from a
male perspective, which was tricky but manageable, but I don’t think I would
write anything from the point of view of someone from a different ethnicity or
a different sexual orientation. It’s partly because I don’t think I could do it
well enough and partly because I think we should be encouraging people who have
those life experiences, to tell their own stories. Writing is still dominated
by white writers – you only have to look at book displays in supermarkets and
bookshops to see this and I think that there are plenty of other people who are
far better qualified than me to write those stories and they should be
encouraged to do so. When I’m reading, I’ve had to actively seek out books by
people from different backgrounds and it’s required far more effort on my part
than if I wanted a book by someone from a similar background.
That said – I want to have my books reflect the real world and so its important that they are populated with characters from a range of backgrounds and with a variety of experiences. In both The Reign of the Winter King and Folly, partway through writing them, a character informed me that they were gay. It wasn’t a conscious choice on my part, they just told me it was who they were. For both books, I spoke to people who knew more than me and got them to read the relevant sections to make sure I had got the characters right. I think sensitivity readers are important – there are so many stereotypes that we don’t necessarily even realise are such and personally, I would far rather have this pointed out to me, than risk inadvertently upsetting someone.
Where would you place your own stories, on a continuum with PURE FANTASY at one end and COMPLETE REALISM at the other?
My adult stories are definitely at the complete realism end of the scale, but my children’s books are probably edging towards the fantasy side of things, but I think they’re technically on the cusp between magical realism and light fantasy. The more traditional fantasy doesn’t always appeal to me, but I love things like Terry Pratchett, Eoin Colfer and Jasper Fforde that are more light-hearted in tone. Pure sword and sorcery isn’t really my thing, but something that incorporates elements of that and puts them in the real world is far more to my taste, which is why I think that Susan Cooper’s books have always had a massive hold over me. It’s the idea that something magical could happen in our world – a lot of the fantasy feels too remote for me to really engage with that world. Does it have value though? Absolutely. I’d find it hard to make a case that anything that gets people reading doesn’t have value. I talk quite often about how the Twilight books are my guilty pleasure – I know as a writer, that they are not massively well written, but I still love reading them. Romance is another genre that frequently gets dismissed as valueless and I think it’s inherently unfair and actually incredibly disrespectful to the authors who write in those genres. All styles of book have their good examples and their awful ones, but for me, to dismiss a whole genre is wrong. (I wrote a blog about why books should never be a guilty pleasure - https://www.reloten.com/post/guilty-pleasures)
3.00, Friday 10 March 2023
It has snowed.
It
wasn’t exactly a surprise as the weather reports had forecast it, but I tend to
view weather forecasters as being hyper-vigilant easily-excitable
gloom-mongers. They’re always predicting massively disruptive weather which turns
out to be extremely disappointing in reality [an example of hyperbole followed
by litotes, if any of my English students are reading].
‘FLASH
FLOODING EXPECTED THROUGHOUT THE NORTH-EAST!’ turns out to be a slightly
faster-than-usual beck in Huddersfield. ‘TSUNAMI HEADING FOR FILEY: RESIDENTS
TOLD TO BE PREPARED!’ eventually arrives as a pleasant curler that splashes the
promenade and wets a few joggers wearing cagoules.
Even
weather-related events that have already happened are reported in such sensational
language that it’s difficult to get them into perspective. ‘EARTHQUAKE DESTROYS
HOUSES IN BIRMINGHAM’ turns out to mean that a few roof-tiles were dislodged;
‘FREAK HURRICANE BLASTS PICTURESQUE VILLAGE’ is accompanied by a photo of a
village green dotted with a snapped-off branches and the pub-sign bent awry.
Obviously,
sometimes we do get genuinely serious weather-related disasters in the British
Isles. I’m old enough to remember the infamous 1980s hurricane (recreated so
effectively in the climax of A.S.Byatt’s novel Possession), and the
second one that happened a year or so later. I was at teacher-training college in
Greater Manchester, and newly-in-love, so I spent the night wide awake in the
arms of my boyfriend, occasionally wondering what the hell was causing all that
noise outside (oh, how I miss the era known as ‘back in the day’!). At that
time, student accommodation wasn’t what it is today (no modern university
student would stand for the conditions students used to accept as normal). We
lived on the top floor of an old block of damp council flats perched on top of
a steep hill, and the hurricane’s fingers rattled the single-glazed windowpanes,
sneaking round the gappy edges so the notoriously chilly flats were cold enough
to cause frost-bite. Great howls and creaks could be heard, along with the
occasional bang as flying wreckage hit the building or bounced off cars. It
felt as if we were in a storm at sea.
I
remember at one point my boyfriend said, in another example of litotes: ‘Sounds
a bit blowy out there’.
On
that occasion, the storm provided a suitable background for our torrid
emotions. [An example of The Pathetic Fallacy, for any student reading this].A friend and I had planned to go home to my mum’s house for the
weekend, the next morning, and I remember walking to the railway station,
feeling dazed through lack of sleep, in a weird silence, the sky lit by a
silvery-grey light and the streets strewn with debris like the aftermath of a
riot.
However, despite these occasional flurries of exciting weather-related drama – the winds that force people to walk home more or less horizontally, fighting all the way; the floods that lead to Instagram shots of Volvos floating down high streets and old ladies in rain hoods being helped into dinghies; people huddled like refugees in cars topped with two feet of snow on the M25 – we’re not really a country of extreme weather. We don’t suffer volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hail-stones as big as a fist, permafrost.
Not yet anyway. Who knows
what Global Warming will do to our generally sedate climate.
What
we do get is a bit of snow now and then. Like yesterday. It fell steadily,
feathery and picturesque, coating the grass and rooftops like royal icing on a
cake, but leaving the roads and pavements relatively clear. The worst that
happened in our household was that our elderly cat refused to go out to pee. We
had to gently force her through the patio doors when the snow abated a little,
and she then huddled miserably under the garden table staring at the lawn in
terror until we let her in again. As far as I knew, unless she had done the job very
quickly when we weren’t looking, she hadn’t emptied her digestive system since
7.00 am. Personally, I need to pee about every thirty minutes
these days, so I don’t know how she does it!
Interestingly, it snowed more heavily overnight and today our part of the world is coated in beautiful snow and the sky is that gorgeous bright blue you get after a snow-storm. P has gone out for a walk and is probably lying in a snow-filled ditch as I type (last time he went for a walk alone he ended up caught in the vicious embrace of a bramble bush after falling over a stile). The cat went out quite happily an hour ago – it is obviously the actual precipitation she hates – but I’m slightly concerned about where she’s gone. She’s probably paying her previous owners a visit, on the basis that we have fallen short of her expectations by not only failing to stop the snow but also pushing her out into the garden several times against her will. Or she’s also lost in a snow drift.
Of
course, when it does snow, all the anecdotes about previous snowfalls emerge
from your memory. Like the time when my niece and her partner came to our house with
their baby and my mum, one evening round Christmas, and by the time they were
ready to leave the ground was thick with snow and the roads ungritted. It was
impossible to drive in. My niece tried but the car spun in the road
uncontrollably. So they were forced to stay at ours, but my niece and her
partner decided to walk back to their house, a couple of miles away but up a
steep hill, to get their baby’s travel cot. It took them a long time, but they
eventually got back with a bag of stuff they needed and a large ungainly box
containing the dismantled travel-cot, which my niece had carried through the
snow all the way down the hill to our house, slipping and sliding all the way.
She was utterly exhausted, freezing, soaking wet and pissed-off. And it didn’t
improve her mood when she opened the box to discover it was empty! We never
found out what happened to the travel cot.
My own
personal memory of that night, however, is of sitting on my sofa cuddling my
great-nephew, who was about eight months old and was still awake, with the
light turned low so we could see the twinkling Christmas fairy-lights, and the
snow falling in the garden outside the patio doors, singing to him, while he
stared wide-eyed at everything. It is a memory I will always cherish.
For
every awful snow-related memory there is another wonderful one.
Today’s
snow has scuppered our plans for today, though. We were going to take my mum
out for an afternoon tea as a birthday treat. The place we’d booked is a nice
little tea-room in the middle of the Loxley Valley on the edge of Sheffield,
and unfortunately it has had to close today due to the snow. This is
particularly irritating as this is the FOURTH time we have booked a table at
this particular café in order to take my mum for an afternoon tea, but we have
yet to actually get her there. The last three times we had to cancel ourselves (Philip
got Covid, mum had a tummy upset, mum was at my niece’s house as she’d
forgotten we were going out for afternoon tea). On the third occasion, P booked
the table but forgot to tell them we wanted afternoon tea, so it was just as
well Mum couldn’t make it as she would have been deeply disappointed – she has
an incredibly sweet tooth and loves a plateful of cakes, and she particularly
loves taking home the leftovers in a box so she can indulge herself for the
next couple of days. This works well as I’m pre-diabetic so shouldn’t really
eat cakes, and there is a definite limit to P’s pleasure in eating such things,
so mum ends up with most of our share too. Anyway, not today. Maybe there's something eldritch in the Loxley Valley that is refusing to allow my mother to enter its domain, some unseen presence in Oughtibridge silently shouting 'Thou shalt not pass, Woman!'. Or maybe it's just coincidence.
The
cat has just returned, in case you were worrying. She was desperately hungry
after her adventure, and - after eating a packet of cat-food and sitting on a towel looking doleful - she has now gone upstairs, presumably to go to sleep on
our bed…
