Out earlyish and on my way to the bottle bank a few minutes’ walk from my cottage. Only… I’m not really, am I? I’m doing ‘damp January’ (for me, only drinking in company) so there are no wine bottles to deposit, and two glass jars doesn’t really constitute a necessary trip. So what am I up to? I’ve slung a canvas tote, modified so it has one long strap, across my body; it’s for gathering sticks which I dry in my hearth and use as kindling, a bit like a medieval peasant – only one who has apparently been to The Design Museum and come away with a souvenir. Am I out of kindling? Nope, so it’s not that either. After I’ve dropped my jars into the slots and waited for their satisfying smash I find myself heading on up the road, rather than back, towards home. And that’s when I realise what’s really happening: I’m out in search of spring. Snow is forecast, and I love snow: please, bring it on. But before a freeze clamps inexorably down on the village I need a brief moment of looking forward. I need a little hope.
I had a difficult December. Some years I find Christmas hard, and the one we’ve just had turned into a real test of character. The rewrite of my novel had ground to a halt for the second time, and the subsequent sense of financial precarity has really started to bite. The rain was relentless, our local fields and roads flooding and re-flooding, and I spent the last weeks of the old year battling with rats after having lived amicably alongside them for years.
But January always comes, and the mornings begin to be a little brighter, and we are released from the airless stasis of the ‘festive period’ with its charts and lists and roundups back into the flow of a fresh new year. That means looking forward again, rather than back, and I’m always much happier facing the direction of travel. So what I really need this morning is to see the tightly rolled spears of arum breaking ground, and perhaps find a snowdrop in flower, or even hear a great spotted woodpecker drumming. I want so desperately to drop back into the current of time again.
A little further up the lane from the bottle bank the tarmac grows muddy and imprinted with the deep, clean cleats of tractor tyres: for the last couple of days the big machines have been out harvesting the sugar beet. It’s come in late this year – for weeks the fields were far too waterlogged, and I had started to worry that the crop might be lost. The wet autumn might have depressing for me but it has threatened the livelihoods of farmers, many of whom are operating on incredibly tight margins while dealing with constantly changing legislation and trying to predict both prices and the weather in the years and months to come. Seeing the muddy beets stacked safely in the field feels good, and it’s good, too, to see gulls, skylarks and fieldfares making the most of the newly disturbed soil.
I divert up a farm track clogged with washed-out sand that runs between young wheat on one side and oilseed rape on the other, neither looking as strong as they might though at least they haven’t been drowned in the fields. There was an overnight frost and now the sky is clear and the sun low and bright, and while I don’t hear a woodpecker, from the hedges around me come the sounds of wrens, dunnocks, robins and the odd tit. None are in full spring voice, and it’ll be a month at least until I hear a blackbird, but there’s been a definite uptick in birdsong since midwinter. At home I’ve noticed that my garden sparrows are becoming insistent again.
Nothing I have learned or achieved in my life has proved as transformative as tuning my attention closely to the seasons. I find it hard to describe how comprehensively it changed everything, back in my twenties, when I was living in central London, disconnected and miserable – and it’s hard to overestimate how central that basic rhythm still is to everything I write and make and do. Knowing what will happen next – being able to wish for it, anticipate it, believe in it – grounds you not only in the seasons but in time itself, something which is essential to a healthy sense of one’s own mortality and lifespan, the preciousness of our short tenure here and the purpose we can find in what we choose to do. No wonder we can feel so shaken up by the evidence that some seasonal occurrences, such as the timings of spring blossom, are shifting due to accelerating climate breakdown. As well as the implications for wildlife, the sense of a once-steady metronome becoming unreliable strikes at something very deep in our sense of what our lives might mean.
In The Botany of Desire Michael Pollan writes: “I do wonder if it isn’t significant that our experience of flowers is so deeply drenched in our sense of time. Maybe there’s a good reason we find their fleetingness so piercing, can scarcely look at a flower in bloom without thinking ahead, whether in hope or regret. We might share with certain insects a tropism inclining us toward flowers, but presumably insects can look at a blossom without entertaining thoughts of the past and future — complicated human thoughts that may once have been anything but idle. Flowers have always had important things to teach us about time.”
The deep triple-boom of a bird scarer echoes across the fields, and from further away comes the less regular report of someone out shooting pigeons. At the sandy back end of the village’s recreation field the rabbits have been busy, while on a fresh molehill I discover a fox scat with its characteristic twist at one end, this one grey with rabbit fur: a clue to the nightly dramas that play out around me while I sleep. As I regain the lane a tractor fitted with a backhoe rumbles and clanks through the village. It’ll be on its way to clear out someone’s ditches, no doubt.
I’m only a few doors from home when I spot it: a clump of snowdrops, and then another, and then a couple more. They’re on the verge, under a neighbour’s beech hedge whose dry, bronze leaves won’t be lost until a new set push through in a few weeks. If we do get snow their little coifed heads will be covered up by it, but they won’t be damaged: snowdrops contain their own antifreeze – as well they might if they want to be out at this time of year. They may wilt a little if things get really bad, but they’ll soon stand up again. And that’s all the example I need.
What to look for in January
I’d like to tell you about arum. It’s a real January faithful for me: common, widespread and easily recognisable, spearing greenly through the leaf litter powered by its starchy tuber, full of energy and hope. You might see it with plain leaves or with purple-spotted, but they’re effectively the same plant (there’s a white-veined version too, but that’s found mainly on the south coast and Channel islands, and in gardens).
Arum rejoices in a plethora of common names, many of which refer to its flower. This will appear in April and May and looks a bit like a lily, with a folded, greenish-white sheath enclosing a spike called a spadix. The spadix can be yellow or purple, smells faintly faecal and attracts pollinating insects; it then develops in autumn into a cluster of orangey-red berries, loved by birds but which can be harmful to humans. However, we don’t need to worry about that too much as they cause such an odd sensation in the mouth that its incredibly rare for anyone to actually eat enough to cause an issue.
So what are arum’s other names? Well, you might know it as lords-and-ladies, and that’s certainly the respectable term the RHS prefers; the vaguely male/female nature of its inflorescence has also led to it being dubbed Adam and Eve, devils-and-angels, cows and bulls and a few similar variants. It was once widely known as cuckoo pint, and this is the term I grew up with; what I didn’t know, as a child, was that ‘pint’ was a contraction of ‘pintle’, an old word for penis. The cuckoo part is because its flowering period coincides with the return of these birds to our islands (see also cuckoo flower and cuckoo spit) – another note in the ancient rhythm familiar to our ancestors that’s now being disrupted as cuckoo numbers plummet.
And there’s more. With its holy white vestments arum was also once known as jack-in-the-pulpit and priest’s pintle (!), and more latterly – please cover the eyes of any nearby infants – dog’s cock. Sorry.
In the next section I’ll be continuing to think about time, but in fictional locations, societies and landscapes: how it’s handled is a big part of why some invented places feel real, while others are more like cardboard backdrops. For £3.50 a month you’ll also get access to all the previous newsletters via the archive, plus the warm glow that (I hope) comes with helping me to buy firewood and notebooks and loo roll and sausages – and ultimately, write more books.
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