A world reshaped
When the waters rose. Plus: what to look for in November, and why it's wise to treat 'writing tips' and courses with caution.
It was around noon when the first texts started to arrive: ‘How bad is it where you are?’ ‘Are you OK?’ ‘Thinking of you’. I was away from home; that morning I’d driven through moderate rain to the station and caught the train into London, one of the last services – or so it turned out – to have made it out on that line. The day before I’d checked my gutters, emptied the water butt that lacks an overflow and gone to the end of the garden to make sure my section of ditch was clear. I’d known Storm Babet was coming, but given East Anglia is notorious for its low rainfall and with only a yellow weather warning having been issued, nobody expected it to hit us as hard as it did.
Exchanging texts with neighbours it rapidly became clear that something pretty apocalyptic was happening. The ditch at the end of my garden had been overwhelmed and my garden, including my ancient septic tank, was underwater. One nearby house, then two, were being flooded. The lane leading down off the fields into the village was now apparently a river; the rushing water had picked up a car and toyed with it, its owners seeking refuge in a stranger’s house and leaving it to drift around near the village postbox (it would be over a week until it was towed away). One friend texted urgently to ask if I knew anyone with a tractor as her children were stranded. Animals needed rescuing. A pile of sand at a house that was having an extension built was being used to fill sandbags.
My neighbour – god bless her – let herself in and checked whether any floodwater had come into my little brick cottage, which stands, without the benefit of foundations or a damp course, directly on the earth. She didn’t send me the photos she had taken, though I’ve since seen them: my back garden and side path a lake of brown, silty water reaching nearly up to my back door. It’s probably just as well: I would have been absolutely beside myself, just as she was. It was strange enough not being there, knowing but not quite knowing what was happening at home.
As it turned out, several hundred homes and businesses were flooded to a depth of several feet across Suffolk, with three nearby towns the worst hit: one of those things that happens on the news to other people was now happening where I lived. A huge volume of water had fallen in a very short time, on ground that was already waterlogged and fields that in many cases were relatively bare: either stubble or only recently sown to winter barley and wheat. The images that began to be passed around by text and then appeared on the local news were truly shocking: a car park full of cars in my local town, only their roofs showing above the water; tractors – some driven by farmers who I know – ploughing through water to rescue elderly people; cows trapped by the floods, bellowing in panic; roads torn up as though they were paper by torrents carrying earth, trees and other debris. A world reshaped.
There is something nightmarish about floodwater that goes beyond the purely practical – though its ability to erase everything familiar, unhouse us and even kill us should not be underestimated. Like any unpredictable natural phenomena floods are a reminder of our ultimate weakness, our vulnerability – and with that, our mortality. They also carry echoes of deep psychic fears: that we will be flooded with anxiety, overwhelmed with emotion, that the very thing that gives us life will turn on us, that the boundaries we rely on between self and other will be breached and washed away.
Yet from the Bible to the Epic of Gilgamesh, Waterworld to O Brother Where Art Thou, Ballard’s The Drowned World to Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and even my current work in progress, floods figure in our imaginations not only as destroyers of worlds but as harbingers of possibility: clean slates, on which we may begin again. Small wonder, perhaps, that we might feel a level of ambivalence about them, for without the periodic flooding of the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia, agriculture itself may never have been possible. As long as we are safe, the ancient, half-buried parts of ourselves still respond to the vital, renewing aspect of flooding: certainly, I can admit to an awestruck fascination with the power the water had exhibited as it tore through our little village – even as I counted my blessings not to have been badly hit.
Because I was lucky. When at last I made it home – the little diesel train pushing bravely on its tracks across great lakes of sky-reflecting water – it was to very little damage: the inside of the cottage was dry, the power was on, my toilet still flushed, and while much of the back garden had a fine coating of silt it wasn’t until the local rats, flooded out of their burrows, began to invade my walls and roof, gnawing great holes in my house’s very fabric, that I realised I hadn’t quite got away unscathed. But it could have been so much worse. Driving gingerly around on roads that were either deeply puddled, newly potholed or deep in sandy earth, the homes that had been worst hit were obvious by the heartbreaking piles of waterlogged toys and furniture standing on their drives.
Our local river had burst its banks, calling on its watermeadows for assistance with the volume of water, just as it should. Although now back in its usual crease it was possible to see exactly how wide the waterway had become by the way the long grass had all been combed in one direction and still lay flat, each blade catching the wet, pewter light. Clumps of burdock and dank nettles were topped by silvery spiderwebs, those on their lower sections having been washed away; the upcurrent side of the alders’ and willows’ boles harboured clumps of leaves and twigs deposited there by the current. I thought about all next year’s insect chrysalises, eggs and larvae that will have been lost, and the fish displaced from their usual ponds and waterways – not to mention the vast numbers of voles, mice and shrews that must have been drowned across the region, or died of exposure. Our kestrels and barn owls are in for a hard winter to come.
Two weeks later, the clean-up operation still underway, came the news of Storm Ciarán, and this time the chastened forecasters spared us nothing in terms of warnings. Heading away once again – this time to visit dear Scout, in Brighton (she’s just turned sixteen!) – I ordered some Flood Sax, took up my rugs and carried as much as I could upstairs. Thankfully – given the devastation wrought on the Channel Islands – this time the worst of the weather passed us by.
What to look for in November:
It’s looking like it might just be a waxwing winter. The last was in 2016-17; a larger irruption in 2012-13 saw these gorgeous-looking birds with their punky crests spread across the UK: I remember groups of them that year eating hawthorn berries on Tooting Common where we used to walk a young and more energetic Scout, and stripping my local street trees of rowan berries. This year, good numbers have already been recorded in Scotland, the north and Essex, with some sightings in the west too.
Winter is when starlings come together to form communal roosts, and we all want to see them murmurate as they get ready for bed, right? To find your nearest likely roosting site, there’s some useful information and an interactive map here. I find it both utterly brilliant and incredibly sad that sites like this exist: brilliant that there’s such a hunger to see a natural spectacle, sad that bird numbers have fallen to a point where large flocks are something to pay attention to.
With the first frosts we see a massive drop-off in insects, which prompts those creatures that rely solely on them, like bats and hedgehogs, to hibernate. If you can provide a hog hibernaculum or put up a bat box you’ll be doing a really good thing; if you can allow bats under your tiles or into your attic, leave leaves unraked and let parts of your garden stay unkempt and messy, you’ll be doing something even better.
Say goodbye to your local cows, too: in most parts of the country they’ll be moved indoors for the winter this month and fed on haylage and silage (fermented forage harvested earlier in the year). Grass doesn’t grow much over winter, so they wouldn’t have enough to eat otherwise; moreover, their pastures would just get muddy and churned-up and horrible, the cows would be chilly and their feet would rot. They’ll be better off under cover – but look how excited they get to be let out again in spring.
News
It’s that time of the year when magazines and newspapers start publishing their Books of the Year lists: woe betide anything published in November or December! This year, for The New Statesman, I chose A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder by Mark O’Connell, an extraordinarily insightful, layered and self-aware account of a double murder that nearly brought down the Irish government. My piece is in the print edition but hasn’t get appeared online; you can read the Guardian’s review of the book here, though.
I really enjoyed my evening at Daunts Marylebone with Alice Albinia talking about her new book, The Britannias: An Island Quest. The Literary Review have just covered it here.
We closed our first funding round for the Encounter app and I have found myself surprisingly moved by the fact that we have actual shareholders: not wealthy venture capitalists or investment fund managers but ordinary people who heard about what we’re trying to do and wanted to be part of it. We’re now in a position to get started, and I’ll have more news soon. If you’re one of the people who invested in the idea I had: thank you so, so much.
I wrote about the importance of ditches to wildlife and the aftermath of Storm Babet in my Times Nature Notebook for November. It’s paywalled, but if you’re a member of your local library you can access all sorts of publications from the comfort of your own home – including this one.
This week I’ve been working through the copyedit of the non-fiction book that’ll be coming out next year. It’s the first book I’ve written in something close to my own voice – by which I mean the way you’d hear me if we met up for a walk and a chat: colloquial, enthusiastic, not always entirely serious. It seems to me that a great many books about nature (including my own) share a kind of hushed, pious tone: descriptive and contemplative, verging on the high-flown and sometimes even a little, well, sanctimonious. That’s all well and good for we holy nature worshippers, but I think that kind of voice can sometimes be a little exclusionary – especially if you want to reach people who don’t habitually read nature writing, as I do with this book. It will be interesting to see whether people like it – including the critics! I suspect my copyeditor would have preferred that I took a more academic tone.
Because I’ve been working really hard I’ve been dipping into things here and there when I have the time, rather than committing to reading longform journalism. To this end I’ve really been enjoying newsletters that feature short lists or round-ups of interesting things, like Lev Parikian’s Six Things, Stop, Look, Listen… with Jude Rogers and Home by India Knight. Lovely little morsels, all of them.
Also just to let you know, I’m on Instagram and Threads if you want to find me. I don’t really enjoy spending time in Musk’s dystopia any more, though I’m preserving my account there in the vain hope that things might change somehow. While I know lots of you are on Bluesky I can’t cope with being in any more places than I am already: I plumped for Threads because it didn’t require a sign-up code, and found I really enjoyed its gentle atmosphere, so there I’ll stay.
Below the fold I’ll be thinking out loud about author-led writing workshops and the kind of ‘how to’ articles and tips authors are so often asked to produce, and why we should sometimes treat them with caution. It’s part of an ongoing series in which I’m trying to be as honest as I can – including with myself – about the mystery and the challenge of living and working creatively. Paying supporters also get access to all the previous newsletters via the archive, should such a thing be of interest – plus the knowledge that they’re helping me produce this newsletter, and ultimately, write more books.
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