Just for fun. I drew my ideal town on some post-it notes. The idea was that I’d begin with the allotment I’m writing about and see how the town grew from that.

This is some more of the work in progress that came out of my last visit to the allotment.

My mentor Katherine Stanton says she has her red pen at the ready. Good! I rarely write about nature and that was the appeal of this residency. But as an English student I read many, many poems about ye myrtles brown and ivy never seare. Rather than attempt the sort of pathetic fallacy wherein the willows weep, I wanted to convey a sense of nothing happening on the surface, but something like a green giant or garden-variety leviathan coping with absolute stillness.

This first scan is the poem I wrote after trekking from Camden to Hampstead.

The rest are all versions / perspectives on snow. I have a sequence in mind. Does anybody else experience their work meshing itself together when writing about a particular topic? i.e the same images or lines coming up over and over again? Part of the editing process, I hope, will be seeing where the images work best and how they can be expanded to give a greater sense of place…

How beautiful to see that other people have started their residencies, as I’m coming towards the end of mine. Not in terms of writing, but in terms of visiting the site. There are advantages and disadvantages to working outdoors, as you can imagine; the first point is that, as Scarlett said, one can learn to ‘get it’, to understand how enjoyable it is to be in the middle of a place that I can only describe as a North-London-Garden-Suburb-Rurality. But it is cold. Very cold. And when it’s cold the allotment remains incredibly beautiful, but, on closer inspection is quite morbid; everything is dead, or dying. I went up there a few days ago and my first thought was that the flower beds looked like graves. Fresh graves which have yet to settle and are disturbingly literal reminders that there are bodies underneath. In this case (we hope) there aren’t so many corpses as bulbs and seeds and roots that have seized up for the winter.

I want to talk particularly about my first snow on the allotment. This is the main subject of the work in progress I have posted in a separate entry. I was actually writing about the journey from Chalk Farm, up that enormous hill until you get past Belsize Park and the very posh shops lining the street up to Hampstead. It really is an upward journey. I did it once on my bike during summer because I knew this was the area I’d be working on, and again in deep January. I did it because of the stark transition between the two areas, in particular the amount of yellow and green in Hampstead, versus the black and red that I sense in Camden. These are the words of a synaesthetic. Generally, I think London is a sunkissed orange and alabaster. New York is definitely yellow. Paris is Pink, as Jean Rhys pointed out in her ‘Art of Fiction’ interview for the Paris Review. Hampsted is butter yellow and green, even when the trees are bare and the lights in the houses are out.

But snow. That was the point. As I walked up the hill the sky furrowed and I expected rain. Strange as this sounds, I’ve never expected snow. When I see dark clouds I think it’s about to chuck it. Snow is always a surprise. It’s something I hear about on the weather and repeat to my friends with sage anticipation. “They say it’s going to snow, you know.” I got to the allotment and it brightened a little so I sat down and began writing about my walk. As I was nearing the end of my freewriting tether, I saw an enormous cloud come from behind the turrets of a house that abuts Scarlett’s plot. It was like a sheet being pulled over the thin grey and pink that coloured that evening. It grew dark very suddenly. The temperature dropped even further. “Rain,” I thought. But it wasn’t. I saw a white speck drift in to my vision, then another until my hat and shoulders were covered.

There is, of course, nothing spectacular about this. It’s not as if I’ve come from the Tropics (not recently, anyway) and this is my first experience of England. But it’s the first time I’ve stood there and engaged with the way the allotment, the land, the landscape changes in ways that are not obvious. Things are not always ‘blanketed with snow’ – rather, they’re dappled in it; partially covered; and grass does a very good job of making its presence felt. It gathers in odd corners and looks to me like a greasy cream smeared on the taps of the tank or pasted along the path. It highlights colours. It creates a patchwork where there was monotony. I was immediately reminded of Robert Frost’s ‘Birches’:

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

I love that – ‘the inner dome of heaven’, ‘cracks and crazes their enamel’. Besides the pleasure and excitement of watching snow and frost my bedroom window, I have never stood in it, or worked in it, or really stopped to enjoy it. And despite what Scarlett says about the perils of being on the plot too long, I wandered about on my feet-which-had-become-blocks-of-ice and wrote with my hands-which-had-become-blocks-of-ice until it became too dark to see.

Ideas mostly.

My instinct is to justify it, by explaining that, yes, I am aware of this flaw and this flaw and this flaw… But I won’t. I met with my mentor, Katherine, this evening and we discussed this. It’s as uncomfortable as I expected, but exciting too.

The allotment in Hampstead is completely outdoors. On one side there’s a shed with solar panels, but that can barely power the lightbulb, let alone heat the place up. So I regularly freeze. And the last fortnight has been scuppered by rain. Today there was a low, bright sun. I got to the allotment to meet Scarlett and the ground was covered in frost. She was very surprised because it’s the first time she’s been out when the sun has been too low to touch any of the frost on her patch. It was intact when I arrived – shards of it glittering on the pea shoots and the beautiful manure piles – and it was still there when we left. I did my first job – digging along the bank, to get rid of some particularly long, slimy roots that would shoot up again unless weeded. Apparently I have good technique and avoided digging holes. I understand the term ‘back breaking’ now, as well; though we were only working for an hour or so, I could feel the strain and wondered how on earth people did this every day, for several hours a day, for their entire lives. A scene in Tess of the D’Urbevilles comes to mind, when she begins to understand the meaning of being ‘wet through’:

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

The more I go, the more I realise how ignorant I am about vegetables, and this is coming from a vegetarian. Every now and then Scarlett would get excited and point to a tiny shoot, far, far away and name it, explain it, tell me when it was likely to bloom properly, how many seasons she’s been growing it, what variety it was… It’s astonishing and humbling. We’re standing in one of the poshest areas in London, where, less than twenty metres away is a giant house with several beautiful cars parked outside. Down the hill is a long street which has Starbuck’s and Carluccio’s, and down an alley a very twee christmas market with the requisite fairy lights and appropriately dressed children. The allotment, on the other hand, is unlit, freezing and beginning to look quite bare. Scarlett pointed out where the onions would be planted (in blocks, not rows) and where the potatoes would go, all in the rapidly fading light. Contrary to the commercial season we’re in, the ground is soft and dark. Things are dying. Plants that should have been harvested are perishing in the frost. Abundance & Merriment versus Black Soil & Silence. .

What a brilliant beginning to my residency; on Sunday, I broke the stem of a sunflower – a little like breaking its back – and then tore it out of the ground. It was dead, but it was still living, really – still very beautiful, if dry and (as I found out later) stinking. I put cornflowers in my lapel. I was introduced to camomile in its natural state, as opposed to the strange, limp stuff in a teabag. Scarlet will tell you, I was rubbing my hands all over it because it smelled so beautiful.

Scarlett is the person I’m working with on this residency. She wears pink and is fabulous. Currently she is planting according to the moon. I will provide details of this late. In the mean time, observe:

Our boots. Mine speckled, hers porcine.

Scarlett herself – the least camera shy person I’ve met. See how naturally she explains what’s going on? The tee-pee-like construction is for plants to climb. I know there are pee – sorry, pea – shoots beneath it, which had sprung up by my last visit. This is both good and bad: it means it’s warmer than it should be so they are growing faster, but if we have a particularly bad winter they’ll freeze to death.

I think the blur adds to the charm. The arrangement of the chairs suggests there is a potted-plant appreciation society at the allotment. There isn’t. But there are all sorts of odd things; A single pink sandal was uncovered when Scarlet and I were digging up weeds, and there is a fox named Cheeky who has a penchant for leather gloves.

And this is roughly what one part of the allotment looks like. The tall plant against the fence in the centre of the picture is the sunflower before we uprooted it. I can’t help but think the heavy, shrivelled heads are erotically charged. Beyond that is a nice house with what looks like a conservatory. Scarlet and I were having a conversation about communal areas and how the ethos of the allotment is so different to the rest of Hampstead. I was saying that as I walked from the station I was aware of how conspicuous I was; I don’t look like I come from there, though I sound as if I do.

Gary Younge, in his first book ‘No Place Like Home’ discusses something similar – the experience of ‘looking local, but sounding foreign’ in the US and ‘looking foreign, but sounding local’ in the UK. We talked about the areas we grew up in and the areas we moved to; we talked about racial demographics in Sutton in the 1970s; we talked about appearances – the tendency for Englishers to dress in monotone, when English wild flowers – such as the cornflower I had in my lapel – are so vibrant.

Colour as home. Colour to signify a place. The obvious colour of the allotment is green, but I’ve found so far that it serves as an effective backdrop to the intense colours of the plants. And it seperates us from everything else; you go from a tarmac road to grass paths, and ‘Heavy Plant Crossings’, to nothing but plants. Besides the odd helicopter, it’s nearly silent too and I have a whole other post on what that does to conversation…