So. My time in London has come to an end and I’m starting up again in Oxford. This happens to be where I live at the moment because I’m a student. The weather was so amazing today that I couldn’t resist cycling up to the community garden to take a look. I’m meeting with the people who work there on April 17th and will probably spend a good few days there generating new material. I’ve got the winter part down – snow, sludge etc – but I’m wondering what I’ll write about for summer. I think of it as a black month. Things getting too ripe and fat. I seem to associate warm weather with scenes from Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971).

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.

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…