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.