A ‘Week’ Ghost Smile: December
A week of re-forming a coven, considering ghost monks and having an existential confrontation with my bag.
Monday
Get Your Bare Bones Out
I love the changes the cherry tree in our garden presents. It’s now bare but instead has a crown of antlers. I look out in the morning and think of a stag in a clearing, and I’ve decided I rather like bare branches.
There’s a quote I’ve misheard from somewhere, but I’ve took it as my own regardless; something like in perimenopause or menopause all the usual obligations, crappy things which we think ground us – but don’t really – are falling away; everything usual, the reality we’ve been used to is falling away and now ‘the bare bones of the tree are beginning to show’. I’ve just realised a sentence too late where that’s from – and it was said in this podcast episode of the excellent The Bell Witch Podcast
It really is how I feel. All the leafy furnishings, the adornments I’ve had hanging over my figurative branches : the anxiety, people pleasing, focusing on outcomes, the self-chastising, apologies for walking into a room, opening a dishwasher door mid-cycle (yes really); the apologies for apologising; well, all of that is dropping like dead leaves. Finally.
Here are some similarly like-minded trees I’ve become friends with on walks recently:
Tuesday
My Husband’s Secret
I’ve found something quite shocking under my husband’s pillow. I was quite taken aback and knew I had to ask him a few questions. It was lying there hidden away but the evidence was there to see: a copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
I was shocked.
Now let me backtrack a little – my husband doesn’t really read for pleasure. When we very first got together, he made a thing that he did, and I pushed a book into his hand that I had just read – which was a story about a girl’s final days – and he pressed it against his chest solemnly and promised to read it – and he did. He read it on the train commute every day; we then met up and with tears in his eyes, proclaimed how much it moved him. Right. And then I got a series of text messages where the semi colon was used with such abandon and accuracy that I declared to all and sundry that that’s it ! He’s my soulmate! I’ve finally found my sort-of Mr Rochester (without the complex attic issues) that’s it! I’m planning my life … this is it!
As it was, it really was ‘it’; I was right , he is good for me , and he does have the touch of a sardonic Mr Rochester on a good happy day – you know, when he’s just bought Jane a bonnet and had a glass of rum, you know that kind of way – but he doesn’t read. It was a ruse. Not quite a lie but maybe a wish and I fell for it. Although I have to say, I’m still very much in awe of his semi colons.
Once settled I bought him novels, biographies of bands he liked, funny books, puzzle books, even the fairly recent Stephen King short story anthology (which he did start and quite enjoy and then forgot about ) but it always becomes apparent that, well , he’s not really a reader. So quite a while ago I gave up with all that and accepted it and loved him anyway.
This Christmas I had this idea of reading Christmas stories to my two sons by the Christmas tree every night on a proper reading chair and by candlelight. I put this in action: I read them the Night Before Christmas and we all loved it; it felt cosy in a kind of way only hot chocolate and new pyjamas can usually induce. Right, that’s it! I declared (I’m fond of quite startling declarations) this is our new tradition! We’re doing this every Christmas time night! Every year! As far as I can see December 1st was the first … and last night of this tradition. Oh well there’s always next year – life got in the way, me being too tired, the boys too tired, PlayStation, football training, Christmas parties at bowling alleys, guitar lessons, Beavers, not being arsed …
I thought I would try a similar tact with my husband, Tom. Some god-driven insane inclination to resurrect the prolific reader I briefly dated – but I also wanted romance in my life. I don’t mean in a love hearts sort of way; I mean in a make life beautiful kind of way: candelabras, candlelight, tones of sunset, watching robins singing as you eat breakfast – that kind of thing. I wanted to be read to, by candlelight before bed. I banished my phone to downstairs at bedtime, got an old alarm clock instead, went analogue, a little off grid, lit candlesticks and got a book full of Christmassy literary extracts: the only ingredient missing was someone willing to read to me. When I suggested this to my husband, he sighed a sigh only a man whose witnessed too many madcap ideas which fester can make – nonetheless he agreed with all the reluctance he could muster. On the first night I read to him the extract from Wuthering Heights where Nelly is getting the table ready Christmas Eve; it’s gorgeous in its Yorkshire gruffness describing cheeses and fairies and a dialect I could hang coats on – so spiky and substantial. I did this in that Yorkshire accent, and I really went for it, and Tom fell asleep trying not to laugh so he ended up asleep smiling.
The next night it was his turn and when I reminded him , he sighed again and resigned himself, looking up at me like a wild muddy dog forced to have a shampoo and set. His eyes looked pained. That said, he confidently chose Mr Fezziwig’s party from A Christmas Carol, offered to do it in a muppets’ voice which I declined. Something happened: he seemed to really enjoy it and got into it with some admirable gusto. He soon fell asleep and I stayed awake smiling.
I read the odd poem to him but like most things it fell to the way side. Instead, some sweet behaviour occurred: the reading of A Christmas Carol in secret. Like Scrooge, was he now reformed? I confronted him about the material that I had found, and he looked a little sheepish and said, ‘I just fancied reading it.’ Leaving me with the brightest smile in the fading light of the day.
Wednesday
Bypassing a Night-time Walk …
I don’t go the gym, and I certainly don’t scream exercise to anyone – neither would I in a million years suggest it. I like the odd swim but in the main, I am a walker. Not very fast and not very dynamic but dawdling – and I assess exercise by whether it would be suited to a crinoline and daydreams: and walking fits the bill. Even when I swim, my bathing suit is Edwardian in nature and allows for the propensity of daydreams (unfortunately, I don’t own a crinoline) (but I’m working on it)
My usual walking route of the cycle path by a nature reserve (which I always seem to write about …) has had the opening of a rather bendy new bypass shaped like a scythe hanging over its neck of the wood for some time now. I didn’t actually believe it would open – it’s been lying in wait for so long and I wondered if nature would eventually take over and reclaim the space with bindweed. That it would be, in fact, a monument to a brief madness. Not so – it’s just opened. You can see in the picture below the cars on it if you look carefully … like sharks in the shade of deep water.
Later it got much busier and I despaired. It no longer felt like a meadow with plains beyond but a sprig of green in the way of a road; the space felt cut off and triangular, a view flying by in a car window, a place for murder maybe or where dead bodies or bag of cats might be dumped from cars . The river a place simply for upside down shopping trolleys rather than dragonflies or newts. The meadow all of a sudden seemed inconvenient. I felt hemmed in, the birds felt scattered and the midges seemed legion in shock. The little eco-system so ordered before felt like it was crashing over like a stack of cups (which you kind of knew would happen).
So, I feel sad about that. My usual walk not usual, hindered and cut off and noisy.
It never seems to work out, though, the building of bypasses. If the natural world doesn’t have its revenge, then the supernatural world does. Usually, they’re built over ancient monastic sites, and it stirs up some pretty pissed off monks. Think Stocksbridge (Bypass) the accounts of a monk randomly appearing on the road are pretty numerous for it to have a spooky (and fatal) reputation – the anecdotes of the monk appearing in a glance, in the rearview mirror sitting in the back seat staring at them like they would strangle them are particularly frightening.
I don’t really want any terrifying hooded monks to now turn up on my walk but I wouldn’t blame them if they did – and it’s just a reminder of how building on , churning up and knocking down can disturb and disrupt natural and (supernatural) worlds …
I try to walk everyday but sometimes that’s difficult with the darkness settling in not long after the sun is up (that actually suits me. I like to live life like under a stone). So, I’ve been questioning why I don’t go for walks in the dark and I guess it’s years of conditioning that as a woman I’m not safe and will be savaged as soon as I walk anywhere on my own where the only light is a street light . And while of course to a degree there is truth in that, and that everyone should be careful, I still think that to be cavalier is a freedom – so hell to it , I’ve been doing Christmas lights night walks around the block and it’s brought as much magic as finding out my non-reading husband secretly reads Victorian novels.
Thursday
The Death of Winter … The Birth of Spring
Right now, I’m reading The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen. I’m relishing it; what surprises me most is that I’m enjoying its springtime setting. I’m a season ahead and it’s providing impunity with Christmas twenty minutes a day. I’m impervious to Christmas to-do lists and Sellotape.
The way spring is described is intoxicating. I’m in flowers. I’m in sea air. I’m wrapped up in bright yellow. And I’m surprised by my yearning for spring. It’s wonderful.
The story resides either in 1930s’ tulip-blooming Regents Park or the seaside town of Seale where I can see and feel pebble-dashed walls and just for a bit I’m leaning against them, warming myself in the barely-there sunshine. It’s a measure of something I didn’t know I wanted. The book presents some odious characters and with the spring in the background their wickedness seems more thorny and vivid. I’ll leave with you some exacting quotes from The Death of the Heart about spring’s arrival …
‘Early in March the crocuses crept light, then blazed yellow and purple in the park … it is about five o’clock in an evening that the first hour of spring strikes – autumn arrives early in the morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.’
‘The later phases of spring, when her foot is in at the door, are met with a conventional gaiety. But her first unavowed presence is disconcerting; silences fall in company – the wish to be either alone or with a lover is avowed by some look or some spontaneous movement – the window being thrown open, the glance away up the street. In cities the traffic lightens and quickens; even buildings take such feeling of depth that the streets might be rides cut through a wood. What is happening is only acknowledged between strangers, by looks, or between lovers. Unwritten poetry twists the hearts of people in their thirties. To the person out walking that first evening of spring, nothing appears inanimate, nothing not sentient: darkening chimneys, viaducts, villas, glass-and-steel factories, chain stores seem to strike as deep as natural rocks, seem not only to exist but to dream.’
Friday
The Getting of the Christmas Tree
My favourite day of Christmas isn’t Christmas Day – no, that always wounds up with me getting a hefty migraine and having some kind of internal introvert earthquake which I have to contain in something way more flimsy than Tupperware, my bravado.
So no, I prefer the odd days where you see Christmas fleetingly and you have to quickly witness it before it dispels like frosted breath. These days are more Christmassy than the day itself. For me Christmas day piles in on itself pretty quickly; it’s over before it’s finished and I’m already looking ahead brooding that the baubles look tired and out of season by 9 p.m. (which makes me morose too). As a kid, I always preferred the anticipation of Christmas Eve which illustrates a lifelong lesson needed: living is in the journey – never in the arrival . Process not outcome. Yes.
My favourite day, then, is the getting of the Christmas tree.
I try to cement Christmas traditions but they never harden, often getting mopped out the way as slop like it was never there (see reading by the Christmas tree experiment). But one tradition which has endured is the getting of the Christmas tree. It goes a bit like this: pick kids up from school, head straight to the Christmas tree farm (when we go it’s usually the last days of November, so on the way we have standard songs playing that no one really likes BUT on our return home it’s full on Christmas classics Wham, The Pogues – December switched on and programmed ‘start now’ – Bublé begins); anyway, get to farm choose ridiculously-priced Christmas decoration each , then buy ridiculously-priced hot chocolate and cakes , then buy ridiculously-priced marshmallows to toast by a whimpering fire (roughly the same flame power as a plastic lighter) – remembering that last year the fire was roaring and inside and in a tipi – then have financial crisis by hotdog stand as I catch breath adding up I’ve spent eighty quid getting a round of hot chocolates . We all then deliberate over which tree. I usually get emotionally attached to one and we have to choose it because I feel like I’m at a puppy farm (luckily no one else in my family has this problem and it’s just a tree to them). Choose it. Pay for it ( 🫠) . Get tree in car without severing any of our heads. Play aforementioned Christmas songs. Get home. Decorate tree and realise last year’s decs are smashed. Decorate it anyway and it looks like it always does: like one of the strange trees found in the forest in The Blair Witch Project.
No one can agree on flavours but order pizzas anyway. Pour WINE. It tastes better than Christmas Day because it tastes like I need it. Put Home Alone on and watch it against the strange spooky tree. Feel like I’m in a horror film because of tree. Feel happy. It’s a day full of flaws, worries and laughs – messy and whole, my kind of thing. My kind of Christmas. Merry messy Christmas. It’s only November the 28th.
Saturday
The Re-forming of my Coven
I woke up with a name in my head from the past. I won’t say her name but let’s call her D. It happened the next morning. And the next. I wondered if it was a mermaid siren – it felt like it. I knew I had to contact her, my wonderful old friend from the past. Rather than texting, I almost felt like scrying for her through a mirror or candle flame - but in the end I WhatsApped 😂
Within minutes I got a voice note, ‘Marie you’re psychic. I’ve been thinking of you. Last night I started writing again.’ Knew it. We used to have a WhatsApp writers’ ‘group’ just me and her and it felt like a coven; the spurring on of each other, it had all the beauty of manifestations and spells. I was so prolific and full of can do with her at the other end of the line. We’ve reformed it; we’re meeting up in the New Year. I’m so happy.
The coven is re-forming …
Another member of the circle has come forth by some powerful force – she’s become a conduit of my creativity and I’m so grateful our paths have crossed these past few months. Our friendship feels divine and meant and known before somehow – it’s the talented and immensely wise writer Sue Bentley . In the summer I wrote about hares in my piece Hare Raising and I mention how I came face to face with a hare, how I wondered if it was my Irish grandmother leading the way, showing me the direction to go bravely Boudicca-like and now I honestly believe I followed it in my soul and it led me to Sue. I met that hare on a literal Norfolk crossroad and pretty much a month later I met Sue at her author talk and what followed was a friendship which seemed picked up from a previous life. When Sue gifted me a Christmas card with hares and the word’ joy’ on (as well as the Beth Kempton Fearless Writer book!!!) well, it felt all my familiars had manifested in a line and nodded in assent that magic had occurred.
(Weirdly, Sue writes about hare transformation in her magical book We Other)
My cousin, who is my karmic sister, has arrived back on the scene. She’s moved nearer and we go for moonlit walks because that’s the only time we can – but it’s the best time; we always plan to line our pockets with crystals, but we always forget. We are so similar but it’s her differences which give me strength. Our dads are twins and in some way our lives and tastes feel similarly entwined: we’ll have the same thoughts and buy the same handbags separately. It’s weird, it’s witchy, I couldn’t do without her. I tell her to listen out for the owl hoots I hear at night – she must hear the same owl. My Celtic ancestry is strong and purposeful when walking around aimlessly next to my karmic sister.
Last but never least is my best friend who has just always been there. She’s a teacher and poet yet grounding. When I say grounding, I mean she swears profusely and knocks back whiskey – and tells me straight as her whiskey. She’s truth in a beautiful scarf and potent. Protective and fiery – like the Leo she is – she’s a lioness who does all the gathering. We talk for hours around graveyards mostly. She wears more pastels than me yet we both have the same dark spot in our soul which makes us suggest graveyard walks after a frothy coffee. They’re not as frequent as I’d like but I couldn’t do without them. More profound talks around graveyards is an intention for 2026, I think.
Sunday
Le Sac, C’est Moi!
When it comes to bags, I’m deeply aligned with the great and brilliant Nora Ephron. In her book of essays, I feel Bad About My Neck, she opines her uselessness with bags …
‘This is for women who in mid-July still haven’t bought a summer purse or who in midwinter are still carrying around a straw bag.’
That’s me …
‘This is for women who hate their purses, who are bad at purses, who understand that their purses are reflections of negligent housekeeping, hopeless disorganization, a chronic inability to throw anything away, and an ongoing failure to handle the obligations of a demanding and difficult accessory (the obligation, for example, that it should in some way match what you’re wearing).’
This also me. Although I do love bags but were not good together. Nora goes on to say …
‘This is for those of you who understand, in short, that your purse is, in some absolutely horrible way, you.’
If that’s the case I am a ball of receipts coated in crumbs, I am a frayed interior pocket, I’m a lipstick with no top, I’m a leaky pen, I’m an old banana, a sticky lollipop, a toy train, mould. For this, I’m absolutely ashamed to say, is the deep inner reaches of my bag.
In any spare quiet moments I have lately, I’ve been doing something a bit weird: watching videos of Parisian women on YouTube (Parisian Vibe ) delve into their bag in beautiful cafes and share its contents. It’s enthralling and I heartily recommend it if you don’t want to meditate but need something mindless. Lots of the women featured frighten the hell out of me with their triangular small bags and purposeful zips and stacks of organised supplies; most of them tell me they don’t wear make up at all – just lip balm as they touch up their very perfect no make-up face.
Most of all I have learnt I should invest in a lip scrub.
There’s quite a few I really loved though and it inspired me to shake out my bag and vacuum it (I did). One woman emptied her haphazard bag with papers flying everywhere and my attention was piqued. She talked us through her dog-eared books of poetry, her grandmother’s perfume bottle, receipts, her scribblings, an old locket, another book of daydreams. She was enchanting. And then I thought well, like Nora, I’m not ever going to have a small triangular bag with just lip balm, plasters and a Filofax. I’m always going to have crumbs, a lost brush and coins stuck to the seam by some unknown substance. And then I thought, why not go with it? Instead of seeing it as quicksand, a drowning abyss, let’s get creative and fill it with things I love and with beauty. Let’s not get dividers and containers but books of poems and a pocket full of antique pens. Let’s put a 1920s’ compact in there (if I can), crystals, a compass, a feather. Let’s go from a sea of mess to a portal of awe; it’s dark in there but actually it’s Van Gogh’s Starry Night full of shiny things, wonder and trinkets.
I’ve been doing that and I’ve been quite enjoying delving in – not despairing of what I can’t find but intrigued by what I might pick up. If a bag is me then I’m accepting it, ignoring dividers and enjoying the starry starry night (with crumbs).
‘Le sac, c’est moi!’, (said Nora Ephron) (and Louis XIV) ( and now me).
Love the ‘ta dar’ tree
I really have enjoyed these type of posts. Taking your everyday life and writing it as a story