The winter field

As a child I was always being assessed for signs of potential brilliance, whether in painting or in music; my parents were desperate to have the inadequacies and disappointments of their own lives somehow made up for by what they felt was sure to come out in me. As a result, my painting and my music have always been fraught. The deep longing for both was always there, insistent against the interruptions to schooling and training, always trying to find its way home. I never understood why it all seemed so difficult, why more often than not either love seemed to be accompanied by stress, dissatisfaction, frustration, and judgement. Perhaps it takes the best part of a lifetime to be able to see the patterning of such things, and their genesis.

My writing, on the other hand, was safe. It was safe because it was invisible. No-one knew that when, at the age of eleven, I went to the secret cupboard in the new house to get away from my mother and stepfather, I was ‘writing a novel’. No-one saw me writing in journals, year after year; talking to myself as a means of trying to understand a life that began with fractured schooling and minimal parental support. I never thought to bring my writing out into the open, apart from one brief period when I was living abroad and travelling, and I wondered if I could write a travel book. I soon gave up that idea as I had no idea how to go about such a thing.

When I finally got some schooling doing my late degree, I began to learn to curb my extreme opinions; I learnt how to look for evidence, how to make arguments that worked. Eventually I became an official academic writer, paid to research and speak what I found. Still, I never thought of myself as ‘a writer’, just a person who liked ideas and enjoyed pointing out when the emperor seemed to have no clothes. Writing was never a strain for me, because there was nothing riding on it, no expectations or desires. It felt more like a useful tool.

When writing appeared for me in a new form in October 2024 here on Substack, there was no expectation, and no striving, because there was no history of frustrated, thwarted longing. There was only a growing flow of ideas and colours, of stories and memories and tones. I thought I might manage a month or so of weekly essays at best, and was amazed when somehow one thing kept on leading to another, until at the end of December, 2025, I found that I had written 58 essays.

I began to imagine that the world would just keep on giving me things to chew over and write about, unconsciously falling into the trap of momentum which fools me into thinking that things have found their groove, and that no change is going to be necessary. That’s usually the exact point when suddenly everything falls off the edge of a cliff, and I find myself, yet again, wondering what just happened, as I look around incredulously and realise that every part of the landscape has changed.

I’ve had a virus, and am now in that curious post-viral state of almost-wellness but not quite back to normal yet. It’s as if someone has taken the field of my mind and ploughed it all up, leaving only dark clods of wet, overturned earth facing up to the winter sky as the crows caw overhead. And then the snow comes, and the whole field turns a soft white, reflecting the clouds, marked only by the occasional tracks of a passing hare.

I wonder at the curious peace of it. Remember how the words used to well up from a seemingly endless spring, when all I had to do was secure the conditions for their safe passage out into the world.

Despite the peace of it, it feels like a bereavement, the loss of something vital.

But the snow-blanketed field is a gift, even though I don’t want it.

It’s 6.30 am. It’s dark. I’m sitting looking down the road outside my window at the parked cars, the lights all still off in the houses opposite. The one solitary tree in the street, a Tree of Heaven, vast and secure on the hill, spreads its branches around the streetlight. Through its bare limbs I can see glimpses of the dark sea and the horizon, waiting for the winter dawn.

This is the gift of the winter field.