A Spring Notebook
An audio version of this read by me:
If I was to be asked what my big hope is for the remainder of March 2024, I’d probably say it’s that I’ve already seen my full quota of my own blood for the month, but with six days to go who can say for sure? There was the doctor’s surgery today and the other more viscerally unpleasant experience of a couple of weeks ago which I will refrain from detailing in a family newsletter intended to be read prior to the watershed. Then yesterday I climbed a gate, slipped, and my knee crunched down heavily on some sharp stones. I initially decided I’d ignore the large gash it created but then, taking a closer look and remembering all the benefits I regularly enjoy by having legs, I went to the nearest supermarket, Shepton Mallet Tesco, to buy some first aid bits. It was busier than any shop I’d seen since prior to Christmas and the two inches people were managing to stay away from each other felt like the two inches separating a sketchily maintained idea of society from a 900-fist brawl. A strip of my trousers was hanging off, with blood from my knee streaming out of the hole, and I thought I could see a bit of white bone, or something else similarly, unfamiliarly white, sticking out. But in all honesty my knee wasn't painful at all compared to the experience of negotiating Shepton Mallet Tesco at midday on a weekend. Later, after I’d walked through six miles of deepest, richest North Dorset mud, I went to a pub to make some of these notes and people at the pub stared at the bloody red ripped part of my eight year-old jeans and pulled those faces people pull when they’re trying to not make a face at something that disgusts them but can’t help themselves. I think, though, it was mostly about context. The pub was extremely clean and full of even cleaner-looking people, people who looked like they’d walked directly out of a glossy catalogue which sold entire families - mostly just two generations but sometimes three, if you wanted the deluxe package with extra childcare - in expensive clothes for staggering sums of money. Earlier I’d been to a record fair where people were nowhere near as clean or blatantly well-off and everyone greeted my knee more stoically. The landlady of the pub told me the pub had a beer and gin festival coming up soon and that Brian was going to shave his beard off for charity. “Great!” I replied, thinking “Good on you, Brian” but also “Who the fuck is Brian?” One of the unnervingly clean children belonging to the unnervingly clean adults escaped towards the small river near the pub. “Absolutely not, Digby,” said his mother. “We are not people who go into rivers.”
Later I was browsing in a shop and the guy who ran the shop asked me if I could tell him precisely where I lived and, being a bit hesitant about precision at this foundational stage in our relationship, I told him that I lived in a village about 20 minutes’ drive from Exeter. “‘I’ve been to Exeter a couple of times,” the man said, with what I thought I detected as the twinkle of the born narrator in his eye. “The first time, I went to a cafe, I forget which one now, and I ordered a coffee and the coffee was ever so big, quite a lot bigger than I expected. Then the second time I went I got the train but I’ll tell you what: on the way back my train was delayed by almost half an hour.” The man added nothing further about his experiences and it became apparent that I had now heard his Exeter stories in full. Some might have said they could have done with a little extra twist or two but it was hard not to admire their stripped-down, to-the-point realism.
Have you seen the SUVs come out, at this time of year? Have you seen the sweet way they crawl blinking to the thresholds of their warrens and, feeling sunlight and birdsong showering them with gentle kisses, venture out boldly onto the tarmac surface of the earth and tailgate you relentlessly all the way to the motorway slip road or the garden centre. You notice they’re a tiny bit bigger again this year. Their parents must have fed them well over winter! As their bodywork becomes more fortified and their brakes more responsive, their drivers put more faith in their own godlike invincibility. The process keeps on advancing, until one day, driving the same ordinary size vehicle you’ve been driving for years, you notice a semi-rectangular country glued to your rear bumper. At first you mistake it for Egypt but on closer examination it turns out to be the new improved Land Rover Discovery. The man driving it might kill you but that’s ok: he figures he’ll be fine, due to advancements in crash technology and, now we’re all individuals, in the isolationist culture cars have been campaigning for, looking out for ourselves and cutting anyone who kills our vibe out of our lives, is that fineness not what truly matters? You pull over into the nearest layby and let him pass and his fury transitions to a Peugeot hatchback manufactured in 1998. “Get out of my way, pathetic little man!” he shouts at its driver, who is in fact called Sue and considerably over five feet ten in the flat pumps she is wearing today.
But what is troubling me more right now is the cat I saw on its side in the slow lane of the dual carriageway on Thursday. What on earth makes a cat wander out onto a four lane road roaring with traffic at rush hour anyway? I expect it will be a while before I stop seeing the poor thing’s pupils glinting ahead of me in the headlights, before I stop wondering if they still were able to see anything at that point, or what heartbroken child might be missing it, or whether (even more painfully) it was never loved at all, or whether (even though it would have been dangerous, in traffic like that, and no doubt futile) I should have left at the next exit, six miles away, turned around, left at another exit seven miles from there, driven another mile, stopped on the hard shoulder and moved the cat out of the road. What can you do, except try your best to drive carefully, and hug your own pets even more frequently than you already do? What I want to know is what happened to that future vision I had, as an already sensitive 20something, of my reinforced future self, the one who’d built up an exoskeleton to protect himself from these sights, the one immune to the huge amount of roadkill that spring in the UK countryside brings? When precisely was he replaced with this even more sensitive human lump of blancmange that becomes more in danger of entirely liquifying with every dead badger and pheasant and hare and fox that he sees? I suspect there is nothing to be done, except to keep writing.