2.1, Lancaster
N.’s kitchen so cold you can see your breath. Woke at 6.45, 7.15 to the alarm, then 9.45, a treat for the last day of cold. Woodpigeon calling down chimney, or so it feels.
4.1, Lancaster
The house much warmer now. Undersalted my porridge, having oversalted it yesterday. Walking in the rain by the marsh, and then back there at dusk. Flocks of lapwing, unseen until they rose in racing clouds then settled. Blackbirds cackling everywhere. In London you are never properly alone. London this, London that. I don’t know how anyone does a PhD in London.
6.1, train to Lakes
Fields pale green w/ frost, fells pink over the fields. Wisps of clouds in the valleys.
Later, Booths in Windermere
I’m not tough. I am wearing two hats.
Later, pub in Coniston
Raven with light shining in a way that made it look grey at the neck, like a jackdaw. Kestrel near the top, perfectly still, artefactual.
8.1, train to London
Gull just flew low by the birch, turned into the light. Like a flock of lapwing. On the train back to London now. Enjoying calling it ‘tepid’ and ‘lukewarm’ to people.
Woman a few seats away has a lovely pleat at the back of her shirt. Her belt is missing one of the loops, the central one at the back; to see it was surprisingly intimate.
11.1
Dreamt H. was my wingman. His tip was to open conversations with the words of ‘We’ve got a groovy thing going baby’.
12.1
Just remembered the smell of the grit spreader – unexpected, malty.
19.1
Herzog double bill – intoxicating soap-like smell of the woman in front.
22.1
Purest late winter feeling, napping in the cold sun, the light exposing things I feel I have not seen for months. Odd pressure of hopefulness, possibility, that will dissolve, probably, come 4:45 and the dark.
25.1
I intended some days ago to write of having dreamt I was looking after someone else’s baby, and was curious rather than anxious at how they picked it up and supported its lolling head.
27.1
Woke at 3 to see a red light coming from my computer. I began to believe it was on fire; but so peacefully as to not be quite of this world. But it was the laser from A.’s USB mouse. The moon, intensely bright, with lines of cloud in grey against the sky, the robinia silhouetted. I worried I’d been cursed by looking directly at the full moon. Creaking, as if F. were wandering about, or someone on the landing, but no doors had opened or closed. Thinking that it would come as a relief if the house were haunted.
15.2
Blackbird sitting in the cream apple blossom, yellow beak. Where is An Area of Darkness? Pigeons in the tree like raisins, fat blobs on the branches.
21.2
Dreamt of a bird running up to the window, mocking me, trying to get in. It turned out to be a human in a costume. I looked through scrapbooks of fashion history to ‘identify’ the costume.
27.2, bus to Germany
Through the high, barbed wire-topped fence, past the scrubby sand grass, a small group of birds, pale grey, in a wide, bright pool, reflected in it.
28.2, Marbach
Dreamt of a very precocious girl who claimed that 1967 was her favourite post-war year. I combed her tangled hair with my fingers.
6.3, Lausanne
Swiss plug sockets beautiful, unearthly. I couldn’t find them because I could hardly believe that this was what these delicate arrangements of holes were.
9.3
Hearing a blackbird and thinking it is already dusk – and seeing that it isn’t, it’s far from being dusk – and realising all of a sudden that winter is over
6.4
Thought I could hear a bell ringing at the school, but it was the bubbles in a glass of water.
18.4
Stood at the wrong bus stop and ended up in the wrong part of Central London. In St James’s Park. Hungover, bright sun. Sense of everything being physically constituted of regret, every stone and substance made of it.
20.4
Beginning to feel superstitious about April, a month of bad luck, and still 10 days left of it. And then the fear that having named this I have brought it about.
23.4
Waking when the heating goes on, the sudden heat and then overhearing the prints clipped in the sock dryer over the radiator jostling in the thermal.
26.4
Dreamt of being at an airport, waiting to fly. Seeing owls up close through the windows, the terrible peaks of the Alps.
3.5
Set alarm for 5.30, of course decided not to wake.
6.5
Nice to see the pothos without its blanket of white mould. The rain, the bank holiday, wicked sense of having run away, the little birds dashing from bush to bush.
7.5
Dreamt of A. finding a piece of fur in a hearth, realising that it was feathers, the downy front of a bird, as if birds sloughed off their skin as they grew.
13.5
A child in a pushchair, snoring. Somehow disturbing, in her utter trust. Her sense of safety on the overground.
Have I said yet how warm it is out, how it smells of summer in the evenings. Stopped mid-run, halfway up the hill, tired but also shocked by the smell of elderflower.
17.5, accommodation outside Huddersfield
Students on the lawn barbecuing and listening to the White Album. The air warm, damp. Earlier I thought I heard a pheasant but it was something being hit regularly.
18.5, pub in Holmfirth
Dreamt of bluebells, walking near them, my path not through them. The light on oak, when the air is damp.
In Holmfirth, ‘paying my respects’ to M John Harrison. It’s sunny, men are out. Everyone is out. 5pm. I feel I could walk forever. No dippers on the Holme.
25.5
Want to write here about Cold Crematorium, which I just finished. Wide Awake festival in the park, Slowdive, the sounds enter the house and reverberate oddly, as if they came from within it, but very far away, as if that were life and I were outside it. I can hear a great spotted woodpecker in the tree, chip chip. Debreczeni seeking refuge in unconsciousness. The squalor, unimaginable; the proximity to death, the thinking of nothing but survival, but also the hope of death, choosing death.
26.5
Waking at 3am and it has just started raining. The point where it turns; it’s summer, the windows are thin or open, the sound close but you are dry.
1.6
Wind overnight, the rustle of prints, the sound of the door opening.
7.6
Have spent a good amount of today and some of yesterday, in Paris, worrying about an article Herta Müller wrote about Gaza and whether I want to continue working with the various poets who approved of it. Now (8.6) it feels like a storm in a teacup.
9.6
The sound of a bluebottle, distracting and at the same time of summer and so beautiful. Grey out, cool. Falling asleep at 1.30, foxes in the garden, or cats, fighting. Disconcerting sense of our sovereignty over this place being illusory, radically relative.
12.6
Fell asleep thinking about Zionism.
17.6, Huddersfield
Busy gulping coffee. Thinking about infection and what curd tart is.
19.6
Waiting for the night bus at Holborn having been delayed 3 hours by being accused of stealing a man’s wedding ring, a story I have now told too many times to write here.
28.6, Torquay
Dreamt of fashioning a rollercoaster for a tiny little cat.
10.7, Torquay
Dreamt that there were huge green iguanas catching fish in the Cornish sea.
14.7
A day of birdwatching yesterday has made me hyperaware of birds and birdlike movements.
15.7
The sky very dark, surely only the rain, and not the winter. But already the autumn feeling is here. Wet terracotta from watering a plant, a wonderful smell.
21.7
Dreamt of bateleurs and short-toed eagles flocking in the sky. Dreamt N. got a tattoo related to Mayröcker, or someone like her. Dreamt I had forgotten to make Christmas cards.
Yesterday, window open, waking up in the damp air, a little cool, hearing a woodpecker, and I for a moment felt I could be on a campsite in Germany.
Hungover from drinks with A., I cycled around Herne Hill seeing male couples holding, or almost holding, hands, and feeling I did not want to hold a man’s hand, could not, until I was one. And then thinking about women, that I could not hold a woman’s hand because I was one – a man, that is. A fantasy of perfect equality.
22.7
Both windows open, prints, still hanging, rustling wildly. Was woken up in the night by them. Vivid dreams, of seeing a rare small mammal that I could not identify, white and round and very fast.
26.7, Cricklewood
The cats very quiet and sluggish, though enough animosity there. At 7.15am, as the alarm went, the older came and called for food and, as I addressed her, threw up on the carpet.
27.7, Cricklewood
Swifts overhead, louder than Herne Hill, perhaps just because it is quiet here, really quiet. It feels a lovely day, cool still but no clouds, will be hot. I will walk the final northern sections of the Loop.
31.7, Cricklewood
Found myself dreaming of bread and butter pudding. Locked myself out, barefoot, taking out the plastic. Had to be let in by the next-door neighbour and climb over; one of the cats took fright.
Moments of doubt about my ability to continue saying things about Rohmer, what if I’m not clever enough. But that’s foolish. Just say what you do understand.
Later: Broadway Market. Strong but not totally unpleasant smell of shit, manure perhaps, or actual dogshit, on the wind. Maybe just the smell of warm streets in summer.
1.8, Cricklewood
Afraid that one of the cats has disappeared. Ramen. The younger one. When I woke I could find neither, but the older had been hiding. Tuppence staring for minutes at the same spot in the hedge.
Later: Tuppence seems at a loss without her sibling rivalry.
Later: Each little noise I think is the return of Ramen.
12.8, Isle of Man
Dreamt of explaining Oxford philosophy to H. Weather turned overnight – enormous gusts, light rain. The air now damp, sky thick + grey. The wind like the foley sound of a storm at sea. One flash of lightning – unless it was a torch.
13.8, train Liverpool–London
Nearly got a good photo of a chough, but it flew off as I pressed the shutter.
19.8
Woke up realising that I might have put apostrophes in the wrong place in my Substack post. That and other thoughts kept me in bed for nearly two hours.
22.8, Cricklewood
Did not leave the house all day – did not even open the door. Just went to put the rubbish out and it is much warmer than I thought, the wind and the rain very warm and a little sinister.
23.8, Cricklewood
Long vivid dreams of out-of-date milk.
24.8, Cricklewood
A cat, Ramen, just dashed out and is cowering under the garden table from the rain.
28.8, Cricklewood
Ramen looks like she is glaring at Tuppence. She may just have her eyes only half open.
2.9, train to Sheffield
House party yesterday, garden party. The tiny slugs that got on all the plates and were brought into the kitchen by phone torchlight last night, in the morning arching curiously on the kitchen towel.
5.9
Perfect September morning, rain, green, grey.
12.9
Dreamt of boring Jeremy Noel-Tod with the meaning of the word Novella.
26.9
Reading Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, and listening to a crane fly patter around the room. Rain outside. Dark, traffic.
27.9
Dreamt I was in a horror movie in which Hell was run as a ‘paf-like space’.
17.10
Once again distracted by trail shoes.
20.10
Bag of apples, wet, earlier. Split in the street. One apple rolled right into the road and was sheared by a motorbike.
2.11, Brittany
Today overcast again. Window shuts out the birds, but from the toilet I could hear it, whatever it is, the woodpecker.
3.11, Brittany
Dreamt of scooping cheese and gravy into a box to make it melt and getting it on the sleeve of a jumper. An elaborate dream in a Wetherspoons. I had programmed certain mugs to make a special noise near one another.
5.11, Brittany
Dreamt of scaup that had the faces of identical lads, their hair in a dinner ladies’ hair net.
6.11, Brittany
Watching the sheep eat with such gusto. As if every new bite were a particularly delicious morsel, but it’s all they do, all day. Table smells of beer from when I used my hand as a funnel last night.
Later: two men arrive in a car. I half-overhear the conversation and become convinced that we are about to be funny gamesed.
10.11, bus to London
13 hours late. The bus hit a boar. I had hoped, finding out that the windscreen had not shattered, that we might make it to Paris. But when the journey was cancelled and we all had to get off, I saw what had made the tinkling sound: the entire front corner of the bus, the lights, all of it, taken out. The spectacle of this on its own somehow made up for the delay.
23.11
Dreamt of going to San Francisco to see birds; there were skinny black and white pigeons with velvet red patches on their shoulders like shawls.
1.12, Snaresbrook
Slept badly because the cat spent much of it having to be as close to me as possible, cuddled up in ways that made me afraid of squashing him.
5.12, Snaresbrook
Yesterday, falling asleep on my back on the couch having gone to Wanstead Flats to look for barn owls, I pictured a mouth and, under the side of the chin like a jowl, a row of bulging pig udders.
13.12, Snaresbrook
Dreamt that the cat could speak, and could speak German better than me.
18.12
Wind, grey sky, the kind that may never get light. The light disappearing outside, and I ran to the park to look for woodcock, which of course I did not see, but I did witness the roosting of the parakeets in the thicket of poplar. I had heard them the other week but not seen them until now. It was spectacular, uncanny with the people doing Tai chi slowly beneath the tree, black in the winter dusk, parakeets wriggling and darting around, the more you looked the more you saw, like stars or spots.
28.12
Reading the Thesiger mountains book in the hope of finishing it before the end of the year; it is almost unreadably boring, the austerity of his earlier books now just one mountain pass – one attractive village, one tribe – after another.
29.12
Outside is foggy still, the fog a burnt cream colour as it got light, now ghostly white. Not cold out, just dark, inhospitable. Fluffy white fungus on the soil of the pothos, and flourishing like a ruff around the bottom of the aspidistra’s pot. But no time to sort them until I am back.
31.12, bus
Noticing as if for the first time the gorse by the motorway, in bloom. ‘When gorse is out of bloom, kissing is out of season’ – which I must have got from Jarman somewhere.
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Some of these have been published as ‘Dreams of Birds’ in i think it is a bird, edited by Grace Linden and Hannah Machover, and a couple are about to be published, in edited form, in the afterword to my book of translations for Holocaust Centre North, coming out in April. Thank you all for reading/subscribing; happy new year!