A submerged, dark feeling to Glasgow early this morning.
Tag Archives: fog
Of Hargate Hall
-Rather than of the wedding D and I attended, which was full of light and bustle and food and good cheer, this post is about the venue itself. About the feeling it carried, subtle, overwhelmed by the good mood of our party (70 odd souls and three dogs).
Hargate Hall, Friday, early evening. That white tent is a marquee.
You could say it was the perfect setting for hush, for suspense. For reading at the windows, looking out across the stumbling, black-tree garden. Hargate Hall was built (so a photograph in the entrance-way told us) in 1899, so not very old by the standards of English Country Houses. In little over 15 years after its construction, the facade of the aristocracy would begin to crack with the onset of World War One.
Nowadays it’s a collection of self-catering apartments adjoining a fantastic central hall replete with stained glass windows with pseudo-heraldry, and a spiked candelabra hanging from the ceiling. We stayed in a low mezzanine, located up a steep wooden ladder and overhanging a small central room. It was like staying in a cosier treehouse.
On that first evening, D and I walked the grounds through the soft wet mist as it grew darker.
the flash reflecting off the white mist, just outside our kitchen.
The garden path curves both up and down. We followed the downward path first, by the marquee and into the thin woodland.
we found this little…house? It is used for wedding ceremonies in warmer weather. Here it stared at us mournful, open mouthed
This ghostly gate marked the edge of Hargate Hall’s lands. Beyond was a farm reeking of the cows.
The light was beginning to go, and my poor wee camera struggled to keep up. It’s hard to capture the atmosphere under such conditions. It wasn’t eerie – I have been in eerie places – but was instead still. Stoic.
The farm, the drystane walls shelving the fields off into the close horizon
We wandered round along the main road and towards the gates of the hall. I’d like to say I had time then to read The Secret History (it would I think have been a perfect choice – second only to The Little Stranger) but there was far too much to do and far too many people to meet. The same of course was true of Saturday, the day of the wedding itself. But the evening of the second day brought snow, and our last morning saw Hargate Hall and the farmlands covered white.
One last shot of the hall itself. We had to take a taxi and then a five hour train ride back north. It’s funny though, on the ride to Buxton train station, the driver referred to us coming ‘up’ to the Peak District, though he had already asked where we were from. Perhaps he misspoke, or perhaps it was something to do with where he felt situated – Northern, already. It always strikes me strangely, to hear of ‘the North’ on the BBC weather forecasts, when there’s so much more north. It reinforces the idea that Scotland is, to those who live below it, a different country, though they might in other respects (and irksomely to those who believe otherwise) refer to Scotland as a region. A region North of Thule, I suppose.
From the train we watched the snow storm follow us into the North, skittering the higher lands and leaving the valleys green and then, further, the tufty brown of semi-moorland, then green once again. I began The Secret History, but still have much to go. It seems so far like a slip of caramel over a big white plate – flavourful, but. More coherence (possibly) later. Thanks to all who wished us a good trip. It was.
Filed under Uncategorized
Write like a girl
I’m writing in fog and through keeks of cloud. I’m writing with the lights on in mid day, as if on board a ship. This second book becomes a risk, an adventure over grey churning waters, when the first is settled elsewhere, waiting for another chance. The risk is not the writing, for this one. It’s in who I’m writing.
I’m writing the life of a mid-twenties girl who has come adrift on alien seas. Who has forgotten what home shores are, so that, were she to find them, she would be alien upon them. I’m writing of stress and longing. Of self-destructive and creative urges both being muffled. The shape of desire and the spines of it. That’s what the book has become, over this last harsh year. Remembered coastal landscapes and elkridden mountain country. I’m writing a girl with an interior, becoming. And I want her to be read.
I said on Twitter, “I want to write a book about a woman’s life, a book that tastes of gunpowder and failure and Indian ink”. I hope that there is room for my books, my voices, in this world. I know there are girls becoming. Women. Boys, men. I want my book to sing to them. Siren song or not. But something that presses a finger to their pulse, letting them know it is there.
I will read the books that foster longing and provide me with the permission to write, and the awareness of my deficits. I will write like a girl, though I am not any more. I started writing properly when I was 23? 24? and I gave my girlhood to writing, and I shall not stop giving it.
Outside the sky has turned ominous, dark grey, as if in writing this I have sworn something, or forsworn it. Maybe my words make me sound like Lady MacBeth?
For motivation for other women/girl writers out there: The Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award
Filed under Uncategorized
Hazy by the falls
On Saturday, D, A and I went on an outing in the West of the country, on one of the best days of the year so far. There was a brilliance, diffuse, to the air. We walked by the falls of the Clyde, the river that feeds silver and peaceful into Glasgow but in its spry, quick stage is put to use by industry and the generation of hydroelectricity. We briefly visited New Lanark –
New Lanark, a preserved former cotton mill (now tackling wool) which had progressive ideals - for the time. Health care for the workers (from the early 1800s when it was set up), the children sent to a school onsite, good pay, cheap rent. But they were still using cotton, brought, presumably, from America. Slavery at an arm's distance.
The three of us decided however that the weather was too fine to be indoors. It is not often 17c in March in Scotland, and we all caught the sun: the average temperature at this time of the year, for comparison, is around 9-10c. I’m still waiting to break my record of getting sunburnt in April on the Isle of Raasay while out hiking.
I should let the photos speak for themselves, emit the light and heat they soaked in when I took them. All this is is a journey along river, on a gorgeous day, sweet with the smell of the awakening earth.
Stillness, the shadow of the pines
Finally when we got back to the East coast, this is what awaited us: a mist that descended to cloak the city gothic and chill.
(it burned off the next day, hot once again) (brilliantly hot and bright)
Schietree 