The Road Home

It’s a strange phenomena to go away and come back. I’m fuelled by the transitions between familiar and unfamiliar. At home, since my diagnosis process began (not quite as simple with this sort of cancer) I’d been locked in a cycle of shock, hospital and other people’s shock. A bit like a ballbearing in a pinball machine. No let up and not a lot of relief. The mountains have been a salve. Somehow it helps to remember that nature is bigger than you, and carries on regardless. I’ve been making recordings of sounds I find calming and restorative. Birds singing at sunrise over the Vosges. Water trickling through a mountain stream filtered through icicles. Woodpeckers and wood pigeons. We are so addicted to our vision, hooked on looking we forget to listen. Yesterday I got up early and snuck out alone to watch the sunrise. The colours changing over the hills as the valley wakes up changing from misty blues to lilac to a murky green black. I tried to paint it but my water colour skills failed me. I need a massive canvas and oils and liquin to build up slowly and make myself do it slowly.

I have a little art studio on a very special place called Johnson’s Island where the grand union canal and the river Brent join the broad sweep of the Thames. It’s a rare gem surviving in the midst of Ballymore’s aggressive development, valued by locals, always going missing off the map of the relentless march of progress. My studio is in the old counting room of the lock-keepers cottages. The original building is a maze of little rooms that smell of river and oil paint.

As someone who cannot sit still for long painting makes me patient. But I am best when painting five things at once so as not to overpaint the one I am really working on. And when I paint I listen. I’m not sure I’ve realised that until now. I am rarely trying to represent something I know. I mainly paint some inner landscape but what comes out is responding to music and the sounds of big birds landing on the canal outside my studio by Brentford Lock. Sometimes the images unconsciously mirror somewhere I know.

I’m told the swans and geese need about 50ft to land so you constantly hear the beat of big wings, the webbed feet braking their landing and the hearty splash when their bodies touch the water. At this time of year we usually get ducks nesting outside the studio on the corner of our tiny bit of towpath (which we grandly refer to as ‘Brentford Beach’.) They steal all sorts of things to make their nests, torn up bits of paintings and mosaic they’ve found. Last year, they even found a tenner and made it a feature. The artists on the island report back regularly and we hold our breath that the foxes don’t find the eggs. We set up a webcam last year and it makes you appreciate how patient and industrious the parents are. Curiously there is often a third duck who acts as a surrogate mother, a runner, a servant. Who knew ducks had such a sophisticated social system. Some years we are rewarded by a little troop of ducklings scooting by with their proud parents. Sometimes it is fractious and there’s fighting on the strip. Like bird Eastenders. The coots are the worst. ‘Coots are cunts’ as a famous musician once told to me. You watch them. Always starting trouble. (As I do some advisory work for Natwest group I have to stress here I mean the bird not Coutts the bank but I wasn’t sure which he meant at the time). I digress.

This reverie makes me realise I am looking forward to something. It’s been a while. I’m looking forward to spring. To new beginnings and marking the rhythms of the year, the natural cycles. I’m looking forward to painting and being with my artists’ community on the island. I’m looking forward.

The hardest thing about the start of this year was not being able to look forward at all. There was only waiting for More Bad News. We are great planners and planning is one of my greatest joys. To a fault in fact. But planning tomorrow. Today. Maybe next week. That’s ok. I can do that. Further ahead is usually fantasy.

I’ll be posting some of my minute meditations here. Actually most are thirty seconds as I am ashamed to say I often can’t wait a whole minute. I’m toying with starting a little visualised podcast from the island. Paint and chat. I don’t like my voice or my face on camera but I do like to chat and there are conversations I’ve been having about life since diagnosis that are nothing like I have had before.

We’re back in England and I’m looking – and listening – forwards.