A Hogmanay Letter.

Dear ones,

 it's that time after Christmas that stretches into the first week or so of the new year when I think back over the last twelve months and feel inescapably tragic. No matter if it has been a good twelve months or a bad twelve months or (more commonly) an untanglable mixture of the two, the weight of the year past descends upon me and I feel heavy, as heavy as if I were being asked to live it all over again in the space of a week.

 This year has been longer than most. We started it in London in a pretty bad way – stretched, sad, exhausted, scared, fairly legitimately tragic. We scrambled and we fought to get ourselves packed and organised and ready to leave the life that was filling our pockets with more and more rocks every day and we did it; after three months of painting and building and planting and crying we stuffed our bags and closed the door, said goodbye to the garden and the home that we had tried to build (some pieces more successfully than others) and handed the keys to our year's work and life's savings over to a bunch of only moderately suspect tenants.


 We boarded planes and ferries and planes again - sometimes together and sometimes apart - and fell face first into Nye's parents' arms and home where we lay whimpering and shaking and drinking wine like France had run out of water. It was supposed to be three months but it turned into six, three months being not nearly long enough to recover from the preceding hundreds. I'm still trying to make sense of them but I probably never will, they were six months out of a life otherwise lived elsewhere. They were six months that were purely, intensely, unfathomably their own (très français) thing. Seductive and restorative and alienating and exhausting, they both tempted us with the desire to turn them into our next six years and sent us running for a place we knew better, a place for want of a better word, less foreign.


 And so again we were packing our bags and our boxes and our car. Wrapping the speakers and the hard drives in tea towels, stacking the books and squashing the cuddly toys into the spaces in between. Washing and folding the clothes outgrown, the summer things that would in all reality not be needed again while they still fitted and packing them into bags for the charity shop. Dismantling bikes, taking photos from the fridge door, secretly filing a thousand drawings of the dog and the swimming pool into the recycling. Boarding planes alone again with two small, bewildered children and watching my husband drive off, the work of his past few months bouncing along on a trailer behind him. Saying goodbye to somewhere that like the home before it had been so many things to me, both wonderful and terrible. A place that had taught me that nowhere is perfect, that however hard we look a home is never going to be heaven all of the time, that even a landscape gifted to you by the gods can and will turn into a prison of occasion and that maybe it was time to accept and learn to live with that.


 Stepping off the first plane into Bristol we stumbled again into the arms of family, again we drank wine and again sighs of relief were prickled with tears of separation while bone deep exhaustion settled over us as we drifted to sleep on the floor. Another plane, another journey alone with little children and we were almost there, desperate to be reunited again with my husband, their daddy who had driven across two countries. Together, in a state of weary confusion and displacement and with the help of my mum whose quiet home we invaded with our chaos, we got ready for the final stretch of our journey and a convoy of two cars trailed slowly through the Highlands, mountains and lochs and deer and sheep leading the way to the ferry terminal, a long concrete strip buzzing with fishermen bringing in catches and seagulls busy spreading their detritus. In the back of one of those cars shivered a small, smelly puppy with ridiculous ears who had been found along the way and collected that morning in an act of hope and serendipity colliding. Ten years of talking about a dog and finally, finally, we had one.

 We arrived in the dark, having sailed into the sunset and out of the other side. Driving across the moors in the pitch of a night unlit by street lamps, the ghostly antlers and luminous eyes of red deer, the low swooping of owls and the darting of rabbits from the road welcomed us to their island. The next morning that same road disappeared into the grey of an October sunrise and in our pyjamas we threw a ball in the garden, marvelling at the thick blanket, the rolling tide of mist from whence our new home was peering.



This year has been a long year. We have moved and we have moved. We have rested in a way that we have never rested before, we have quit and we have stalled and we have tried to start over again. We have made the best of what we have and we have worked hard on accepting - accepting decisions mis-made, situations mis-handled, directions mis-taken. We are looking into a new year (like every other damn person) not knowing what will come and being, finally, okay with that, hopeful that this will be one of new starts but that not a single one of those starts will require a boarding card.

 I have dreams big and dreams small for 2016, the list is endless but these are some that come to mind; to see more of the people I love, to find a home and put up a picture, to sell my photography but not my soul, to train the dog to walk at heel, to find a mascara that works for me, a pair of jeans that fit and a job that pays me actual money. To hold the newborn baby of my oldest friends and cry quiet tears of joy into his or her soft little head. To learn to drive, make sourdough bread and joint a chicken (not all at the same time). To climb more sand dunes, chase more waves, eat more foods that scare me. To go slow and enjoy it, to go fast and enjoy that too. To fill a sketchbook. To find my place in this endless landscape, to enjoy the space that has opened up around me and allow myself to fill as much of it as I need. To shout less, or at least with a little more direction, to join the library and knit something in the round. The list goes on and always will.

 Happy New Year friends. Thank you for being with me this year, for leaving your words of encouragement and commiseration and support. For offering me your tales of failure and your dreams of success. For being there when I quit and being there when I tried to start again. Every word you have left here has been a gift to me, a gift to each other and I hope you know that they are always, always appreciated. As this year ends I wish you all a few moments of peace to think about all that has past, to ready yourselves for all that lies ahead. I wish for at least 30% of your dreams to come true, if not this year then the next or the next or the next again and for those dreams that aren't for you to be let go with all of the grace or anger or dismay that they deserve, for as my Granny says, what's for you won't go by you. 

 See you on the other side my friends, see you on the other side. x

Scotland, pros and cons

pro: You can buy paracetamol in the supermarket, in fact you can buy paracetamol everywhere.*

con; I have been wearing at least one pair of tights every day for six weeks, more often two. 

pro: Coffee in British cafes does not taste like burned soil. 

con; Tinned tomatoes taste more like tin than tomato.

pro; The words boak, bogging, minging. 

con; When I accidentally mutter 'Ce n'est pas bon' under my breath I no longer sound like a trier, I sound like a twat.

pro; I have 'cultural knowledge', like how to open a tube of toothpaste and what number to call in an emergency. 

con; Other than hands or faces, I haven't seen my own or my kids skin for six weeks. This will only continue. 

pro; Knowing (generally) why people are laughing in my presence

con; It costs what would once buy me a week's worth of wine to come by one bottle that is at all drinkable

pro; Weather that changes, dramatically and often. 

con;  I will have to leave the country to eat a ripe apricot.

pro; Prescriptions! They're free! Totally, completely free. 

con; When I was either my hair or my clothes it's a very real concern that they may still be wet in a week's time. 

* I can't believe I've been blogging here for almost 9 years and I've never told you my favourite joke. . . Why are there no painkillers in the jungle? Because the parrots ate 'em all. My husband thinks it's terrible but he's wrong. 


*image from Fornasetti, it's a plate that I really want but I can't spend £125 on a plate because I'm not allowed nice things that can't withstand being dropped, banged, accidentally hurled across the room etc, etc.

Time is gonna take so much away.

Time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that time can offer you a trade.
Time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that time can offer you a trade.
You gotta do something that you can get nicer at.
You gotta do something that you can get wiser at.
You better do something that you can get better at
'cause that's the only thing that time will leave you with.
'Cause time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that time can offer you a trade. 

It might be cabaret.
it could be poetry.
It might be trying to make a new happy family.
It could be violin repair or chemistry.
But if it's something that takes a lot of time that's good.
'Cause time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that time can offer you a trade.
Because your looks are gonna leave you.
And your cities gonna change too.
And your shoes are gonna wear through.
Yeah, time is gonna take so much away
but there's a way that you can offer time a trade. 

You gotta do something that you can get smarter at.
You gotta do something that you might just be a starter at.
You better do something that you can get better at.
'Cause that's the thing that time will leave you with.
And maybe that's why they call a trade a trade,
like when they say that you should go and learn a trade.
The thing you do don't have to be to learn a trade
just get something back from time for all it takes away. 

It could be many things.
It could be anything.
It could be expertise in Middle-Eastern travelling.
Something to slowly sure to balance life's unravelling. 
You have no choice you have to pay times price,
but you can use the price to buy you something nice.
Something you can only buy with lots of time
so when you're old, which you will, some whippersnapper's mind. 

It might be researching a book that takes you seven years.
A book that helps to make the path we take to freedom clear.
and when you're done you see it started with a good idea.
One good idea could cost you thousands of your days,
but it's just time you'd be spending anyways.
You have no choice, you have to pay times price
but you can use the price to buy you something nice. 

So I've decided recently,
too try to trade more decently. 

Bill Cunningham New York.

Recently, since I discovered Netflix, I've been watching tv while I work. I usually watch fairly mindless, dialogue heavy tv series, seeing as how I am am mostly looking at my work while I'm working (honestly) and anything more subtle gets lost on me, but today I watched something different and it was so good that I had to share it with you. 

Bill Cunningham New York is a beautiful, gentle film about a beautiful gentle man. Cunningham is an octogenarian fashion photographer who has been taking pictures on the streets and at the parties of New York for the NY Times since the 1970s, and that is as much as I knew about him before I stumbled across the film and remembered that someone somewhere a long time ago had said it was good. 

Despite what you might expect, the film is not about photography and it's not about fashion, it's about a gentleman and an artist, striving to make pure work in a desperately commercialised industry. Bill Cunningham is a quiet, infectiously cheerful, unassuming man who until he was evicted lived in a tiny kitchenless and bathroomless studio in Carnegie Hall, sleeping on a camp bed, surrounded by filing cabinets full of his negatives. He travels around New York on his bicycle, with his old Nikon film camera slung around his neck, wearing a blue jacket that he first spotted on some Parisian street cleaners and thought looked both practical and was a nice colour. He is 84. 

The film is about him in the simplest way that a film can be a portrait of a person; it follows him working; interviews him about his thoughts, life and ideas; speaks to the people who know and love him, (which seems to be everyone, he is an immensely lovable man - something that becomes apparent almost as soon as the film begins) and leaves the viewer to fall for and feel for the man as it goes. There isn't much that I can say about him or the film that doesn't feel inadequate; it's quietly moving and inspiring and if your heart isn't a little bit broken by that interview with him (you'll know it when you see it) then you might want to get your heart checked, because it's likely defective. It's been 3 hours since I watched it and I still feel tearful. 

*image Bill Cunningham by The Sartorialist

‘No. You’re forgetting,’ said the Spirit. ‘That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.’

I haven't read C.S Lewis's The Great Divorce, but somewhere, some time over the last couple of weeks I found this quote and it has been flitting around in my mind, making my heart and brain tingle . I wanted to write it down here because without ever really knowing how or why, the things that flit around my mind making my heart and brain tingle tend to fall out of it and be completely forgotten. I can't help but feel life would be richer if I could just remember the things that move me.

*watercolour by William Turner, c 1830

Motherhood and (self) employment.

A friend asked me if I could write about how it was being a self-employed mother who had to go back to work after 3 months, in a society where the mothers around us are for the most part taking a year's maternity leave.

Friend,  like me, is a wedding photographer. And Friend, like me, gave birth in November and had to start shooting weddings again in the Spring when her baby was around four months old. I'd imagine though, that also like me, she started answering work emails and fitting in little bits of admin after only a few weeks. Not because she wanted to but because when your livelihood relies on bookings made 6 months to a year (or two in crazypants situations) advance you're painfully aware that the emails you don’t answer now are the weddings you're not going to be shooting a year down the line, when presumably, you're going to need some dough.

So, four weeks after W&P were born I started working again. Just an hour or two while they were sleeping. Let's back up and look at this situation from afar: four weeks after giving birth to twins, haemorrhaging, having a blood transfusion, spending a week in hospital, coming home with TWO BABIES that I had fuck-all idea how to look after and who spent most of the night awake, who were struggling to breastfeed, who I was struggling to breastfeed, who were complete fucking alien tyrants, I decided to start working again. More specifically, to start communicating with people, people who I wanted to think that we were capable of a) photographing their weddings and b) behaving like normal human beings at their weddings. It was a bad scene. But it was essential, both to our livelihood and actually, to me. I kind of enjoyed having a role other than 'mother' to fulfil. This might be when you ask 'why wasn't Nye answering emails? Aren't you a partnership?' which, yes. Yes we are. But Nye, the dear man, was up all night with the tyrants while I slept a blissful six hours on the sofa. So that I was capable of sustaining our business. The simple fact of the matter is that I don't cope well on interrupted sleep and he's painfully dyslexic. Reversing our roles so that I was up all night and he was writing to clients would have been a total shitstorm, (Quite possibly literally with TWO BABIES and a woman who throws things when she's tired and angry.) At this point I could write an entire essay on our mental schedule during the first year of the girls lives, but I won't because Friend didn't ask what it was like being two people who were trying to keep their babies and their business and each other alive. But that's a good story too.

What did she ask again? Oh yes, self-employed mother, going back to work. Focus.

So at four weeks I went back to answering emails and other administration stuff and Nye continued to look after the babies (after being up all night), patting me on the shoulder to (try to) feed them when they were hungry. I know who had the better deal out of that ride. The truth is, as I said, I enjoyed being back at work. But the truth also is that 'work' was a few hours of emails that I could write in my pyjamas, ten feet from the sofa I slept on and much more importantly that I had an immeasurably amazing partner who looked after the children and allowed me to get enough sleep that I was able to function. In fact I should probably just stop writing here because I have fuck-all idea how anyone does this shit without someone else at home all day. Show me a self-employed mother who is trying to work and look after her new baby while her partner is at work outside the house and I'll show you a fucking superhero. A crazy, tearful, unwashed superhero but a superhero nonetheless. I'm very very aware that our situation is fairly unusual and that I can't really talk for all those women who have just had babies and are still feeling the pressure not to let their businesses die a speedy death from neglect.

Let's assume you survive the first few months of parenthood and you find yourself at the point where you have to actually leave the house, and the baby/babies to shoot a wedding. Holy crap. Before the girls were even born I spent days and weeks fretting over this point, sobbing 'I don't want to leave them, I don't want to go back to work. How are we going to do this?' 'It'll be fine, don't worry' said Nye. Unsaid: 'we don't have any choice, we have to work so suck it up.'

The thing was, we worked as a team, so we both had to leave the house so we had to leave the girls with someone. 'Someone' was our parents, so at least they were being left with people who loved them, but that didn't alleviate the terror that a) the caretakers would forget to feed them/ drop them/ sit on them/ go out for a fag and let the door slam behind them (that none of our parents smoke is probably worth mentioning. This particular fear may have been born of hormone-induced insanity.) or b) I would cry through the whole wedding, aching with longing to be back with my babies.

I contemplated the logistics of combining working with feeding my babies; the babies would just have to come to. Whoever was looking after them would have to bring them to weddings and I would just pop out to feed them (because brides and grooms wouldn't mind that sort of thing at all). And the weddings that we had to travel overnight for? Well my mum would just have to come too and we would all share a family room at the travel lodge and it would be fine. HA!

Let's just consider this a parable in the pointlessness of sobbing over things that have not yet happened. In the event, by the time we shot our first wedding, I had given up on breastfeeding altogether, (it being just too soul-destroying to continue with) which removed that problem. The girls were happy to take bottles so there would be no need for me to pop outside to whip out my floppity milkers during the vows. Secondly, by March, when the girls were four months old, I was really really really ready to spend a day without them. REALLY ready. As we closed the door behind us to head off for our first wedding I did a little skip and a hop, feeling my charpei belly wobble under my work outfit (still Gap maternity trousers, FYI.) 'Are you worried?' asked Nye. 'Nope, are you?' 'No!'. I don't know that I've ever enjoyed photographing a wedding as much as I enjoyed that first one.

I hope I don't need to say this, but the internet is stupid so I'm going to say it anyway; I loved my babies and I loved being a mother but I also loved working and I couldn't and can't see a single reason to feel guilty about that. Maybe if I was leaving my kids alone with a couple of milk bottles tied upside down to the bars of their cot, like hamster water bottles, I'd have felt guilty. But they were being left with a kind, caring, terrified Grandmother, they were going to be fine. We worked all day and when we got home late that night I was absolutely ready to see my little bears, to sniff their milky necks and hold them close. Then go to bed while Nye stayed up all night trying to convince them to sleep. The next morning was tough, I got up at 6am to send Nye to bed for his 6 hours sleep and take over parenting duties and dear god, it hurt. Two weeks later we left for an overnight trip, two nights actually. That was pretty good too. I don't think my mum enjoyed it quite as much, when we got home she looked ready to flee, but everyone survived to tell the tale.

I don't understand the cultural noise that says we're supposed to want to be with our babies and our children all of the time, and I mean ALL. There is an understanding that leaving your baby with someone else, even for a few hours, is somehow not only shirking your parental responsibility but depriving your child and reveals that you are in fact, entirely heartless and unloving. Men don't feel this and I get it; breastfeeding. Breastfed babies have a dependency on their mothers that is important and undeniable, so swanning off on a week's holiday and leaving them with someone else is probably unwise. But even when they're older, when they're no longer breastfeeding we're supposed to want to be with them all the time and personally, I'm calling bullshit. I'm sure there are mothers who do feel that, who genuinely want to be with their offspring 24/7 and who would genuinely ache were they separated for more than an hour. It's just that I don't know any of them and I'm not one of them.

The status quo in the UK is for mothers to take the full year that they're entitled to on maternity leave and at the end of it to either return to their jobs, start a new career or to quit working and continue to be full time parents. I couldn't possibly say how many take which path, seeing as I went out of my way to avoid spending time with other mothers in that first year, but I feel that going back to the job you left is not the prevailing trend, I may be wrong. It seems that the freedom that a paid year of maternity leave offers rarely comes in tandem with the flexibility most mothers are after once their child is a year old. 

To be completely honest, I don't feel qualified to provide any comfort at all to mothers who have to go back to work before that year is up and who are unhappy about that fact.  I can offer comfort to mothers who are worried about this coming up and say 'hey, it might not be that bad! You might enjoy getting away from your kid for a while, AND THAT'S FINE!' But for the mothers who are actually struggling with leaving their kids at home while they go off to earn the readies; all I have is my sympathies. It sucks to have to do things you don't want to do and I'm sorry that there isn't an easier way.

Weirdly, talking about our parenting situations seems to be taboo, we are quick to be defensive or self-depreciating, to see other people's decisions as either an attack on or a validation of our own. It's only by having these conversation that we can begin to place our own experiences in context. I'd really love to hear other people's experiences of returning to work, or not, after their allotted maternity leave, be that a week or a year, is up.

* DISCLAIMER. Again, because the internet is Stupid, I'd like to say: I have shared my experience, my situation and my feelings. I am in no way suggesting that this is or should be anyone else's experience, situation or feelings. I am neither insinuating that everyone should be glad to go back to work or that those who don't want to leave their infants with a babysitter are in some way lacking and I have huge sympathy with almost any and all alternative experiences. Call my naive, but I do essentially believe that we are all just trying to get by and do our best. By sharing my experience I am not publicly validating it as either healthy or desirable. Just because I felt it was both is in no way to imply that you should. I am well aware that I may be deficient in many ways and that the chances that I am completely fucking up my children are high. In fact just yesterday I referenced a dog training manual in conversation about childrearing and was surprised when people laughed/baulked.*

on motherhood

"I didn't expect to come face to face with my selfishness, my laziness and my lack of patience so brutally or abruptly. I didn't expect that my self confidence would wither or that I would battle so much just getting through the day. I didn't realise that such a small creature could expose me the way Pip has.

I thought I could just go on being me. Me with a baby. Turned out, I had to be stripped back and rebuilt from the bottom up. "

I'm probably not the only one who feels like culturally we are mis-selling motherhood; yes it's amazing and wonderful and fulfilling and life-giving and nurturing etc etc, but FUCK, it's hard too. I'm probably not the only one who is reading blogs like Glow and looking at supermodel (sometimes literally) mothers with beatifically happy children in impeccably artistic houses spouting crap about how their most humbling moment as a mother was when their kid spilled juice on their interior designer friend's white sofa and thinking COME ON.

My friend Rachel wrote the most beautifully raw and succinct piece on motherhood for Oh You Pretty Things, summing up in remarkably few words what it feels like to become a mother, to go from being responsible for the life of one person to being responsible for the life of another (or others) and the complete and utter disassembling that takes place to readjust to this new and huge way of being.

You should read it.