Cooling the hooves

Writing in the moment.

I am sitting in the summerhouse with my feet in the washing up bowl. I have filled it with cold water and for good measure, added two ice blocks dug out from the back of the freezer.

My feet, ankles and lower legs have been so uncomfortably swollen for the last few days in this unseasonal heat, that they feel as if they are about to split open. I am horrified at them for this. I had thought that my kankle days were long behind me and I am incredibly resentful that they have gone from their normal state of moderate slimness to these bloated monstrosities that look like a pair of startled puffer fish.

I am thinking of rebranding them as ‘miss piggy’ ankles (thank you Alisa Kennedy Jones), as that sounds much more glamorous, and hoping that this is not a sign of things to come as I head further into the depths of perimenopause. I am envious of the perfect ankle proportions of this beautiful lady who generously allowed me to photograph her as I walked along the River Itchen on Friday morning.

After the latest (and absolutely phenomenal) lesson with Kit de Waal on her 6 month writing course, I have been considering my authorial voice.

When I look back through my writing and the essays and poems and stories that I love the most, they feel like my mind, my heart, my soul, spilling through my pen nib onto the page.

You writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

Meg Roscoff

I believe them to be a clear reflection of my voice — I can feel my insides on the outside in them. But, every piece of writing that I share has been painstakingly crafted and carefully edited — read and re-read so many times that I could almost recite it by heart before I click publish.

It can take me days, weeks even, before I am happy enough with what I’ve written to share it.

But if I am to write this story from the wild place that I long to write, to find my voice in that story, I need a better method, I need to free myself from this painstaking process of ‘making well-shaped sentences’, and write more freely.

I write a lot that never sees the light of day — little snippets of things from my week that have inspired or irritated or amused me, reflections on things I’ve read, random thoughts that bubble up and spill over into the notes app on my phone, or my Substack drafts, or Word, or scribbled in my notebook or on a scrap of paper. I want to share them, because I enjoy writing to you. But I don’t because I feel that to do so, they need a little more crafting, they need to have some kind of structure, a beginning, a middle, and end. A point. A theme. A cadence. They need to be interesting. And by the time I’ve messed about with them to a point where I am happy they are ‘writerly’ enough, the moment has often passed.

So this is a small experiment.

To share the snippets, the scraps and fragments as they come, without polish or purpose, and see where I end up, in this moment.

With love,

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