A caravan by the sea (an extract)

‘The good - cannot create, they are always the beginning of the end -’

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Childhood Skies

As I sit and write, a plump bumble bee, drifts lazily over the grass, under the warmth of the afternoon sun, a striped spider scurries below the cover of tangled shoots. The sea rolls steadily over the rocks below, hurting my eyes with its white reflection. The tide is low, revealing a small private beach, the only spot of sand on a bouldered, craggy coastline. I think about what I should write. What I should tell you about what I have created. Above the shore I see the criss-cross of paths along the cliffs I have walked dozens of times over the last two years.

I am perched high above and opposite in one of many favourite spots, a spongy cubby hole, caught by the sun, sheltered from boisterous winds and the road behind me.

I moved to Cornwall in the autumn two years ago to be ‘more creative’. I spent most of my days that first year roaming the cliffs around Mousehole. Watching as the brown winter became a yellow of spring daffodils and later a summer of pink campions, foxgloves. I clambered over boulders searching for buttered seals and tried to discover the thing that is creative in me. My main project was supposed to be the work of my novel, The Lemon Tree, the words of the Fools Garden song haunted me.

‘I wonder how, I wonder why yesterday you told me bout the blue blue sky but all that I can see is just another lemon tree.’

Blue skies were sometimes a little scarce but the representation was always with me, the remembered blue skies of childhood, a time of liberty, unconsciousness, happiness.

As I walked, wrote, painted, played, laughed, sometimes cried. I found myself transforming and changing into the skies of adulthood with their fiery reds, streaky whites, blacks and bruises and soft pinks on a summer’s eve.

I found myself, surviving, living, creating, arriving at myself. Arriving here today, perched high over the sea, the sun bringing a pink flush to my white winter cheeks. My first small collection of paintings is finished, my book is seeking a publisher and the sky is clear and blue. Just like the sky in a childhood memory.

Genesis

And God said, let us make man
in our image, after our likeness.
Genesis I:XXVI


Learning
to be an unbroken pool,
it's all flights and crashes,
learning to fly,
don't know what the fuck is going on,
there are two people inside me,
two couples lying side by side
in capsules,
in a sandpit,
like the film The
Bodysnatchers,
one must die so the other can
live,
'They're dying!'
I cry.

But nobody listens,
everybody understands but
me,
I''m an angel learning to fly.

Lands End
Monday is my scheduled
start day.
I have visions of me sat at
my table, gazing at the sea,
pen in hand and wondering
what it was that I so badly
wanted to write about.
What is it that has driven
me to come and live in a
caravan by the sea, as near
to the end of the world as I
can go?

Fact or friction?
And how close
shall I be
to the story?
Shall I invent
a small fiction?
Change a name
here or there?
There's always
fairy stories.

Staring into Space
Six months,
I have six months grace,
I miss my brother,
childhood, children,
to take me away from
my favourite place,
staring into space,
watching the test card
transmission...

Millionaire
Q Who was the first woman
in the Bible?
A Eve
Wonder what she thought
about,
ate from a tree,
got knowledge,
life before knowing,
a baby born.

Eve
a baby who grew up,
passed into adulthood
through knowledge,
got knowledge,
then had sex.

Q So, is knowledge
acquisition original sin or a
story about growing up?
A...

Vicky took me to an Iron
Age settlement yesterday.
She found a bronze mirror in the
shape of a keyhole.
'All we need now is the key.' she said.