We lace up.

I am a runner. Not the fastest. Not the strongest. Not the most graceful. I am a runner, though, and I share one thing with all runners - fast or slow, experienced or novice, amateur or professional. Before we set out - on the trail, on the track, on the treadmill - before we run, before we race: we lace up.

This has been the year we found ourselves before we realised we were lost. As the world locked down, we opened up - to new possibilities, to a different view of ourselves, to a new understanding of our limits and capabilities. Lockdown and the ever-present threat of Covid-19 is something that was unimaginable when we broke the seal on 2020, so many months ago. If you had asked me then how I would have ridden out the wave that hit us in early March, I would have said writing. I can wrap myself in words, mine or someone else’s, and for a while I live in a borderland that pulls inner and outer worlds together to create a new place where I’m free, just for a little while. It’s a place where rebuilding happens, filled with bricks of limitless shapes, each one ready to be laid in the cracks that have formed, to remake a whole that is broken.

This year I didn’t read.

This year I didn’t write.

This was the year I laced up.

I have run for almost 15 years, always erratically depending on what life threw at me at any given time. I have been fickle, letting work and life trip me up. I have paused to become a parent. I have stepped away to fix damaged parts of me. I have run alone. I have run with friends. I ran my way through my PhD. I ran to raise money for causes I believed in. I ran alongside people because I couldn’t run them healthy again but I could show them that as long as they needed me, I would match them step-for-step.

For 15 years, I have laced up.

I weave my laces. Into each one, I put a part of me. For every run, I add a thread. In the beginning, the threads were stubborn and tough to twist together. I wasn’t used to weaving. A work colleague and friend gave me the first one when he printed out a Couch-2-5K program and asked me to give it a try. I had forgotten that I knew how to run. It was a long time since I had raked around the village as a child, never questioning my ability to put one foot in front of another at speed. I don’t know if he realises the worth of the gift he gave me but that golden thread has held strong for all these years and there is a part of his kindness that keeps my footsteps true even now.

My favourites are the blues and greens - these I weave together for every run I use to find a measure of calm in a busy world. I have a store of them to hand. My drawer at work is full of them. I keep a box of them on my bedside table. I find them tucked away in the door pockets of the car, in cupboards behind the cereal boxes, tucked inside my wallet or marking pages in books as yet unread.

Once in a while, the blue-green seascape of thread is broken by a bright line of red. These are the threads I weave when I run in anger. They are fragile and easily broken. Often, they have turned to dust and blown away before I return home and take off my shoes. The motion of my footfall is enough to shatter them and I can never quite remember why it was so important to add them when I look at the laces the next day. I prefer the blues and greens.

2020 is the year the world closed. I am still weaving my laces but it’s harder to find the coloured threads. This year, my laces look dull. I think it’s because they are carrying more black. I twisted the strands in while I ran for my oldest friend’s dad on the day she attended his funeral. I couldn’t stitch her back together. Humans mourn collectively but this year, Covid-19 changed that. I could only mark memories through footfall. I have added more than one black thread this year.

For as much as this year has been hard, so it has also been amazing in many ways. Life is complex. I have found a community of thread-weavers who gave me handfuls of bright neon strands to add to my laces. Now, as I run I leave a glowing line of colour in my wake, like a sparkler-trail in the dark. I love this so much that I keep adding more and more miles on the trails, just to watch them shine. Sometimes, it makes patterns that make me laugh out loud. These thread-weavers are my running tribe.

They lace up.

I have spent a lot of time talking to groups of runners over the last 15 years. I look closely at their laces. Often, the laces are woven with harsh steel threads that will cut you if you aren’t careful how you handle them. The runners spend a lot of time polishing their threads. They shine with a cold kind of brightness. When I run alongside them, they sneer at my brightly coloured laces and disappear down the trail ahead on their own, absorbed with their shiny grey strands. I don’t chase them.

My running tribe are different. They understand that when we lace up, we are tying together pieces of ourselves and that our brightly coloured laces are what hold us upright as we run. It’s the colour that lifts us to run further and faster than we imagined we could. We admire each individual warp and weft thread. Our laces hold the strongest threads of all. They are the strands that are spun from kindness. Sometimes, someone’s laces snap and then they aren’t long enough to fill all the holes and pull them tight enough to hold them up. It’s OK though, because between us there are enough laces. We pass on our laces, tying them all together to make sure everyone can stand tall and cross the finish line.

In the end, we run as one.

We lace up.

One Hundred Walks: Living one step at a time

This is my challenge for 2020. I do a reasonable amount of exercise - I love running and boxing/kickboxing is a lifesaver for working off general life stresses. What I don’t do is walk enough. Just for the love of it. When I walk, I think. When I think, it feeds into my writing. So, for the rest of 2020, I have set myself the incredibly enjoyable task of writing about One Hundred Walks here on The Cluttered Desk. They won’t all be rural countryside yomps and I don’t know where they will take me, or where they will take my writing, but then isn’t that the whole point?

Welcome to The Cluttered Desk

Welcome, writers and readers, one and all. It’s been a while. It’s time I reintroduced you to The Cluttered Desk, which is the virtual home of all sorts of musings from my incredibly full head, and my very cluttered actual desk.

I have just raised my head from a two-year MA in Creative Writing with the Open University, which has been am immensely worthwhile developmental experience as a writer. With the results of that in the bag in December, so begins 2020 in the grown-up world of writing. With the training wheels off (note: the training wheels are never off, but that’s a discussion for another post), it seemed a good time to reengage with this blog and shape it into something new. “What shape is that?” is the inevitable question. Let me give you an idea of what to expect.

Apart from the inevitable voyage into the deeper reaches of my random psyche, (which much like an ill-functioning GPS, could well take you along a narrow country road and strand your carefully polished pride and joy in an overflowing ford that is deeper than you first allowed and impossible to extract yourself from), over the course of the next few months, I will be posting all sorts of things to do with the craft and practice of writing. There may be some tips and lessons learned from my MA. It is possible you’ll learn a bit first-hand about my successes and missteps in the writing world. I’ll be posting a variety of articles about not just the craft of writing, but also some of my approaches to the practice of turning a passion into a career. I’ll also be posting a lot about other people’s writing, especially the writing I like.

My mind, much like my desk, is cluttered though. Expect the unexpected, with a smattering of running, parenting and cats. Sometimes, I may forget to hop into a phone booth, twirl round twice and appear in my super-writing hero cape, and instead the scientist and educator that remains my alter ego by day will come by for a visit.

We live in interesting times - I can’t tell you if it’s a curse or a blessing. It’s likely I’ll write about it. Or will I write because of it? Either way, come and join me on the ride.

Of book piles and their potential.

If I ever disappear, look for me under the book pile. My feet will be protruding like the Wicked Witch of the West … but my shoes are going to be teal nubuck stomping boots instead of the hopeless gentility of red slippers. Let’s be honest, we could all predict that with the commitment to a 2 year Creative Writing Masters out there in the mix, the book piles weren’t likely to get smaller. With the (near) beginning of a new week dangling there, tantalising as an unspoilt notebook, which part of the pile am I going to destabilise in the name of creativity?

Book folk need no encouragement or excuse to build the pile, but just in case I needed help and motivation there’s the assignment I’m working on for next year focusing on a single influential author. I’m working on that by increasing my book pile. I think that’s a valid approach. Deciding which way to go with this has been like choosing your favourite offspring. There are so many authors out there who influence how I write … so, so many. Not all of them are ones I like. Sometimes I’m influenced by authors I cannot abide, perhaps even more so than those I love depending on my mood. I like to dissect exactly why I hate them so in a dispassionate and academically critical way (Translation: ‘I like to rant a lot about how awful I think they are and how I could possibly have spent time reading them when my book pile is so high and filled with so many gems … often to the cats as they are the only ones not wise enough to leave the room when I get what I like to refer to as my Dan-Brown-JoJo-Moyes look … or possibly they simply aren’t listening to me at any time and this is no departure from the status quo … hard to say when they’re always feigning sleep’). The thing is, my most hated authors are still loved by so many people so they must being doing something right (plus, they are actually rich and working in a career where their book purchases are tax deductible) so there’s a good reason to dissect their prose, even if I don’t want to replicate it. I can’t face using one of these for my extended piece though. This, I think, should be a labour of love. In that vein, I have chosen to increase my Ali Smith book stack as she is one of my most respected authors and the ease and fluidity with which she redefines genre and form is gracefully inspiring.

So, watch this space for some Ali Smith devotion, coming your way soon at a bargain price (free).

If you don’t hear from me again, send help … I will be under the pile.

Musings on 'Never Let Me Go' - Kasuo Ishiguro

I'm devouring the Summer Reading List for Part 2 of my masters course right now and this is one of the real gems on the list.  It's been on my shelf for ages and I kept meaning to pick it up but for some reason (life??) just didn't.  I'm so glad that I finally did though as this is a fantastic book.  I've read other Ishiguro books and, while in many ways this was different, it is also classic Ishiguro in the restraint of the prose and the beautiful pace of the novel, which gradually guides the reader through the story rather than dragging them forcefully ahead.

Reading this from the perspective of a writer, the narrative voice and the choice to write the narrator as if they are clearly recounting their life history to the reader was a very effective device that very quickly brought the characters alive and immersed the reader in their story.  Reliability and POV intertwined with the life story this character recounted and Ishiguro used them in a powerful way, with the narrator often acknowledging the bias or unreliability of their perception.  This helps the reader 'trust' the narrator which builds a strong relationship.  I read elsewhere in one of the 'craft' books that it can help to think about who your narrator is telling the story to as this can help you build both the voice and the narrative itself (I'll update this post with a reference once I find it again!).  This story clearly showed how effective almost-conversational narration can be.

I loved the subtle warping of the English world that we know.  This was certainly what I would describe as a literary novel but it subtly and gently intertwined the fantastic with this.  The narrator's assumption that the reader already knows and understands this world and exactly what the narrator is makes for a very effective tool to bring the reader into this warped world - it shows us the plausibility of the implausible.  It helps build tension as it's not until the end of the novel that it is clearly spelt out but it does so in a gentle way - the reader reaches the end and has their understanding confirmed but the novel isn't driven by suspense.  This creates a delightful pace to the work.

There are definitely a lot of lessons to take from this into some interesting creative work this year.