Oh hello blog, i may have neglected you as a way to get words out of me, as a way to understand how  the world feels to me. There are lots of ways to communicate and the how and the with who makes a difference. My notebooks are private, my blog obviously isn't. Emails may or may not be. Conversations are as private as the participants allow.
Before Jon died in 2017 we wrote emails to each other for about two years, back and forth conversations most days, often inconsequential chit chat, sometimes deeper stuff. When he died i missed his voice on the other end, the response, the return. I carried on writing emails for months, occasionally still i will email tho' i know he won't answer. But emailing dead-Jon feels unprivate, it's not me talking to him, it's me talking to an empty space, or a space that is Jon in my head, and i don't know if other people occupy that empty space, if i send him an email does it get seen by people who are not him the never-will-receive intended receiver. I guess we can never know these things. 
Privacy is something held within. People are more or less private it's a personal choice. As soon as a word is uttered or written to another it ceases to be private. Though there are people who hold our words private, counsellors, therapists and if we are lucky a few close friends we can trust with our secrets. 
Women who have been pregnant will know the super-secret wonder of a child forming in our wombs in the weeks before we tell anyone just in case the baby doesn't stick. I am lucky i have not had a child i needed to lose, or lost a child before it could live, how it feels to live with those feelings i will never know. There are feelings that are hard to express, that cannot be given voice, or which are terribly hard to voice. Those feelings become secrets.
Secrets can be good, can be great, but not always, some secrets are terrible. Holding feelings in can feel like safety but always holding is difficult and bad feelings held in and not allowed expression can become dreadful, unbearable. 
We are living in a strange political climate at the moment and some of the big frontsmen appear to be terribly damaged to the point of psychosis. When deep emotional wounds are left to fester within they may find outlet in cruel language and acts.  Or else terrible unfathomable depression. I know from my own bad self that mostly it is driven by things that cause me pain, feeling worthless, feeling rejected, feeling wrong. 
What is a bad self ? Why would i think part of myself is bad ? Is my bad self worse for being witnessed or worse for being shoved away, forced into submission and given no release, no breath, no light. When Jon died i was insane with grief, books and blogs say it's not insanity but it felt like insanity, insanity caused by grief but definitely not straight, not common place everyday normal. I think tho that maybe being insane with grief when someone you love deeply dies is an appropriate response so maybe that's why the books and blogs etc say it isn't insane. They also, all of them, state clearly that burying grief will not help, that each of us must live it as we need. 
I felt at the time that Jon's family would have liked me to grieve less, not for my sake, but theirs. Go away, be neat and tidy and out of the way, they brushed me away like rubbish and still that hurts and i don't know quite what to do with that hurt as over the past year and a half i have slowly recovered my sensibilities and begun to occupy my now and point my gaze to what next instead of what was or what could, or might, have been. 
Because what was still occupies space in me, and what is connects to what was, and what will be meets the was in the is. My lived experience with Jon was intense and marked me so of course it is still part of my now but i know that it is also done, that he is dead and who he was with me lives only in me. That won't be how it is for everyone grieving i think because often grief is shared with others who loved and cared for the deceased. But still each relationship is unique and i guess that's why mourning is such a lonely journey. 
For me it has been a kind of mapping process. A connecting of memories, places, moments, books, music .... and feelings. Feelings i think are the most personal of all our memories, I might see a mimosa tree for instance and it will take me back to the place we stayed in Italy where there were several flowering but as I fly back to that time i am at once again in the feeling of that holiday. I am in my now seeing a mimosa tree, but i am also in my past with Jon, on the platform of the deserted station, finding a boar's skull, looking over a bridge at the rubbish clogging the river, seeing Naples far in the distance from our bedroom window, exploring the roads and pathways around the village we were staying close by to, and so on. I am also in the future knowing that what is done is done and cannot be undone, that flights of fancy, what ifs, are strolls within my imagination and will never be reality but that my path keeps going. 
In that moment when i see a mimosa tree (other memory joggers are available) time meets time. And time meeting time is a place. A place in me. A cave within a labyrinth of caves. 
Ever since i was a child i've been a walker. There are lots of types of walker and i think maybe the way a person walks maybe matches their thought process. I'm a wanderer, maybe a roamer, i'm not a hiker, i'm mostly a solitary walker, there isn't a right way or wrong way to walk but different types of walker need different types of journey fellows if they choose to walk in company. 
When i was a child i used to roam the paths and roads and lanes around our home. We lived next to some water meadows and close by was a clay-pit where fishermen would sit in the gloomy shadows surrounded by midges in summer, once a pike stared up out of the water, it's head the head of a monster, still remembered, another memory that sits within my labyrinth of caves along with the gorgeous gloopy threads of toadspawn and the light on the water and the mud gap in the hedge that was how to get to the pool.  
I loved walking with Jon. Right from the beginning of our relationship it was something we shared. He took me to the paths at the back of his housing estate and the housing estate where his mother lived. We wandered together from word go. In many ways our wanderings were like the wanderings of two children. Two children roaming free in a beautiful garden world, our own garden of Eden.  Innocent and carefree we stopped to look at bugs and flowers, to listen to birds, got lost together and found our way out of being lost together. We learned to read maps together. I learned how to draw a map inside my body by treading paths, linking places together until i could draw them in my head. This is a practise i continued to do after Jon and I broke up and which i have found is a sanctuary process since he died. 
I apologise for going on about Jon, he was someone i loved, he wasn't perfect, and i could have grieved less if i had loved him less, as maybe i should have done, i would have grieved less but love is what it is, it's a feeling given free-ly not a creative accountancy game where you hope to get more than you give, tho i think maybe well balanced books make for easier relationships. 
When i was doing the sculpture trail in 2017 (blogs about this are from around about this time of the year in 2017) the area around the trail was unfamiliar. My friend David and I had a little explore and some of the places around the trail we'd visited before because he had family roots in that area and so we'd looked at Heckingham church and Hales church and walked around Loddon a little. My commute to the trail is longish but lovely. I catch a bus from Norwich to the road that leads up to and past Hales Church and i walk from there to the site, the walk takes about 40 minutes, i often see deer and hare and buzzards, some of it is grassy paths some of it is quiet roads, in good weather it's gorgeous. In 2017 i was my sculpture so my day was that, it was an odd enlightening experience, a chance to know how it felt to be seen being. It's all in previous blogs so i won't go on except to say that every time i walked to the trail i passed a crossroads. I came from one direction and took the turn to the right but the roads straight on and left called to me. Always i planned to go back to explore them and it is this that i've done as part of my research for this years trail piece.
Over the course of the past year i've been exploring the roads and ways around the trail site, building a new network of experienced wandering around my historical self. The first walk i took 4 deer crossed the road once, twice, three times, four times, i felt my knees buckle and my self crumble it was a moment i would have shared with Jon and weirdly at the moment i broke i felt his arms around me and his voice saying "it's alright, i'm here, i'm here"  i don't care if that seems mad it was my experience and it's mapped on that road and so i know that even tho he is gone forever as a body the feeling of him is always there if and as and when he is needed/wanted and maybe sometimes when he isn't wanted. 
My piece for the sculpture trail is giving me head issues at the moment because it isn't pretty. And it isn't clever. And maybe anyone could do what i am doing. In fact, yes, anyone could do what I'm doing.  I asked for a cave space within the shrubs at the end of the garden and have been gifted a beautiful space. I am wrapping the network of branches around the space, the space that is the cave, the inside of the cave. I want the branches to feel like the walls of a cave. I want them to feel like chalk lines marking out the paths that lead to the cave. 
Just after Jon and I split up in 2013 after my degree had finished and he had left for Gozo i went on a strange walking holiday in the Dordogne with a group of people i didn't know well. I'd been told about the trip by a woman whose work i'd admired in the degree show, i'd got in touch with her, we'd met for a cup of tea, we talked about walking, she told me about the trip, i got in touch with the man who was leading the trip, someone had bailed so there was one space in the minibus which i decided to take. It was a trip to walk and look at Lascaux amongst other caves with paintings and carvings and I'd wanted to see Lascaux for some years so it was sensible to go and i needed to pick myself up and get on with life after the shock of being dumped just when i thought Jon and I would be adventuring together. 
The trip to the caves was a beginning and ending, beginnings and endings belong together, sometimes they overlap and sometimes their meeting is marked by a sliver of thin air. Jon and I emailed semi-courteously for a while pretending to be civilised until my yoga teacher lent me the "Fuck It" book  and i decided that whilst he was quite within his rights to leave me neither he or his horrible family could tell me what to feel and if i still loved him, goddamn it (or fuck it) i was going to let myself love him. I knew i was supposed to behave, to accept rejection politely, to let him go without making a fuss but i decided to let my wild grow instead because it felt honest, because it felt good and i grew out my box, was unruly and thorny, gained mass and flowered and i'm glad i did. 
Oh, i must have needed to get that out.
I am talking about caves. I am talking about visiting caves and caves inside of me and the inside of the tree cave that i've been given to draw the map of the territory i've been walking this past year, this past two years, ten years, life. Inside my cave are my memories, my memories of Jon and the part of our lives we spent together, also my memories of other people, places, times, moments. Because inside of each of us i think is a cave, at least one cave, in which time and space and passage of time and presence all meet together in a place that is called Still. 

April 1st, Easter Sunday ... it is still dark outside. This is a day i've been dreading. It is a day of anniversaries. April 1st is when Jon and I got together. And it was on Easter Sunday last year that our relationship finally broke beyond repair. I think this may be a dark blog. Although i may refer to events that happened before Jon left me my aim is to focus on the four years when we were apart, sometimes unconnected and sometimes not. It may offer explanation for why i am grieving so hard. A grief that often seems foolish and incomprehensible even to me and i'm living it. 
Here just for a moment i'll flick back into our time together as lovers and say that from the beginning of 2010 our relationship became incrementally worse, 60% good, 50%, 40%, until by 2013 when Jon left it was really at best a mean 10%. I held to that 10% he held to the 90% bad i think and that determined the outcome of our relationship. 
In 2013 when we broke up, it could easily be said and seen that we were flogging an almost dead horse. My hope was that after i graduated we would spend time together playing after years of intense work, that we would soften into our successes, his and mine, give ourselves time to hang out, hang loose, i felt that the world was our oyster, that we could work through our problems, make new memories (jam for the cupboard), and so and so on into a benign old age that would see us glowing and happy at the end of a long and fulfilled life. My hopes were played against his reason, things had gone wrong, it was not worth fixing, it was better to bail and get a brand new life. Was he wrong ? No. My hopes were fantasy, romantic and dreamy, they required work to make them come good, but without that work they would never have come to anything. His reasons were valid, our relationship was awful at this point, if we had gone to Gozo together our problems would have surely come with us. There was no escaping the reality our relationship needed work and determination to survive. I wanted to give it time and space in the sunshine, he wanted time and space in the sunshine but he wanted it without me in the picture. 
The fact is a relationship is a mutual agreement and if one party does not want to be with the other it's a pretty much done deal. This is a dance we are all engaged in all the time, with everyone, at work, at home, in our everyday lives, to a greater or less extent depending on how close we are to those we are dancing with.
So there we are, Jon's reason trumped my hope and he left in a blaze of virtuous glory, off to a new more glamorous and exciting life. I too had a brand new life because all my hopes and dreams and plans had been taken from me, i too was starting anew but not out of choice.
At first i was like a bird whose cage door is open but who quietly sits starving on the floor unable to take the freedom it has been given. I didn't know what to do. For a while i was furious and behaved very badly. I wrote emails, raging, yearning, pretending i was fine. I sent some emails, no doubt as deranged as the ones i sent Jon, to his family. Of course I wish i hadn't, they didn't reply, i was Jon's godawful lunatic ex that he was well rid of. I didn't understand. I didn't understand anything. Jon's departure from my life had wrenched my heart from it's bearings. I didn't care what his family thought of me. I wanted him/them to see me. I couldn't stand the awful cool superiority any more. I imagine it just made his family feel more cooly superior. This is a hard thing to say, but looking back Jon's leaving could be seen as an act of kindness. He let me go.  
He let me go, and yet he didn't. His response to my crazy fuck-mess weirdness was magnanimous, his new happiness vindicated his decision, "you are the love of my life" he said "but things hadn't worked out". I, in my heat, thought "damn you, if i am the love of your life and you are the love of mine, why aren't we together loving each other". I wanted to know that all the other women in his life had been called the love of his life so that then i could discard the notion, put it in the box marked "empty words". Who knows what the truth behind those words was, maybe one day i'll meet one of his ex-partners and they'll say "oh yes, he said that to me too, it's just a string along phrase he threw out to keep his options open". 
And so and so and so on. I drive myself mad with my round and round thoughts. I don't really know where i'm going now. There are parts of the four years when Jon and i were apart where our stories do not link. Our lives went their separate ways. I know my life but the details of his that i know are few and sketchy. I know that at some point between our parting and our reconnecting he began to drink again. I don't know when it became problem drinking but i'm guessing it was a fair time before he and i reconnected in 2015 because he was hospitalised not long after we began a fragile exploratory friendship by email in early summer that year. I think he had injured his foot which had stopped him walking, he said that his girlfriend had wanted too much commitment, his sister in law said that his girlfriend had not been able to cope with his drinking. None of that belongs to me, it is his life with another woman. But suffice it to say by the time Jon and I "re-met" he was not well. 
I had continued to email Jon while he and i were out of contact but he had not answered and so i assumed that my emails went straight to his junk, or that he had a new email address. I don't know when he stopped responding maybe around autumn 2014 when i briefly was kind of seeing someone, kind of not really, walking and kissing and touching and eating together, a thing, but not a thing which lasted maybe a couple of months. Jon had informed me that he was seeing someone new the summer before which had put a full stop and a capital letter on to the end of our lives together. We were both moving on, as you do, as you have to. 
But in the summer of 2015 i was burgled and Jon was one of the first people i messaged. And he got back to me. Almost immediately. At first i didn't know what to do about his emails. For so long he'd been out of my life, and i'd begun picking up the pieces. I loved him still but i was scared. I was at that point volunteering with a support group for recovering addicts led by a gentle and generous woman who in lieu of wages got her volunteers on to a host of courses about addiction. This learning was eye-opening, i'd gone into my relationship with Jon in a state of innocence. When he'd told me about his past life i took him as tabla rasa, a blank page, not realising that the rest of his life was written on the back and sometimes the pen had been pressed so hard it had forced it's ways through to the front. So it is with everyone but to a greater or lesser extent the marks on the back of us make more or less of a difference to our life ongoing. I had not taken into account how Jon's life before me as a drinker, an alcoholic, would affect all the other relationships he had that were important. Naive to be sure. 
Back to the moment his name appeared in my inbox. I was grieving him. After i was burgled one of the things that i struggled with most was finding, a day or so later, the bundle of love notes he'd given me scattered and tumbled out of a draw that the burglar had rummaged through. That and the loss of my dad's camera made me feel sad everything else was replaceable. But there in my inbox was the name "Jon H" it brought me out in a muck sweat. 
I didn't open it immediately, fear and longing wrestled within me. I had spent two years getting over him. Earlier in the year I had submitted a proposal to the curator of the Waveney River Sculpture Trail for a piece of work that had taken me back to the early days of our love affair, making the piece had involved me re-treading the footpaths and life that we had shared. I was still in love with him. But I was also deeply wounded. Did i want to reconnect with the man who had left me so callously two years ago. In the end love got the better of me. I opened his email and so began the next stage of our knowing each other. 
He made no mention of his drinking at this point, i think he thought he could hide it. But just weeks after he fell down in the street and was taken to hospital. I emailed his sister-in-law to let her know. They didn't know. She got back to me told me he'd been ill, ill how ? drinking again, and so i found out.  
So that was the deal. Jon was in hospital for a few days, i think he then discharged himself, decided to go to Venice, asked me to meet him there. I wasn't going to go to Venice to meet a drunk ex who had dumped me without care even if i did still love him. That he thought I would pick up the threads with him just like that as if nothing had happened is a sign of how out of kilter with reason his mind had become. And anyway my son Richard was once again off to foreign lands, Singapore for two years, i was making the most of his last days in relative proximity, and also the WRST was up and running and i wanted to keep an eye on my work to make sure it stayed good and to watch how it weathered. He had built a new life, and i too had built a new life. 
Jon went to Venice, and came back very shortly because he got bored. We emailed. We emailed more. He made a will. Went to his barbers to get his hair cut. After his death an old colleague said that he'd said we were back together, we weren't we were just emailing but the intensity of our feelings for each other was still apparent. Our relationship had picked up, but how was still ambiguous, i asked him to come to England to meet me for coffee, for a walk, i knew my family would hate it but we had unfinished business, i was offering friendship, my trust had been broken, i loved him, i wanted him still, but i was wary, very wary, and needed him to meet me in my space. 
Over that summer i'm guessing he was drinking but maybe picked up a little, we emailed regularly, did we speak on the phone ? i'm not sure, it was still all quite tentative on my part, i was there for him but i needed to know he was there for me too. By autumn i think we were likely emailing most days. Both of us often up in the small hours of the morning we would check in with each other, we'd talk about life and love, it was flirty and sweet, there was old tenderness and new tenderness too. Our relationship at this point was still rooted in our love affair. There were times we'd argue i remember  but distance meant that our fights were more quickly resolved,  his silences were not so commanding, and his spite more easily repudiated and what could he do that was worse than leaving me and taking up with another woman ? 
I remember Jon as someone physically well. We never saw each other after he left. In my head he is still the man who left me, strong, handsome, lordly. He sent me a photograph of himself that summer, well two in fact, a selfie of him in his mirror, face obscured by the camera but wearing shorts and looking ok tho' in shadow. The other, he sent while he was in Venice, it was a picture of him on his balcony with a chameleon on his shoulder gazing lovingly at someone, not me, i didn't look at that picture long, I didn't want to see it. I thought it was probably taken by his last girlfriend and was their affair and not mine. Later when my friend David took pictures of me i didn't send those to Jon, not the good ones or the ones where i'm gurning or looking fat. My relationship with David was as friends not lovers but Jon was funny about our friendship. He was cross about me going for walks and visiting churches with David. I thought he had a cheek being jealous quite frankly. 
But I skip forward. There must have been a point in our re-acquaintance when we re-connected as something more than ex-lovers catching up. That he was drinking was clear, we had occasional phone calls that year 2015 when his speech would be slurred, and sometimes his emails were obviously the hand of a drunk, mis-spelt, mis-worded, sexually gross. I had known Jon as someone very careful, sober his spirit when dark erred towards mean-ness, drunk it became base but also sometimes i'd catch a glimpse of the light that i'd known when we were first together. Lux lucet in tenebris. It was this light i sought to reflect back at him. It was a dangerous game perhaps to have entered into but not one that i thought about. Our relationship was rooted in our love affair, that we talked about sex was not weird it was part of our knowing each other, it wasn't the focus, i would flip him pictures and songs and articles, names of bloggers i liked, we talked about books, films, life, walking, art, poetry, Jon was very clever. I'd tell him about going to the library he started going to his library and i think this was a life saver for him. And our relationship became a meeting of minds, in a way it became deeper than it had been before, without the softness of shared physical experience, touch, taste, sound, sight, smell, we were forced into an etheric connection, a meeting of consciousness if you will. We merged as we had when we were lovers but our merging was spiritual, he'd been my soul mate before and that soul bond became more entwined. I gave him my light, he gave me his darkness. Sometimes i gave him my darkness and he gave me his light. 
All this time he was drinking heavily, he said that he was living on vodka and milk. We emailed every day, quite often i emailed several times a day, not long emails, images more often not, not stuff that required a reply just nudges to let him know that someone was thinking about him and cared if he was alive or dead. Later after his hospitalisation in 2016 he said that my emails had kept him going, that otherwise he'd have had no human contact, and likely be dead, he said he was eternally grateful but Jon's eternally grateful never did last long. 
After his hospitalisation he seemed to plateau. He was still drinking, sometimes a lot, but he seemed to be out of his hole. I knew that the last hospitalisation had come after he'd given up drinking cold turkey, and i knew from the courses i'd done that he could easily have died and that he hadn't had been a lucky chance. After his death i read the term kindling which is used to describe the effect of these near misses, each time they happen the nervous system gets more broken and the chances of survival slimmer. Dark matter. 
But there, so Jon did survive that hospitalisation, that was the one where his family told me not to bother them again and that it was up to him to stop. I had thought that if only we could have pulled together and got him into rehab i could have got him long distance walking to take his mind off things, maybe that was my saviour complex kicking in. Maybe Jon needed and wanted to die, maybe he had stopped coping with life. He said when he left me that we couldn't fight our demons, i was cross with him about that i thought "i'm fighting my demons lets fight off our demons together" but maybe he knew that his had got him and that he needed to leave life as he he had led his life prior to our knowing each other drinking and sleeping with women who gave him no mental distress. 
I'm diary-ing. Am i being very boring ? I think i may be. But I'm getting out of me that which i am no longer able to carry, or carry alone, releasing by recording, and in so doing giving space in my being to life after Jon. There is no way i can set down the whole of the ten years we knew each other or put on a page the intensity of our connection, the page would burst into flame. But the little i set out may one day serve me as a memory jogger when the life we shared is trod over, invisible and overlaid by new experience.
I had begun this blog with the intention of taking it up to Easter Sunday last year which is when we lost contact again. But I realise that the events that led up to our losing contact are still too close for me to give form to. I suppose in all truth i am thinking of the year and half before he died really, from his hospitalisation in 2016 to Easter Sunday 2017 and then to his death later that year on October 11th. I have three unopened emails from Jon. One from Easter and two from about a month before he died. And an unheard voicemail on my phone. The emails sit ticking in the folder marked Jon, buried under the mountains of emails i have sent him after his death and the emails i made myself not send him and so sent to myself in the months between Easter and the time i knew he was dead. Will i ever read them ? will my regrets and my sadness ever be soft enough to let me witness the last few scraps of time he gave me ? The email from Easter is likely to be unkind. The two from the month before he died charming and sweet, tho' I cannot be sure of that. All of them will hurt i think. I have a feeling that one day i will hear the voicemail by accident and that it will drop me to my knees. RIP Jon. RIP Fella.  

It is gone 11am now  

Before I get too wrapped up in today, I'm going to glance back at the making of my sculpture "Sutram" for the 2016 Waveney River Sculpture Trail. It's a work that nominally stems from my friend Andy's tweets from his weather station which I love because they have that same quality as the shipping forecast, or the football results or tide tables. But really it is about transience. The uncapturability of the moment, for just as you reach out to hold it, it slips away, like water or sand running between your fingers.
Time, life, as I have just seen, passes by, yesterday is gone and tomorrow, not yet here, is unknowable until we meet it, and then is gone, is yesterday. Clock time is a bind we have created, it is subject to interpretation and slightly flexible as anyone with a friend pre-disposed to be late, or counterwise early, will know, but it is a mathematical construct. One o'clock, two o'clock ..
How else do we tell the time, it is by our people, our creatures, our places, it is by the change of light, night to day to night to day, or winter to spring to summer to autumn, seasonal shifts, not just in how shadows fall, but also in birdsong and flowers, temperature, rainfall (I return to Andy's tweets) .. 
We watch our children grow, become adults, leave home, have children of their own, watch them grow too. We see our parents, once indomitable, become more frail and know that our time with them may be cut short, not unnaturally, but how can we bear a world without them. I am lucky, both my parents are alive, our connections have often been stormy in the past but seem to be quieter and kinder now. This is a relief.
This passing of time, the inconsequentiality of our lives and yet by contradiction the great consequence of our lives is something I have tried to express in "Sutram". There are myriad other  lines that have gone into it but I cannot write them all, it would take all day, and who has all day to know another's thoughts unless there is deep love between the one and the other. 

       

Nearly a week on from the European referendum in the U.K, and what a week it's been. I voted to stay in, I looked at coming out, I know that there are valid arguments for coming out but not one of the main proponents for leaving mentioned these. Their vision was not for a caring, sharing society it was for more grasp, more greed, more nastiness so in the end it was an easy decision for me. I voted to remain for environmental protection, freedom of movement, human rights, workers rights, for the sake of peace and stability. 
As it happens, when the majority tipped by a whisker to the leavers, I found that I am actually more attached to being a European than I thought, that my continental blood ran angry at the petty parochialism of people fixated on a "British" way of life. And that the briton in me baulked at the notion of belonging to the same nation as those that follow the repulsive Nigel Farage.
It could be argued that my desire to maintain my European status is also petty parochialism, that we can make new alliances now all over the world and not just with those countries that are our closest neighbours. But there was another way, put forward by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, to remain and reform. 
There is no doubt that the European Union is a flawed machine, that it has become greater than it's parts perhaps. As a member of that union it seemed that we could have helped to bring about a change for the better, not just for ourselves but for the whole union, for the whole world. 
Here in my town, Norwich, it is all strange; people don't look at each other; who voted in, who voted out .. most of us will have friends and family who voted against us .. do we stop loving those people ? no .. but do we see them differently, do they see us differently ? I don't know. Was this what it was like when Hitler came to power in Germany ? Small seeds of mistrust turned citizen against citizen. I hope we are better than that. 
The leave campaign are very keen to say this referendum result is a done deal and for the Remainers to now, shut up and put up with the new order. But that wouldn't have happened if they had lost this vote. Farage would have been on tv whining about another referendum and so on and so on. And so, why shouldn't thousands of people mass outside Westminster calling for their voices to be heard. Why would Westminster not listen ? 
So the division in Britain continues, those that would normally hold the status quo are also most likely to have voted remain and so their motive for holding the peace is no longer there. There is a tension in the air and it is hard to know how it will be dissipated. 
So I watch and wait. No day is the same. Some days I feel numb, some days I feel hopeful, some days angry, and some days - most days - ambivalent and anxious. 
And what can anyone do in that space but carry on with their work, whatever that work might be. Today I am making paper from recycled envelopes. It happens to be grey but it's not a statement on my mood, other days I've made blue and pink and green. The paper is for my piece for the Waveney River Sculpture Trail which I did last year too. 
In the midst of the craziness post referendum it is nice to fall back into making, particularly as this piece was always about change and release and response and movement so I can use the making as a chance to reflect. Deep inside of me, the part of me that knows itself to be creature not man, I know that whatever must be, there is a way through, even if the death of my body, my being, is a part of that way through. 

As left - 2/2/16

Although the face of the gate was much faded, where the cloth had been hidden from the light the colours were still bright -2/2/16

And the front - 2/2/16

On tuesday of this week I went back to the River Waveney Study Centre, the site of the Waveney River Sculpture Trail in which I participated last year. The managers of the site had very kindly allowed me to leave my piece, Bigod's Way 2, to over-winter so that I could observe how it weathered, how it took on time and the elements. It fared much better than I had hoped, in fact. 
I've been to see it several times over the autumn and early winter but now it is time to take it down, so that the space is clear for this years sculpture trail. 
The weather was bright and beautiful, sunshine and clear skies but very cold with a sharp, skin-biting breeze. 
The site has a different feel, of course, wind singing and reeds rustling, geese, and the colours are fawn and silver-grey, bright green (grass), bright blue (sky), and shades of purple, red and gold on the twig ends of trees. 
After taking some final photos of the piece in it's entirety I knelt to begin dismantling it. Just as setting it up became a kind of prayer, so too is the taking down it seems. 
Slowly, and with cold-stiff fingers, I began to untie the scraps of cloth. Remembering the love that they represented. Remembering the journey beyond that love that they represented too. The new friends, the year just past, and the years before that year. And wondering what this year will bring.
It will take me some days to remove all the pieces. I am doing it carefully, no scissors, so that I can re-use the cloth, and also so that I don't hurt any of the creatures that have made it their home over the past few months, mostly spiders, but also a ladybird and a few bugs. Breaking it up felt like a meditation in reverse, not better or worse for that but a different quality of contemplation.  Just as folding and unfolding have a different quality. 
It will be interesting to see how it feels when I rework the pieces into a new something. They have so much of me invested in them, tho' I daresay no-one else would know, to me they are the dreams of my being - excuse me if that reads like nonsense I don't know quite how to put into words the feelings that those lost dreams arouse.

On saturday I took a trip back to the Waveney River Sculpture Trail. The event is now over but the managers of the site have kindly agreed to me leaving my piece up over winter so that I can observe how it fades and deteriorates. 
Years ago when I used to walk this landscape more frequently I was able to really tune in to the season shift which I loved. Now my visits are more sporadic, so I arrived in a well begun autumn - leaves just turning, hedgerows thick with fruit, the ground and air damp and fungal. 
I was pleased to see that my patchwork gate - Bigods Way 2 - is standing up well to the elements. The colours still pretty, and the whole is generally intact tho' a little shaggy in places and some of the fabric is greening. The back-side is considerably brighter having been exposed to less light.  
The site felt very peaceful after all the hub-bub and to do of the trail. A few other pieces are still standing and there are traces of other peoples work which gave me a warm feeling, a sense of invisible companionship. 
The pair of swans were being swans and the stripy snails were being snails. And I was very lucky and saw two kingfishers, well first one and then two flying back a moment later. 
Later still on my walk back to Bungay a fox was running across a field. It felt slightly shocking to see a fox in the middle of the day, the countryside is a little wilder in winter, a little less comfortable, a little more naked.

I'm two days in to making my piece for the sculpture trail and maybe halfway done, today and tomorrow I shall be dyeing some more cloth and then hopefully finishing it over the weekend. It's been some journey but I'm beginning to really like it. After the weeks of worry this is a real relief because if I like my work then I don't mind who else does or doesn't. If I am unsure, and I make alot of unsure work it's part of the process, I prefer to keep it a little private. 
Anyways, the piece is called "Bigods Way 2" and it's something akin to a memory quilt. There's a story behind it on my website http://beccajiclfford.weebly.com/ in the projects section. And when it is finished I will post a photo of the whole piece but for the meantime I've just taken pictures of some of the colours in detail. All the dyes are from leaves, petals, berries and other things gathered from the hedgerows around and about the sculpture trail site. 

I had hoped to get out to the Waveney valley during the week to pick more buttercups and some alexander seedheads but it wasn't to be. So this morning I cadged a lift with one of the other artists Mike Dodd. The sun has been shining all week, buttercups love sunshine, but last night the weather broke and it's been pouring ever since. My garden has needed a bit of water but it made for a slightly damp trip. The rain stopped me taking many photos but the valley was as shining beautiful as ever. And it was really good to find out a bit more about Mike's work and meet up with Sarah Cannell and a  couple of the other artists, Jacqui Jones and Meg Amsden, who are also exhibiting. They are some way ahead of me in the game so it's nice, as someone not long graduated, to be privy and part of their conversation.  

 

Wednesday was a walking and wondering and gathering materials day. I took old paths that carried many memories and it was interesting experiencing them in the skin I inhabit now. Time passes, who can say how long or short a moment is but a moment is easily lost if it is held too fast. So, it was a walk peppered with reminders of a bygone time but, somehow, new too. 
There was barely a soul; a couple of women walking together, and a man and two dogs who were as surprised to see me as I was them. And the only sounds were birdsong and insects and breeze. Sweet country smells, cow parsley, hawthorn, grass along the way. And, quite fantastic, a green hairstreak butterfly. I have longed to see one for years, I never have before, and I maybe never will again. Bungay magic quickly drew me back into it's spell. 
The waymarker I photographed in 2010 is changed. A clump of the sack is still fixed to the branch and a few threads hang from another branch close by. The black dog that guards the farm still guards the farm tho' he looks a little stiffer now. 
The fields of rape are all in flower, the yellow vivid against the green hedges and blue sky. The blades of wheat are just grown to half height. The larks sing, and the swifts swoop and dive over the fields. And the lone oak on a familiar hedge-line still stands tall in it's solitude. 
I noticed that the bluebells are english bluebells, it seemed odd that I had not clocked this before, it's so easy to be blind. And my heart lurched out of my body at the sight and then smell of a dead fawn by the side of the path up the hill to the field. Life is fragile.  

    

But life goes on whoever is in power. And I've a job to do. So today I have begun dyeing cloth for the River Waveney Sculpture Trail. My trip to the valley on wednesday yielded a fair quantity of nettles, some alexander seed-heads (still green and barely past flowering) and some thistles pre-flowering. 
Dedicating cloth to a project is always a bit nerve wracking as fabric is expensive and easy to ruin but it has to be done and my sampling process makes the risk slighter. 
The nettles on wool gauze make a brilliant yellow-green with an alum mordant. Here is a glimpse of one piece, with a hoverfly.

Lastly, special mention goes to the snails that were out in great number, in shells that came in many colours and lots of stripe variations.

The flowers were mostly pussy willow, but the brambles, hawthorn and wild roses were coming into leaf  in the hedgerows, and there was white blossom, maybe sloes or blackthorn ?