You might, if you listen carefully, hear a mole whistling –

This morning when I went to the end of the garden to empty the compost, I noticed a hazelnut on the ground, and once I had found the one, more and more appeared. I stuffed the pockets of my breeches until they were as tight as hamster cheeks. Fifty-six, just in that first gathering. I still count. It was not so many years ago – five perhaps, that I remember the first, the one and only. I recall quite plainly how I cupped it in my paws as I brought it back to the burrow. I placed it on a porcelain saucer, admired it from all angles – first with husk on and then with husk off, and I wished there was something I could do to preserve the satiny wooden shell, while still obtaining the kernel.

When I first came to this island fresh hazelnuts could not be had for love or money. I pined. I dreamt of Bernese delicacies like Haselnussleckerli, made with hazelnuts, almonds, candied citrus, honey and a good dose of firewater. And then, one birthday, my dear neighbour gave me a tiny tree. It was called White American but we renamed it Pocahontas. The nuts are huge, New World ones, not the little things I would gather in the lanes on my way home from school in Switzerland. These are so big, that when a Lithuanian friend brought me a pair of wooden nutcrackers back from Vilna, the nuts wouldn’t fit.

My fecund hazelnut tree has sent me scuttling to Great Uncle Mole’s encyclopaedias where I learn that the root shoots might be used for making crates, coal corves, baskets, hurdles, whip-handles, withs and bands. A veritable industry awaits me in my own garden. A forked branch might become a divining rod, especially for silver lodes or in France, as a baguette divinatoire, to track down criminals. For the moment, though, I am content just to gather, admire and eat.

I am whistling because I love hazelnuts, but I am whistling with such extra, unmolish exuberance, because hazelnuts mean it is the beginning of autumn. It is a time of mellowing light and deepening colour. Apples weigh down branches, leaves are beginning to turn, and there is from time to time a whiff of cool, dare I say snowy, breeze on my snout. If you were to ask me which was my favourite season, I would say winter. But I love autumn more because it is the herald; the joy of winter and its quiet reflectiveness is still to come. Autumn is a time for gathering nuts, knitting socks, preparing the hearth for the hibernating days of blanketing nights and stillness.

Ah, anticipation: the pleasure of savouring every moment of the time before.

I am always a slow sort of mole. Heat brings me to a standstill. Last Sunday was so hot, I couldn’t even attend the call of rotting fruit and wilting vegetables in the kitchen. What I needed were winter landscapes and cold fiction. I scuttled off to the cellar, a muddle of Great Uncle Mole’s trunks and boxes and the odd bottle. I had to climb onto a couple of trunks on tip-paws to reach the box of special winter postcards on the top shelf. But oh dear me, I had just got hold of its edge when a small book, wedged between the box and an old tobacco jar, launched itself at me. Hit me on the snout, if truth be known, and bowled me over. The box of postcards followed

I might have cursed, but there was something calming about lying on my back in a cool sea of snowy peaks and glacial streetscapes. And when I noted the icy blue of the offending book and the word ‘Arctic’ in its title it my ignominious tumble began to feel less like a calamity and more like serendipity. Here was something I could get lost in, lying in my hammock between the shady willow trees. I have no willows, nor hammock, but such is the power of imagination that I was transported to the Edwardian coolness of the Uncle Ratty’s favourite riverside haunt in the old country even while my stocky little legs carried me under the blazing sun to the dark shadowy interior of my shed.

It was not until I was curled up in the old wicker chair and the whirr of the fan was sending a cooling breeze over my pelt that I really looked at the book. The first pages dealt with a scrum of summer travelers at Basel station, and the main characters were not setting off for the North Sea Passage, but Italy. I checked the title again ‘Arctic SUMMER’. Inertia prevented me from crawling back to the burrow. I read on.

E. M. Forster began writing this novel not long before the Great War. His main characters herald a new age, a new generation: motors, aeroplanes, telephones. ‘My era is to have no dawn’, one says to his mother. ‘It is to be a kind of Arctic Summer in which there will be time to get something really great done. Dawn implies twilight and we have decided to abolish them both.’ The war cry of another was tidiness. Now that there were no new countries to discover, the task was ‘to arrange the old’. Romance ‘was a relic of the age of tidiness’

Endless days frighten me just as much as heat. Everything exposed, all the time. Nothing nuanced. I have seen how beaming a floodlight onto scenes or characters I am writing dissolves them into nothingness. They need to hover on the periphery; they come into being in the twilight. And as for tidiness, it stifles all those odd juxtapositions that spark the germs of stories.

Muddles are tricky and often overwhelming, and movements in the shadows may make this moleheart miss a beat, but they a part and parcel of the endeavour.

Forster never finished the manuscript. He did read a few chapters in the early 1950s at Aldborough and then he said that was all he was going to read, ‘because now it goes off, at least I think so, and I don’t my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking.’

If you wake up particularly early and mosey down to your favourite park, you may notice a sea of small brown bumps on the lawn. Molehills, you might think, but no. You put on your spectacles, and moles come into focus; moles bent over double and wagging their tails. Maybe, as you wipe the early morning mist from your lenses, you see one bump that is rather less brown the others, rather more grey. That mole is me. This is a Qi Gong class.

Yesterday, we added an exercise to our repertoire: balancing teacups. Perhaps you know it? You hold a paw in front of you as if the answers to a tricky question were inscribed on its palm; but in fact you are imagining a teacup balancing in it. You then spiral the paw inwards towards your body and under your armpit and over your head until it is returned to its original position.

I got myself into a terrible pickle, and would have had a sodden, tea-stained pelt had the cup and the tea truly been there. And this is only stage one.

This feeling of bewilderment stirred a memory, not a distant one either, although it began some time ago. It was as if my mind was somehow not being able to curl itself around an idea or something seen, and then translate it into a physical movement.

Bellringing.

Handling a bell is one thing: learning its weight, its behaviour, how to raise it onto the balance, and lower it safely, how to control the strokes into a steady rhythm. It took me long enough but I never felt I wouldn’t get there providing I persevered. But then came the counting, remembering what place I was in and, layered onto that, memorising the method – a graph of the pattern the bell is following. I can almost feel the lights go off in one part of the brain when I am required to illuminate another, as if my circuitry will only allow for one light at a time.

Countless young moles have joined the band since I began. Fearlessly, they go for the ropes and overtake me within months. They race through the learning stage, heaping complexity on complexity with their zippy neural pathways.

I have to confess that for a long time I felt my poor old moleheart sink. And I still harbour a faint candlepower hope that one day it will all fall into place.

On the other hand, perhaps not.

But although my cerebral flexibility may have gone, my curiosity hasn’t. Nor has the joy of the whole extraordinary evolution of ringing, or my awe of the enormous bells, or the company of the band.

As for Qi Gong, there are layers and layers of delicious meanings that are accessible to a curious and determined mind. And maybe one day I will be able to spiral my tea cup, or even two – brimful with hot tea.

We moles are half blind. Not so blind we don’t see shapes and movement, but blind enough to lose outline and detail. Some sharp-sighted creatures may think this a disadvantage, but I have come to realise that fuzzy edges have benefits of their own; that there is a slippery place between seeing and recognising where all things are possible. In the physical world of Knocklofty this may be a tree that for a moment or two is full of tiny birds, but then reasserts itself as a banksia with cones. Or I might stand still for a while, not wanting to disturb a baby wallaby – until the while has extended so long, I have to acknowledge that it is a charred log. The importance of this in between space is no less for our interior worlds.

Being a painstaking sort of a mole, I find that one of the hazards of writing stories set in places and times that are not my own, is that I am often visited by moments of self-doubt. If I don’t know whether what I am about to write next is strictly true, my nib hesitates mid-air. In an instant a light bulb illuminates the part of my mind that tells me I need to check my facts. It then goes on to warn me that if these facts are not checked, I shall find myself in a veritable rabbit warren of false assumptions and will never find my way out.

This lightbulb is a false friend. It leads down one of two dead ends. One is to the point and provides me with so much information, that there is no place left for my imagination to go; and the other leads not to a warren but a metropolis of intriguing historical facts that bare no relation to the story being written. In short, a mole loses the plot.

It is a perfidious lightbulb and it draws its power directly from the bulb that ignites creative ventures: the delicious full immersion research that engages the heart and tickles the imagination. This true bulb never switches itself on at moments of indecision, but in those moments my poor mind is infused by an amnesia.

What I need when my pen hesitates mid-air is not a lightbulb. What I need is a gently staying paw. I may squirm a little, but must not leave my chair, must wait out the urge to scurry down to the library to pin down hosts of facts as if they were poor struggling butterflies. I need to be led to that dreamy but sparky space that I had as a wee mole – before my mind was clouded by facts, when I had to gather all my senses together to view my scanty knowledge, take wild leaps and intuit a cohesive story.

It is hotting up – even in the depths of my burrow.

A dear friend and I were whiling away our lunch-time comparing notes about the phases we went through reading books that reflected a certain sort of mood; a succession, perhaps, of slow-moving long books, or a spate of pacy thrillers. The choices often balance out our non-reading lives – slow and calm when the world is whizzing too fast, or thrills to shoot us out of stagnation. Sometimes it is a place that grabs us. There is a bookshop in London that organises its entire stock geographically. If you are having a Spanish binge you will find paella cookery books, biographies of Franco, maps of the Basque country, Lorca’s poetry, wildflowers of the Pyrenees, histories of the Armada, phrasebooks, all clustered together.

With me there is a very definite phase I go through in summer. You can imagine what it is like , having such a thick velvety pelt on sweltering days. When I am prostrate in the heat with wet socks tied around my paws and tea towels around my neck and forehead, I yearn for snow. I feel the poetry of cold-weather words like dreich and smirr and snell slide around on my tongue like ice-cubes. I seek out books that are set in the Arctic circle, or at the very least cold, wet places: Simenon’s Paris in winter, Cold War books, Russian epics. I don’t stop at books. I wear out needle after needle on the gramophone playing Schubert’s Winterreise. The walls of my burrow are covered with postcards of snowy landscapes.

It has been a cool summer so far, but tomorrow we head for 33C – or 92F on Uncle Ratty’s old thermometer. But this year I want to leave a bit of the bah humbug behind and collect pleasures that are particular to summer: washing woollies and splashing dripping cold water on myself, warm sunny sheets on drying days, the cool blast of cleaning out the fridge,
puzzles that I had thought perfect for hunkering down in winter are just as perfect for a hot afternoon inside my shady burrow – especially with a gin and lime and tonic and ice, and the lightness of Satie or Chopin on the gramophone. And I can daydream about Great Uncle Mole and Uncle Ratty and their mild English summers: the creak of deckchairs, battered old badminton rackets coming out of their presses, and a shuttlecock being idly thwacked.

I am told that up there in the glaring light of day, where creatures of a less solitary disposition while away long summer Sunday afternoons around barbecues, an essential ingredient has been lost. No-one ponders anymore. Arguments about whether this is the hottest January ever are settled, just like that, by a little deciding machine. Labyrinthine discussions and absurd but entertaining wrong turns are in danger of extinction. The instant deciding machine allows no pause between question and answer.

Ponder has the same derivation as pound – a weight, used in the sense of weighing up one thing against the other. My own sense of the word veers away from either weightiness or fierce analysis. I see it rather as a loose consideration of something – and it is not to be hurried.

Is it any wonder that the preponderance of ponder-related words come to us from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pondering flourished in the pre-industrial days of the Romantics, the slow traveling dreamers, naturalists and voyagers to unheard of destinations though not, alas, the poor peasant moles who spent their days and nights digging up the fields.

Great Uncle Mole and Uncle Ratty were great ponderers. Entire afternoons dissolved after some chance remark over lunch about, say, brickmaking. By evening all twenty-six of their soft-leatherbound encyclopaedias would be strewn across the Turkey rug. Uncle Ratty, glowing red from the fire and beads of sweat pouring down his brow would kneel among them, his paws separating the delicate pages between one entry and another. Could you just have a look at DEM to EDW, he might say. And see when the Doukhobors were banished from Archangel. Or Moley, do you have the volume with East Grinstead. By dusk, BIS to CAL in which the article on brick-making resided would be buried beneath the other volumes. And although the object of their search was by now mostly forgotten, the entire journey was laid out before them. The pleasures lay in the places travelled; the destination was irrelevant.

I do accept that my definition of pondering lacks the gravitas that the word suggests, but what it shares with its more sombre use is the importance it places on allowing time for a broad embrace of the possibilities.

There ARE still clusters of ponderers. On any Monday evening in the deep leather armchairs of pub across the road from the cathedral, a band of bellringers, paws nestling glasses of wine or quite excellent local whisky ponder medieval Popes and galaxies, the merits of egg sandwiches, ethics of property law, double helix staircases, ballooning belfries, Icelandic grammar, and James Bond films films. From time to time a little deciding machine will slither out of its case and make clear a point, but it soon tires of the inattention and goes back to sleep.

There are times, when I haven’t seen a soul for several days, that I wonder if I am really me. The puzzlement grips me most of all in the evenings when I have poured myself a smidgeon of cognac, settled myself into my armchair, and am resting my hind paws on Great Uncle Mole’s Egyptian pouffe.

This uncanny feeling has intensified since I ventured out of my own humble abode and headed for a burrow of magnificent proportions. The Museum of New and Old Art (Mona) is dug deep into the sandstone of a half island on Tasmania’s Derwent River. I spiralled down its staircase like poor Alice. At the lowest level, the cinema is hidden behind clusters of baroque chaises longues. Parting the crimson velvet curtains I tip-pawed through the darkness and lost myself in the generous upholstery of a seat. I held my breath.

The picture screening was the National Theatre’s Frankenstein. I knew the tale, of course but what thrilled my little moley heart about this version was not knowing who was being who. The actors playing Dr Frankenstein and the Monster changed places every night. So each time Dr Frankenstein is in a scene with the Monster, the actor within him is seeing the Monster being played differently from the way he, the actor now playing Frankenstein, played it the night before – and the actor within the Monster is seeing Frankenstein as a subtly different character from the one he, the Monster, knows him to truly be. My tiny eyes stretched trying to imagine this back-and-forthing between the two and just how wobbly it must make them feel.

I may not have mentioned Great Uncle Mole’s bequest. His death pains me still – even after all these years. What I never expected were the crates, trunks and hampers that arrived at my burrow one rainy afternoon. A water-damaged note in Uncle Ratty’s hand explained that there was no room on his houseboat, and besides it seemed more fitting that these things should come to me.

And it is on those special evenings when I dress myself in Great Uncle Mole’s fez and smoking jacket and rest my hind paws on his Egyptian pouffe that I am visited by the strange sensation that I am not really me.

Is it the jacket, the fez or the Egyptian pouffe? Or all three, imbued as they are with Great Uncle Moleyness?

Or is the scented cheroots I found in the jacket pocket and which I smoke on special occasions?

Oh Lordy, Lordy. Here we are half way through January.

Just before bedtime, on the last day of every year, Great Uncle Mole used to take down the old calendar and replace it with a new one, which he covered with his handkerchief. And as soon as he got up on the first day of the new year, he would whisk the handkerchief off to reveal January and say, ‘There, now’.

When I was a little mole, and I was very little when Great Uncle Mole was still alive, I thought he meant that the big Now had arrived, there was no escape. Carpe Diem and don’t forget it. Now that I am nearly as old as he was then, I think it is was a sigh of relief that the old year could be put into mothballs.

I have followed his tradition, but when I take down the old calendar and look at the bare hook in front of me I want to pause – not just for long enough to hang the new calendar but for a very, very long time. I would like it not even to be called time; perhaps it could be a limitless suspension, ending only when I am completely ready.

The progression of year upon year, – days, hours, minutes accruing relentlessly are only made so onerous because of their domination by numbers. As soon as you have numbers you notice gaps if you leave any out. If I took the calendar for 2014 down and breathed and then put up 2016, I would know that 2015 was missing.

So I was wondering how it might be if, instead of numbering years, we named them like boats, the Florentine, for instance, or Esmerelda – though perhaps not Marie Celeste. You may think it odd for such a land-bound creature as a mole even contemplating ships as comforting containers of time, but if so you haven’t reckoned with the story-telling capacity of Uncle Ratty. He wasn’t really my uncle, but a very dear friend of Great Uncle Mole (actually, I’m not even sure Great Uncle Mole was a relation. We tend to all be called Mole which can be a bit muddling). When Uncle Ratty told his sea-faring stories, Great Uncle Mole would cover his ears with his paws, and tell him to stop before he scared the poor wee mole (me) to death. Not that Great Uncle Mole was cowardly by any means. He still had scars from the Siege of Toad Hall, and I think he may have fought with Garibaldi, but poor chap, he did shake at the sight of water.

I hope you will forgive me that little digression, but thanks to Uncle Ratty, I have no fear of water and Great Uncle Mole is no longer with us to tremble at the metaphorical ships I wish to use for my new concept of time. So let us imagine these ships, each a container, but none dependent on the other. The ocean itself is timelessness. The only time on the ships is a fullness of time. In the harbours there is a time of imagining – a before time when preparations are made for the voyage: maps and telescopes, warm blankets, cakes and port, a friendly crew and a fiddler. And there would be an afterwards. To be sure that would be a time for scrubbing the decks, mending the sails, splicing rope and resting in dry dock to have ones barnacles removed. But above all it would be a time for rejoicing in one’s adventures and telling tales to young moles and other creatures.

Oh Uncle Ratty, I do miss you.

Sometimes in the small hours nature calls. I drag myself from the nest and pad down the hall tunnel in my pyjamas. I know the route blindfold and it used to afford no hazard.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before but I share my burrow with a creature called Monsieur Boo. He is white and fluffy and has a long black tail. But don’t be fooled; the soft toy exterior is deep cover.

In our time together, Monsieur Boo and I have expended a lot time squabbling over alpha status – especially who gets to sit on the typewriter, eat, or sit closest to the fire. Monsieur Boo outstares me every time. He is fearless.

Or so I always thought.

Until Ultra Alpha moved into the burrow.

Ultra Alpha arrived with an assurance granted to those of great antiquity, especially those who are well-travelled – and Ultra Alpha, who was over 250 years old had just voyaged half way around the world. He chose to position himself in the hall tunnel. He stood, and still stands there, tall, slender and sleek brown. His bronze, finial ears are always perked, his keyhole eyes keep a weather eye on Monsieur Boo’s food bowl in the kitchen beyond.

At first Monsieur Boo would pause at Ultra Alpha’s feet, glance up, then quickly avert his gaze and slink away to eat his meals. But that was when Ultra Alpha was silent; before he found his voice.

Voice is the wrong word – too gentle. Growl is better. Shortly before the hour, every hour, a long, deep growl vibrated from the bowels of Ultra Alpha. It was an otherworldly growl, resembling nothing so much as heavy chains grinding over cogs. the growl made Monsieur Boo sit up like a meerkat, but it was what came next that pierced his heart with such terror, he trembles now at the mere recollection. Ultra Alpha struck a chime so loud that it as good as banished the demons from the entire neighbourhood. And Monsieur Boo left the the burrow at lightening speed. He took up residence under a tree, and vowed never to return.

I reached an agreement with Ultra Alpha, that he would only growl on special occasions, and I negotiated with Monsieur Boo to return to the burrow – and all was well.

All was well, except…

In the pre Ultra Alpha days Monsieur Boo left the booty of a night’s hunting discreetly in the back parlour. Now it is placed at Ultra Alpha’s feet in the hall tunnel, an appeasement to the gods.

So I found when nature called in the night and I blindly groped my way down the hall tunnel, my paws would likely make contact with cold, stiff fur, or worse still the softer, sticky viscera of some mangled victim.

On the positive side, it has to be said that since the arrival of Ultra Alpha, my relations with Monsieur Boo have become tempered. We are both aware that there is a higher authority in the burrow.

And I now take precautions. If I get up in the night, I wear spectacles.

And I carry a lamp.

It is a rare thing to see a mole above ground. We don’t, on the whole, see any need to expose ourselves to the light of day. At night? Well sometimes. On the stroke of the midnight that bridged 2014 and 2015, you might have spotted me, not just at ground level, but at a giddy 139 spiral steps above it. I was the brown pelted one on tippypaws, snout peering out through the tessellations, sniffing at the cordite and sulphur. The explosions were so close, the fireworks so damned spectacular, I gasped and stretched my little eyes with every new burst. No words, no images can do justice to fireworks. They are of that moment only, holding us enthralled as the calendar year turns.

The tower, well yes. This mole is a bell-ringer. And New Year’s Eve is a great secular occasion. We ring the old year out with deliberate discordant vengeance. Every pull on the rope or sally purges a grudge or misery. Out with mole-catchers. Out with pestilence. Out with guilt and self-recrimination. Then we wheeze our way up to the roof. And after the last of the fireworks, when all that remains is a haze of smoke, we descend again and ring the new year in – melodiously.

There is something so liberating about this ritual. We can cut loose from the baggage we’ve been dragging behind us. Our minds are freed to reconsider how we want to live.

Perhaps even spending more time above ground.

Happy New Year!