Oh Lordy, I hadn’t quite realised how far and wide these murmurs might venture – beyond the grave, even, or so it seemed. Returning from a stroll a couple of days ago, I discovered an airmail letter in my letterbox. The envelope blended rather with the icy blue stamp which depicted Marianne, Phrygian cap on head and an uncharacteristic wariness in her eyes. Jetlag, possibly. Or was it from hovering above Mathilde’s spiky copperplate all the way from the Alsace. Because the address had without doubt been written by Mathilde’s paw – Mathilde who had been dead these last twenty-three years.

I pootled back to my burrow, humming the Marseillaise to still the unease in my tummy. Mathilde alive had sent me aquiver, but I’d been able to rest in the knowledge that she was over ten thousand miles away. ‘Ils sont kilomètres’, I can hear her correcting. ’16 886 kilomètres, précisément’. Now miles and kilometres had become immaterial. Beyond the grave she was omniscient.

I don’t usually pour myself a whisky mid-afternoon, but these were peculiar circumstances. Fortified, I sliced the envelope open with a small dagger and pulled out the missive. It was typed. The words ‘Vélosolex’ and ‘le coquin Ratty’ leapt out at me. There were more references further on to Ratty being a swine and a thief and English, to boot. Mathilde was never mild in her accusations. And there was a demand to return the said Vélosolex ‘immédiatement’.

Alas, I don’t have the Uncle Ratty’s Vélosolex anymore. Would I return it if I did? I do still have the photograph, though. It is still in its frame although the brown paper backing is becoming brittle. It came into conversation during my apprenticeship year when I was living with Great Uncle Mole, and was bemoaning the cost of a train ticket back to the parental burrow in Switzerland. ‘We used our legs when we were your age’, Great Uncle Mole said, ‘And our bicycles’. ‘Or the Velosolex’, said Uncle Ratty with a dreamy look in his eyes as he went off to unhook the photograph from the wall. ‘Those days’, he said, and went on to talk about the Resistance, rather implying that he had been involved. I was at a skeptical age and when he showed me the fuzzy photograph of himself, or so he said, on a Vélosolex next to a pockmarked wall, I just thought, well one rat in a beret looks much like another. I expressed my doubts to Great Uncle Mole who often pooh-poohed his friend’s stories. ‘Of course it’s Ratty’, he said, ‘I took the bally thing myself’.

I felt ashamed at having doubted Uncle Ratty, especially as that very afternoon he took me to a lock-up not far from the river. His boat took up most of the space, but behind it was a strange shape under a dust-sheet. He flicked it off like a magician and revealed this wonderful contraption, a squat black bicycle with a motor that could be hooked to the handlebars, or engaged with the wheel. Not only was he showing it to me, he was giving it to me – his treasure – so that I could travel to Switzerland, a twenty-five hour trip if you disregard the Channel.

Over the next couple of days we planned out the route Calais, Arras, Charleville, Metz, Nancy Mulhouse, Basle, Berne. He drew it all out for me in indelible pencil and attached the sheets of paper to a board with a bulldog clip, and he found odd bits of wood and wire and even a torch and secured the lot onto the handlebars.

It was a long, slow journey but incredibly exciting. I could feel the kind of stirrings that I imagine attacked the ancient Mr Toad from time to time. I rode through sleet and hail and sun. I slept in fields by day and rode at night. I got lost in towns and found my way again. I grew up on that Vélosolex. And I repeated the adventure half a dozen times.

Did Ratty give it to me because it wasn’t his to keep? Or did he, I now wonder, have some thought of my returning it to Mathilde as he plotted my route through Alsace. Was it indeed Mathilde’s? I’ve never known Uncle Ratty to even pinch a sugar-lump. Honourable to a fault, however tall his stories sometimes were.

The letter was not from Mathilde. It was from her niece, Solange who although the spitting image of her aunt, was of this world. Like her aunt, she wasted nothing and this old envelope, already addressed by Mathilde, had no doubt been lying around for a score years or more, waiting for an occasion. And Solange had happened upon murmurs and the Vélosolex, and taken the opportunity to try and right regurgitated wrongs.

How can I possibly know what the circumstances were in those chaotic post-war years? And there is no-one left to ask. No Great Uncle Mole or Uncle Ratty or Tante Mole. Nor is there Mathilde, not even beyond the grave.

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There are times when I tremble before a blank sheet of paper, but it is not usually beginning that plagues my writing life. In the mornings I tootle off to my shed, and sit down on my stool with the sort of flourish you might expect from a concert pianist: flicking back coat-tails, raising paws over keys, breathing in – slowly, deeply, before concentrating the entire body for the first note or word. On a blank paper day, one word will lead to another, a page will fill and then another. The first word is immaterial and the last is a surprise. But these days are rare. Most days are not blank page days.

Beginning is not a problem, but continuing is. What yesterday’s Mole wrote may be unfathomable to the Mole who returns to the shed today. Or today’s Mole may be utterly immobilised by the plethora of choices inherent in the writings of yesterday’s Mole. Or perhaps not immobilised, but fired with enthusiasm for some small secondary thread, some chance aside that will (so thinks the euphoric and delusional today Mole) lead to some brilliant narrative scenario. Tomorrow’s Mole will then be seen, head in paws, trying to unravel the mess.

When I am stuck one of my greatest sources of solace is the Paris Review interview series. In the winter of 1986 D L Doctorow told his interviewer that writing was ‘like driving your car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ I imagine a little black Morris Eight with running boards snailing along. The night is misty, but the road is straight, defined each side by poplar trees. There are no crossroads. Perhaps it is Normandy.

This is not the road I am on. Imagine a spaghetti junction. Outside Los Angeles, let us say. This Mole is quailing on Uncle Ratty’s old Velosolex, hedged in by thundering semi-trailers and smart Cadillacs. Night-blindness casts all signage into fuzzy obscurity. And were it not obscure, timidity would still prevent the Mole from launching into the carbon-dioxide haze of traffic to change lanes. Instead the Velosolex and its rider are swept off course for miles and miles and miles, with no hope of return. Not like the little Morris Eight in Normandy gently chugging to its destination without distraction.

The trouble with quotes is that they are always out of context. When I went to re-read the original interview I saw that yes, it was a country road Doctorow was imagining, but it was not without its hazards. He acknowledged that the car might veer off ‘into culverts, through fences into fields, and so on’. And you mightn’t notice you’d gone off course, not for ages. Then you have to flounder about, retrace your tyre marks and try to get back to the road. I imagine – no, I know – this can sometimes take days, weeks, months.

It is a hazardous way of working – Doctorow acknowledges this, but there is a lesson here to be learnt. If I can ever extricate myself from this spaghetti junction, I shall commit to myself to sticking to country roads from now on. Even when I lose my way I shall be able to feel the dew under my paws, the breeze on my pelt and fill my molelungs with great gulps of fresh air as I retrace my steps.

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If you had peered into my soul as the Tasmanian winter solstice approached and passed, you would have noticed a certain unease, a giddiness caused by the tipping of time.

Until the last few years, midwinter has been very hushed here in Hobart. Inhabitants have stuck to their burrows and waited for spring. But now they venture forth in their tens of thousands for Dark MoFo, a ten-day festival with feasts and fires, music and performance. The end (if you disregard the nude swim the next morning), is marked by a parade on the eve of the solstice.

It is a new festival and the themes are borrowed from other places whose marking of mid-winter is deeply imbedded. Indonesian artists came this year to build an Ogoh Ogoh, a monster that in Balinese Hindu culture is paraded through the streets to purify the world of the spiritual pollution we creatures have infested it with. In Bali the Ogoh Ogoh is turned anti-clockwise at every crossroad to confuse the evil spirits and is then taken to the sea and burnt. Here in Hobart, we were invited to feed the monster with scraps of paper that held our scrawled fears, and then to parade with it, banging our pots and pans into a cacophony, before setting it alight on the waterfront.

I wondered about winter solstice celebrations that might be closer to my moleheart, and discovered one not so very far from my birthplace on the south coast of England. Not that I can claim it to be deeply embedded in my psyche; the burning of the clocks was only brought into being twenty years ago, by a community arts group in Brighton called Same Sky. The idea is similar to the Ogoh Ogoh: locals fill an effigy with fears, but also hopes and, carrying home-made lanterns of cane and white tissue, they parade it down to the waterfront, and obliterate it in a bonfire . The difference is – or was when this event was first organised, – that the monster was a clock.

Now the idea of the monster as clock delights the cockles of my moleheart. The unease I feel at winter solstice is the sense of time tipping. The first half of the year feels pregnant with possibility but then it hurtles towards the end with accumulating litanies of things not done, expectations dashed, the spectre of summer and Christmas and time running out.

When I first returned to the southern hemisphere after clearing out the parental burrow, I came laden with time pieces: a grandfather clock with a loud and arrhythmical tick and an hourly wheezing and grinding of chains that built up to the striking of the hour; a mantle clock that used to drown out long-distance telephone calls with its quarter-hourly Big Ben chime; Grandpapa’s watch, which I nursed through its exhausted go-slows; Grandmama’s delicate fob watch; and my father’s more robust wristwatch on an uncomfortable spring-metal strap. Was this obsession something to do with honouring my ancestors, some sense that they had given me time and it was now up to me to seize every moment I had; their passing reminding me of my own life passing by?

Since then these timepieces have fallen silent. The odd beat of the grandfather clock sent lurches to my heart and I stopped pulling down its weights. The mantle clock lost its chime and I stopped winding it. Grandpapa’s watch came to a halt at midnight on Remembrance Day. I had already given away my father’s.

But there is still a clock ticking in my head, still voices that remind me how old I am, how little I’ve achieved in such a long time, how much shorter my future is than my past.

I feel as if I need to take time into my own hands, find myself some cane, string, glue and tissue paper, build a clock effigy, parade it down my drive and set it alight. It may be several days since the solstice, but who cares about a week here or there.

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While I have been laying low this last couple of weeks, I have rediscovered an old pleasure. I think I was first introduced to it the year I caught chickenpox. It was during our annual moletrek to England, and I was deposited with Great Uncle Mole to convalesce while the rest of the family galavanted around the countryside.

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this before, but Great Uncle Mole was a tunnel designer – well engineer, really. And while he was working at his great big drawing board I was deposited in a nearby chair with a dog-eared book on trigonometry which he said he had loved in his youth. It was very quiet; just the scratch of a pen and his tuneless whistling. And the clock ticking, chiming the quarter hour, the hour. My tummy began to rumble. When Great Uncle Mole was absorbed in his work he lost all sense of time.

So you can imagine how my little moleheart leapt with joy when I heard the rackety approach of Uncle Ratty. ‘I’ll take the high road…’, he sang in his rich baritone as he kicked off his gumboots and flung open the door. He pulled the book out of my paws and rolled his eyes. We left Great Uncle Mole to it, and went out to the courtyard to eat marmalade sandwiches under
Garibaldi’s heroic statue.

I think that’s where it began. Garibaldi led to what was to become Italy, and Italy led to the boot, with Sicily being kicked off the bottom. And before you could say Jack Robinson, Uncle Ratty had gone into the burrow and re-emerged with a wooden box that had once held Madeira wine but was now stuffed to the gunnels with maps.

They were higgledy-piggledy, and so we opened them up at random, Dorset, Bombay, Venice, Ireland, Bern, Portmadoc, Palestine. It was like Christmas, unfolding the stiff linen and gradually seeing the thirty two rectangles some mole in a workshop had carefully glued on. And then not seeing the gaps at all, but a feast for the imagination, an abundance of possibilities. We played with names at first. I shouted them out alphabetically while Uncle Ratty picked slugs off the lettuces. Alfoxton Park to Zigzag Hill. Or he would tell me I was a black and yellow taxi in Bombay and was to find him the best route from All India Radio in the Fort district to the Mafatlal swimming pool on Chowpatty Beach. Or ask me what trains to catch to get from Galway to Wexford. Or he would say we were cyclists in canton Bern and needed the flattest route from Arni to Lützelflüh. When I didn’t understand how I would know that, he found some cardboard and we traced the contours, and cut them out and glued them, one above the other, to make hills and mountains. His muddy paws made them all the more realistic.

I didn’t know any of those places then, just loved the names, loved imagining myself along roads, across rivers, up hills and past forts. Now my pleasure lies both in imagining journeys I might or might not take, and retracing the ones that have fed into my making. Remembering with maps embeds me into the soil and the air of a place. I remember with my body the steps, the smells, the sounds and languages, the people I met, the thoughts I had.

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If you had been a fly on the wall of my burrow, a kind of fly-reporter sniffing out scintillating Life of Mole news items, your gleanings would have been very meagre this week. You would have been hard-pressed to even see your subject from within the unseemly knot of sheets, doona, blankets, scarves, jumpers, pillows, bed socks and hot water bottles that was what my nest had become.

When a lurgy smites there is no decision to be made. A flick-switch disengages the busy mind. The body wraps itself up, curls into a ball and goes into semi- hibernation. Night and day merge. Forays are zombie-like: hot lemon, honey, horehound, handkerchiefs, warmer socks, throat pastilles.

And nothing matters.

But then, some time later – who knows how long? one day? two? three? four?, – a sunbeam penetrates the nest and warms the snuffly snout. The bunged up eyelids are tempted to open. One does. The tummy rumbles a little, although the throat wishes nothing to pass it. Another snooze, fitful still, wheezy, and the paws begin to knead their way out of the bedclothes, feel the ground, and wait for the body to slowly bring itself upright. It pads to the kitchen, fills the kettle, makes a hot brew.

Sitting on the sofa, I watch the trees, the birds and the clouds. I feel the warmth of the mug between my paws.

This is the moment that matters, that needs to be savoured. If allowed to be, over the next few days, the molebody will gentle itself into a rhythm. But it is a perilous moment. It is the moment that the mind’s armies threaten to rally, to flick the switch and rescue and assert authority. The trail of bedclothes, mugs, tissues, washing up, knotted bedclothes and possibly even emails and appointments and deadlines (missed, approaching, intended, imagined) flood the barely upright body, and weight it with such overwhelm that all it can do is burrow itself back into the tangled nest and close its eyes.

And now the voice starts. ‘Malingerer’, it chants. ‘Malingerer’.

In French that might be comforting; it only means that you are unwell. But somehow, perhaps a reflection on English attitudes towards the French at the time, when the English took it on they insinuated the idea of pretence into the word, splattered it across countless regulations and policies governing the lives of those workers, soldiers, sailors, apprentices, convicts, servants whose illness feigned, or not, might be inconvenient.

The voice has a definite magisterial tone, sonorous and slightly nasal.

I try to hold the mug in paws, watching the clouds moment for as long as I can. I hope to observe the shoulds and musts from a distance, allow them to joust with each other and only come to me when they have bested the clamouring urgents and worked out between themselves what the truly important tasks are for me to ease my way back into – if and when my body is ready.

And Malingerer – it is rather a melodic sort of word.

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As I was trundling up Knocklofty in the dark and feeling the crunch of snow beneath my hind paws, I was suddenly transported back to Bern, early morning walks in the dark there, the crunch of oak and beech leaves crisp with frost -and I was humming.

I don’t really call it Bern, or even less Berne. I call it Bärn – pronounced like ‘ban’ – except the ‘a’ is drawn out – as if you were leaping off one of the city’s bridges ‘aaaaaah’. And you have to insert about three ‘r’s that roll like the current of the Aare, the river which hurtles round the city and corsets it into a tight ‘U’. That is Bärn.

Now the Switzerland I got to know when I was small mole was deeply conservative. Baths were not to be run, nor lavatories flushed after 9pm. It was forbidden to do the washing on a Sunday and compulsory to clear the sheets and clothes from the communal drying rooms. Switzerland was deeply regulated and also deeply patriotic. No irregular rectangle for their flag, but a square: red with a white cross – and it was everywhere; as were images of gentians, edelweiss and mountain roses. Songs were about mountains, and jolly millers climbing them. Beating their chests, I imagine, and probably yodelling when they reach the summits. On our regular school outing we were cajoled up these same mountains like columns of soldiers. Fidiri, Fidira, Fidiralala…, we sang as we marched uphill in pairs – or wheezed in my case. The experience asphyxiated something in my moleheart. I felt encaged by mountains and longed for the sea and shabby chaos our family had left behind. Lalalala-ha-ha-ha-la, Juhe.

The song I found myself humming as I trundled up Knocklofty this week was quite a different kettle of fish. I first heard it when I was a slightly older mole and beginning to fidget at the confines of the parental burrow. I first heard it one evening when I took a tram into sleepy, buttoned-up Bern and discovered Bärn. It was hidden, not behind its beautiful facades, but deep underground, down steep steps descending from trapdoors off the cobbled streets. They were always dark, these spaces, thick with smoke. You had to feel your way for somewhere to sit, usually the rough stone floor.

Just a chap on a wooden chair with a guitar. Mani Matter, law student by day and troubadour by night.

Our schooling was all in German. Anyone who wanted to be taken seriously wrote and spoke in German. Bärndütsch was seen as backward. But Mani Matter sang in this local dialect. He and a like-minded group were determined to wrestle the language from the stranglehold of sentimental Heimat prose and platitude, and bring it to life with irony, philosophical thinking and robust debate.

His songs were gentle, witty little stories sung to jaunty tunes. And they contained nuggets.

The song* I was humming as I trundled up Knocklofty is a story in which the narrator is walking home one night when he sees a man approaching the parliamentary buildings with dynamite. Is he really about to blow them up he asks. Yes, it has to be, let anarchy reign. As a good citizen the narrator feels duty-bound to do something. His fear makes him eloquent. He espouses the state, the hard won values of freedom and democracy. In a speech that ‘would have made a horse patriotic’, he moves the anarchist to tears. Danger is averted and the anarchist slinks off.

But at home in bed the narrator runs through his speech again. Doubts begin to eat away at his convictions. Was he right to praise Switzerland like that? Now the doubts grow each time he passes the parliament, and he can’t help thinking that all it would take is a couple of sacks of dynamite.

It was this song, allowing doubt to enter what for me had been an impenetrable cultural narrative, that allowed me to embrace my adoptive city. It sowed the seed of a deep love for Bärn, and a way of questioning that stays with me here and now, the other side of the world.

*http://youtu.be/G83PIixn0iM

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A terrible fate befalls me. Imagine. Ambling gently along in the flow of things, I am suddenly plucked out by malevolent predator. An eagle, its talons piercing my pitiful pelt, lifts me from the earth. My stomach leaps to my throat, my terrified moleheart threatens to burst through my ribcage with its thumping. The door to my dear little burrow recedes, then the molehills, then the fields until it all a blur. I am flailing, helpless.

Plucked from the flow? Well yes and no, and certainly nothing so dramatic. I was not exactly in the flow to start with, and the plucking was hardly sudden but rather was cumulative. A little more typing, a little less vigilant about taking breaks, a little less mindful with my Qi Gong, a little more bell-ringing. I was daring to be carefree, limitless. In short, I had begun to take my little body for granted, and my right paw, my writing paw couldn’t keep up the pace. All of a sudden, manipulating a key, opening a jar, turning on a tap, negotiating scissors were beyond my grasp.

My left paw was been keen as mustard to help, but what it didn’t seem to realise is how much it relied on my shoulder which was less eager to bear the burden. My voice, like my shoulder, was underwhelmed at being called into action, not as a murmurer. Heaven forbid. It’s specialisation was out loud. And my mind…well, my mind was adamant it was not going to allow one pesky paw to wreck its plans.

The trouble with us solitaires is that we forget about working communally. And although my general sense is that all that is held in my moleskin is me, it only takes one cog to to slip and I feel as if I am an anarchy of individual parts.

It is taking a little time to move from solitaire to solidaire, to bring the reflective molemind back into the ascendant and permit the active molemind to enjoy a little respite; and to allow the paws to take turns, to pause, to wave about, to swing and to soak in Epsom salts; and for the whole enpelted self to walk about in the wind and the rain, to reconstitute itself with eight brocades, gentle conversations and absorb itself in reading. And to do some work, just a little bit at a time.

The pinger is my friend. Ten minutes allows for about four lines if I know what I’m saying – and then a fifteen minute break – Qi Gong bone-opening exercises, a potter to the end of the drive, brewing a pot of tea. I’m not sure how long I can sustain it, but then my new reflective self tells me that perhaps the sky won’t fall in – with the eagle and me in its claws – if I miss the murmurs deadline.

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There are times when just a word or a phrase topples a whole edifice of mindsets. After reading my murmurs about mistakes last week, Marigold sent me just such a phrase. It was
‘ballon d’essai’. Now, having bathed in its warmth and daring for a couple of days, and absorbed it to my very marrow, I am ready to take it further. One paw on heart and the other sweeping out to the side, I shall go out into the open and proclaim it to any blackbird that might care to listen.

A ballon d’essai encompasses the idea of trial runs, of putting out feelers, of experimenting. It eliminates the whole concept of a mistake. The ballon d’essai pooh-poohs the doom-laden expectation that something must be perfectly formulated in one’s head before it is set down or allowed to go out into the world. It exudes lightness, playfulness and a sense of adventure.

I love the ballon part of it. Ballerinas are said to have ballon when they give the impression of weightlessness as they glide through the air. In laboratories, a ballon is one of those bulbous experimental flasks that holds the promise of eternal life or damnation, depending on what films your rackety relatives took you to. And a ballon, once you have leapt balletically and experimented to your heart’s content, is what you savour your Napoléon cognac in if you happen to be Great Uncle Mole and it is your birthday.

And a ballon is of course a balloon – and here I must bring Uncle Ratty in. I am not sure if he was actually there for Monsieur Baschwitz’s dashing exploit, but he would always tell a story as if he had played some key part in it. So I will imagine him as a kind of collector – the chap who fossicked for all the odds and ends.

It was 1917. The Axis powers were creeping steadily westwards. Allies were falling like nine-pins. Wouldn’t it be splendid, some bright spark suggested, if we could find out Axis troop movements. Well yes, but the main railway junction was in Luxembourg and Luxembourg had been entirely swallowed up. A balloon! some even brighter, but madder spark suggested.

And so it began. How to test the plan? How long it would take, what the prevailing wind currents might be, where to launch it from, given the rapidly changing borderlines? And so while test balloons were being sewn dozens of seamstresses, I imagine Uncle Ratty on a quest for homing pigeons, wicker baskets from the Hospital for the Blind, birdseed, chickenwire to wrap around the baskets so that when they landed the birds would not be eaten by ferrets. But how to make get the balloons to land in the right place? The birds might home but they would not keep time. Uncle Ratty is sent off again to scour the pawnshops for the once popular Waterbury alarum clocks with their very particular winding mechanisms. There is a demonstration of the experiment in the office of some Secret Service chap in London. For this the birds in their baskets are replaced with boots taken off German POWs. Did Uncle Ratty collect these, too? The clock is stuck to the ceiling. The boots are suspended from string threaded through curtain rings and attached to the clock. The clock is wound. It ticks. The alarm goes off and four boots crash to the floor.

Multiple pigeon flights were sent off to test the plan before Monsieur Baschwitz took to the air in his vellum balloon. He had to wait for a night that was long enough for the journey, moonless enough not to be spotted, promised prevailing winds that would not send him off course and further into enemy territory. He almost overshot Luxembourg, but didn’t. And his spy network – well that’s another story.

But this one – well, it has to be the beacon for me in my quest to banish any thought of mistakes in my little molemind and celebrate my future in a plethora of ballons d’essai.*

* I suspect Uncle Ratty occasionally raided his stories from favourite books – in this case Janet Morgan’s The Secrets of the Rue St Roch

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Here I am, pen in paw. Autumn sun is dappling my desk. A perfect place, a perfect time to write. But paw and pen remain suspended. Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing in this notebook. Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing this scene. Perhaps it should be from a different point of view. Perhaps this is the wrong novel. A drop of ink plops onto the page, spreads and I contemplate folding it in half and creating a Rorschach pattern, subjecting myself to a bit of self-analysis.

Truth is I am frightened of making the wrong decision. So frightened I freeze. The tiniest question can swell itself up and taunt me from the writing pad, prance about in the wet inkblot, bullychant: You’re going to make the wrong decision. You’re going to make such a mess of this. Everyone is going to think you are incompetent. Nanananana!

Tante Mathilde was a great one for perfection. Don’t open your mouth until you know the whole poem perrrfectly. Mistakes were slapdash, slipshod and lazy. Mistakes were unpatriotic and would call the whole Mole family into disrepute. Even coughing or sneezing were signs moral degeneration. Tante Mathilde NEVER made mistakes.

Mistakes were locked up in Tante Mathilde’s day, sent to institutions, never mentioned. All those steps between start and finish never existed. And the finish of some other mole’s oeuvre was so far removed from the start of one’s own that it was beyond emulation. Dear Tante Mathilde, how many of your trials went onto the bonfire so that they might never be seen?

Mistake – I try to roll the word around, make it my chum. Mis-take, Mi-stake. I try to squeeze it to Risk-take. It won’t quite go.

Am I really such a tremulous mole? I find my chest puffing up at the thought of it, my snout quivering with indignation. Shying away from a sentence? Where is the brazen activist
of yesteryear? Deep in my little moleheart there lurks a Garibaldi. I have been known to carry placards, stood firm against hecklers, made rousing speeches. Does courage only come when an injustice hurtles straight to my firebrand belly, ignites it and makes me roar.

Would it be so terrible if this were the wrong notebook? Isn’t it my notebook. Can’t I cross things off or tear things out or stick things on? Is there such a thing as a wrong scene – or is it just a step, a way of testing or material that might be used later? Wrong point of view? Perhaps, but at least I’d know. Wrong novel? It will only descend into chaos if I fail to take it in hand. Wouldn’t it become the right one because I made it so?

The next time I feel timorous I shall head to a cupboard deep in my burrow. I shall hunt out a pair of broomsticks, an old sheet, a pot of paint and a brush. And you will see me at the barricades proclaiming the wise words of Anne Lamott:

‘Perfectionism is the Voice of the Oppressor, the Enemy of the People.’*

*Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

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A decade or so ago I began to feel a craving for winter so deep I wanted to howl for the lack of it. I yearned for monochromatic landscapes, blizzards, and air so cold it hurt to breathe. And then for reasons bleak, I found myself thrice returning to a European winter. Two of those were among the coldest on record. Deep snow that didn’t melt – just added to itself, layer upon layer. For the most part, ground and sky were indistinguishable. On the few occasions the thin sun appeared it dissolved only enough snow to lengthen the icicles that hung from the gutters.

I still love the winter. I feel invigorated by it. Snow is an essential element for me. But the craving is no longer so painful. At least it hadn’t been until earlier this week.

The second of those very cold winters was four years ago. I had been in Switzerland for several months, winding up the parental home, but was not yet ready to leave this country of my growing. A dear and enduring friend, a fellow hermit, gave me sanctuary. She, along with her dog, two cats and a tortoise, lived on the edge of a small farming village. Her house was a Stöckli, a tiny, three storey wooden house with external steps up to the entrance on the first floor – so that it could be reached even when the snow was deep.

We were comfortable together. She had known me from when I was eight or nine, cut adrift from my moorings, at sea in a foreign country. She recognised me then as a fellow solitude, a being whose heart beat out of time with the rest. An only child, her life criss-crossed countries, too. Her stories, whether about the days doings or the deep past, were vivid, details and emotions remembered, and told always with dry humour: the grandfather, bigger than life itself, training horses at Chantilly; a big lemon car with my friend, always tiny – tinier still when young, lost in the upholstery of the backseat. The fortunes of English family rose and sank – at one time owners of London pubs with Russian names. She told tales of her indomitable mother, and of her small son, so enchanted by trains he would clamber onto them at the village station, trains that reloaded at this small Swiss town and were heading for Moscow.

That winter we entered a daily rhythm. We breakfasted together, each with our preferred pot of tea. Then I struck out into the morning dark, crossing snowy fields, striding through beech and pine woods and across the railway tracks to catch a train into Berne. I’d spend the day burrowing through archives, pausing briefly for lunch in the canteen.

I had found a pile of coupons in a desk drawer whilst clearing out the parental home. Some were still valid. These I cashed in for punnets of gourmet soups which I brought back to the Stöckli each night. And so in one fell swoop we managed to avoid money and cooking, those pitfalls of mutual obligation, and thanked my dear late Papa for his hoarding.

I heard at the beginning of this week that my friend had died and I could feel myself longing for that intense cold again. This morning, on my walk, I looked up at our local mountain. It was coated with thick snow. So deep and only May. More snow than I have seen on Mount Wellington for years.

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