Love List: September

the Fairy King | swimming pools | wild silence

The fog arrives with September.

Just two days after launching my fog book into the world, I find myself wrapped in fog’s cool embrace. It is early in the morning and I am alone in the woods, a copy of my book in my hand. The damp air curls at the cover, the image for which was shot here, and it softens the edges of the pages, on which are printed words that I wrote in, and about, these same woods. If a book can belong to a landscape, mine belongs here, on a morning like this.

It is a strange and wonderful feeling to see your book in the bookshop window, on shelves, and in the hands of readers, but it is equally strange – and equally wonderful – to hold it in your own hands, in the place from which it has been formed, enfolded in the weather condition that gave rise to it. The September fog entwines its silvery tendrils around my book and me, as pages and hair begin to curl. If home can be a physical experience, mine is the first stroke swum in cold water, or the tingling sensation of fog on my skin.

These familiar woods feel otherworldly in the fog and it was the knowledge of a world transformed that called me here, with sleepy eyes and unwashed hair, wearing a summer dress hastily snatched from my bedroom floor. Tiptoeing down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I had seen from the window the hilltop vanished into cloud. Before the kettle had even boiled, I was pulling on my boots.

Now, a pair of squirrels chase between the trees, the scuffles of their feet loud in the sprinkling stillness of the woods. Spiderwebs shimmer with fog droplets, branches drip and crackle. The caw of a crow echoes across the field that adjoins the path and I say out loud – to myself, and to the trees – some lines from an Alice Oswald poem that inspired the writing of my book:

and a crow
calls down to me in its treetop voice
       that there are webs and drips
and actualities up there

The crow flies on. Shining wet beech leaves caress my neck as I pass. I walk into the fog.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month: