the light of knowledge
(the feeling of writing a book)
order your copy of Chasing Fog // book next year’s Finding Your Voice retreat
On my way to the library, at the Welsh border I drive under a full rainbow arc that stretches from the rainy present to a future just beyond. It is a damp, grey January day and I am taking a trip to Gladstone’s Library for a self-imposed writing retreat. I broke my journey in Oswestry, visiting the town’s bookshop to discover that they had Chasing Fog — the book I was working on during my last library visit — displayed on the shelf. I find this a reassuring thought as I travel through the rain, the draft of my next book in a bag on the back seat of the car.
The library is a sanctuary and a still point. Under the high, arched ceiling of the reading room, there is silence, but for occasional whispers, the tip-tap of laptop keys, crackling of pages, and the bells of St Deiniol’s church that chime to mark the hours. I think of a line from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, a copy of which I bought earlier from the Oswestry bookshop: ‘the bells that the children could hear were inside them’. Perhaps the bells that break this silence are my own, the jangling thoughts of a crowded mind.
My bedroom has a graveyard view and the next morning I ease open the leaded window to look at the pink sunrise sky, letting in crisp air. After several cups of coffee and some marmalade toast, I am standing, clutching a pile of notebooks and waiting for the reading room to open. ‘We are queuing for knowledge!’ quips a fellow resident, who waits with me. I am early because I want to secure my favourite desk, at the far end on the top floor, just behind a bust of Gladstone that catches the first of the day’s sunshine. One by one, as the library fills up, desk lamps are clicked on — the light of knowledge brightens every corner in spreading golden pools.
