On Novel Walks
January
I’m writing from a remote spot in the Shropshire hills, a misty landscape still to reveal itself to me through the floor-to-ceiling window of my AirBnB bedroom. I can just about see my little car at the bottom of the hill, where I had to abandon it when I arrived in the dark last night because it was incapable of getting up the steep, snowy driveway. Perhaps I was also a little jittery and not completely confident of my clutch control, having taken an ill-advised route along a narrow forest track to get here. Thirteen minutes away, Google Maps kept telling me, and I wondered what might happen in those minutes, when every one of them was fog-lit like the climax of a horror film, fallen branches and rutted surfaces threatening to fling me off-course at each turn.
Anyway, I’m now enjoying a cup of tea in bed after a comfortable night’s sleep in the delightful cabin I have booked for three days of sleeping, writing, reading and walking. It is my annual solo retreat and – it turns out – a reminder of how invigorating and nerve-wracking new places and experiences can be. The unknown can bring with it fear. I’m reminded of moving house and experiencing a stab of panic the first few times I’ve walked home at night. Surely this street is filled with danger, this corner a perilous place for me to navigate alone. It takes time and persistence for the unknown to become known, the risk to become routine. So as the fog lifts this morning, I’ll take a walk back through that wooded track and exorcise the unease I felt last night.
As well as exploring the local hills, I’ll also be reviewing progress on my novel while I’m in Shropshire. It’s beginning to feel ironic to call it such a thing, since I’ve been living with it for so long, I am weary of how familiar it is. The whole point of novels is that they are ‘new.’ It is worth remembering that in their novelty they should also be fundamentally unsafe spaces. Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland offers a famous parody of early social anxieties surrounding women reading novels in Northanger Abbey – the potential peril in them being helplessly subsumed by fiction, their thoughts influenced in untoward ways. The history of novels shows us that individuals are indeed changed and radical ideas spread through their innocuous-seeming narratives.
So I have two kinds of thrilling and novel activities ahead of me this weekend. A stomp up Stiperstones, which is a new and unknown walk for me (promising many a spooky folkloric myth along the way). And a wander through words and pages in an attempt to make them new once more.
