Tŷ Newydd
Just come back from a week’s course in nature writing given by Mark Cocker and Kathleen Jamie at Tŷ Newydd in North Wales. It was wonderful!
Parkinson’s disease, diagnosed two years ago, is just beginning to affect my balance – hence the ‘adventure’ described below.
A Bridge a Wasp and Sue
For the first time in months I am on my own as I feel my way carefully down the stone steps that encircle Lloyd George’s monument. Usually I have the dog for company but despite her Andrex looks, she is not a guide dog and recently my husband seems to think I might need guiding over tree-rooted paths, which is all very sweet but makes me nervous. Here there are no roots, the earth is smooth and bare under the trees and I slide down towards the river, giggling. A young family run past me, laughing as they dance over a wooden bridge.
A bridge…
Not a comfortable, machine-tooled bridge with a handrail. Three planks wide with wasp-chewed edges, it straddles a shallow gully. I adopt a speedy shuffle; the planks shudder but I am over before I can think too much and I stride womanfully towards a metal gate; the one with a sign that forbids dogs from defecating once they pass to the other side. The other side is what I am here for: to observe nature, to lose myself in its beauty, to be still. My thoughts are very loud in my head with no one to say them to. I am conscious of how I must appear to any passer-by: an old woman with a notebook perched awkwardly on a wooden bench, her legs not long enough to reach the ground. So I study the river and try to conjure unusual verbs to describe its flow, its roar. On the walk back the uneven ground keeps my eyes downcast so the gate comes as a surprise – and here’s that bridge again.
That bridge…
I try taking a run at it but my legs have other ideas and stop short. I give myself a stern talking-to: this is entirely in my mind; there is absolutely no reason why I can’t walk over the bridge. My legs are not listening to reason. After several attempts I consider the possibility of climbing down into the gully and scrambling up the other side but by now the tremor in my legs has spread to the rest of me and I sit down on a wet, mossed-covered rock and smile. ‘That it should come to this!’ Who said that? Hamlet? Ah yes, and ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ A part of me is enjoying this. I am having an adventure and someone is bound to come by eventually. And then someone does. All I need is for Sue to walk in front as I rest one hand on her shoulder and in four steps we are over!
As I reach for the pen and notebook in my pocket, a wasp stings my palm. Twice.