Creativity took centre stage last week as Wayzgoose and DH1 Records joined forces to host an evening ‘All About Art’. With limited opportunities to showcase the artistic talent here at Durham University, this event was a refreshing reminder of all the untapped creativity within that is out there! From slam poetry to art exhibitions and live music, there was truly something for everyone.
The evening began with a cosy, immersive experience downstairs. In the Holy GrAle’s warmly lit cellar, members of the DUPoetry society (Theodore Forcer, Lyra Button, Ivan Deverick, Heather Chapman, Grace Ellis and Freya Cook) captivated the audience with their slam poetry, where they found something extraordinary in the ordinary. From musings on the moon to the process of dying your hair, their words painted vivid pictures. This intimate setting provided a sensory experience as you could hear the hum of Oli Tranter’s remixes upstairs. (Check out Oli Tranter’s SoundCloud here: https://on.soundcloud.com/We1m5tgpiq9MEnGj7!)
Surrounding the audience was an impressive art exhibition provided by Wayzgoose’s talented artists. Grace Gibbons showcased work inspired by surrealism, pop art and expressionism, drawing influence from masters like Johnson Tsang, Van Gogh, Picasso and Minjae Lee. Sophia Osborn presented pieces that explored the subtleties of human anatomy, and the emotions expressed through posture and gesture, using a range of mediums from acrylics to fine liners. Rohan Scott, Ruby Slinger and Lottie Davey exhibited intricate lino prints, celebrating the fluid beauty of aquatic life and water’s dynamism. The beginning of the event was all about visual art and poetry and then it was time for the music to take the spotlight….
Upstairs, the audience was drawn in by Carys Plews’ enchanting voice. This was Carys’s debut gig, but her performance certainly wasn’t amateur. She is an immensely talented musician, self-taught on vocals, piano, ukulele and guitar, saying: ‘I have sung ever since I could talk’! Her original song about her idea of the perfect relationship, dedicated to someone in the crowd, was both heartfelt and captivating. She also sang beautiful covers: ‘La Vie en Rose’ was particularly memorable as you could have heard a pin drop. Her music, inspired by songwriters like Lana del Rey, Amy Winehouse and Fiona Apple, explored themes of love, womanhood and the emotional roller-coaster they bring. Carys embodied everything that this event was about as her songs stemmed from the lyrics of her poetry.
The energy shifted as the five-piece indie-pop band The Ivies turned the venue into a lively dancefloor. They performed some covers of beloved favourites that were refreshingly different to the well-known Jimmy’s playlist! They played their full EP ‘Hardly My Fault,’ and debut single ‘Sick For A Week,’ which was BBC Introducing North East Track of the Week and featured on Purple Radio’s Newsfeed last week. They also played a few unreleased songs that they are in the process of recording. In terms of sound, they take inspiration from Billie Eilish, The Backseat Lovers, Peach Pit and Wolf Alice. Their music resonated with personal experiences, with Alice Bird’s heartfelt lyrics reflecting on mental health. The crowd couldn’t get enough, dancing and laughing with friends – the perfect tonic for the summative season.
To close the evening, DJ Luke Hesseltine played a deep jazz house set inspired by the likes of ANOTR, Bellaire and Berlioz. He later moved into a higher energy groovy set, tapping into Latin, Afro and Piano house genres which transported us far from the snowy night outside. His set featured occasional UKG remixes, old-school Disco classics and tracks from icons like Armand van Helden and MPH.
The Holy GraAle transformed multiple times over the course of the evening – from a pub to a spoken word haven, an art gallery, a concert venue, and finally, a place to unwind.
This unforgettable night was just the beginning. There’s plenty more where that came from – keep your eyes peeled for our next event!
This time I wasn’t afraid. Starting the Slovenian Mountain Trail, it felt like coming home. I was returning to a place I belonged, to a place I understood. The trail. The trail is where I go to heal. Life needs to be lived, and this is where I can do just that.
Haunted by a sense of nostalgia, I realised I’d been here before. Two years ago, I stood here alone as I set off across the Balkans. I was in the same place, but now I was a different person. I was no longer alone. Dan, Joe and I were embarking on this 600 km journey across the Julian Alps.
I lay curled under my tarp, unable to sleep; I never do on the first night. So much lay ahead of us, all of it unknown. Knowing nothing about the future meant that everything was possible. That’s the beauty of adventuring into the unknown – it opens the pure possibility of life.
For a week we were shrouded in the Slovenian forest. Days spent in the rain, cold and wet, wearing dishwashing gloves to warm my hands. Each day, the snowy mountains that loomed across the horizon were getting closer and closer. A record early snowfall had now made a gnarly route even gnarlier. We ignored the fact we had zero snow gear and in denial simply kept walking. Each day the sole goal of existence was to walk. The snow was an issue for the future, we simply had to live for the needs of the day.
I felt happy. Usually on a thru hike my days are this mental rollercoaster, bouncing between despair and ecstasy. But here I’ve felt this steady contentment, some form of peace. There hasn’t been this grand suffering as in previous times. In the past, I suffered from my idealism. Idealising the suffering of solitude, of having no shackles, believing in the purity of the self, I left people I loved. I drowned in the void that surrounds the lonesome walker. It was always optional, driven by the desire to suffer. The need to suffer. How many days have I spent crippled by the loneliness of this romantic nightmare? I no longer feel this need. I think it’s taken these tears to nourish the white flower that grows in my often black and broken heart. In a cruel and twisted way, it’s taught me the need for others.
Most of the mountain huts were now shut due to the snow. We would often curl up on the hut porches to shelter from the rain. The Slovenian Misery Trail. That’s what Dan and Joe had started to call it. At camp one night we talked about quitting. It made complete sense. Walking in the cold rain was miserable and the snow was going to be dangerous to say the least. The idea of quitting terrified me because I felt like I had nothing to go back to. I felt the crippling ache of losing people who used to define your life. I even felt separate from Dan and Joe. I was an outcast to their brotherly bond. It was too cold to fall asleep, shivering as I let the tears wash the dirt off my face.
In the morning, we bailed off the trail. Failed hitch after failed hitch, we walked in silence. We had no clue where we were going but as long as it was out of the rain we didn’t care.
We ended up getting a ride from a guy driving to Tolmin, so that’s where we were headed. As we drove out of the hills, with music playing from the radio, the sun started to shine. In the mirror I could see Dan and Joe smiling, softly singing in the back.
It turns out our new friend knew these mountains well and he offered to help us come up with a plan. Map in hand, he called up his friend who worked in the Mountain Rescue. In a few days’ time there was going to be a good weather window, which should give us enough time to get through the highest mountains. There was still plenty of fresh snow so we planned plenty of lower elevation alternates that we could bail onto. Our psyche was back. And so, we rested at a campsite, ate and even showered. That man did more for us than he will ever know. He gave us hope and belief. The trail always provides.
Through everything we finally arrived at the foot of the mountains. Through the rain, through tears, through the cold and now through the mountains and snow. That is the nature of a thru hike – to go through it all.
We climbed up along a crystal river. It was brutally steep climbing, but that was nothing compared to our excitement. Our excitement to get up high into the alpine, to drown in the vastness. We eventually broke through the tree line. All around were towering masses of rock, masters in a world of flux. Shards of rock that seemed to cut across the sky. Limestone faces extended all around that burned bright in the sun, blinding me, forcing me to shield my eyes from their purity. As I climbed up through rocky outcrops, I encountered the first of the snow. Above, I could see Dan and Joe about to reach the shelter. Looking up at them, two figures seemingly dancing along the land, I started to cry. Smiling with tears streaming, I spun around trying to take everything in. Refusing to let anything slip by. I knew then that all the suffering was nothing compared to the beauty I’ve experienced. I was back home in the mountains.
We piled into the emergency shelter. Inside were mattresses and blankets, a cosy den. Like kids we ran around the giant boulder field nearby. Climbing the various lines we could see, playing till the sun set where we retreated inside the shelter. We listened to the howling of the wind while we were wrapped up inside. We talked and laughed until the warmth and comfort of sleep welcomed us.
I opened the shelter door to the sun starting to rise over the massif opposite us. Distant peaks lit up in a pink haze. Joe and I set off to summit Jalovec. Dan sensibly was staying behind as he didn’t want to push the risks. Joe and I established that our goal was to simply have fun and that we were completely okay with the likelihood of not reaching the summit. We knew it was going to be spicy. We hopped through boulder fields and up scree slopes. With our harnesses on we started ascending through some via ferrata sections, thankful for the protection given the exposure. Slowly we climbed higher. Quickly the route became covered in snow. Without any crampons or axes slipping on the snow would mean a high chance of a death fall. We decided to quest up off route on rock. We were both rock climbers, so we felt it was safer, but it quickly got sketchy. Slab climbing in no fall territory, looking down below at hundreds of metres of cliff below. Any foot slip and you were plummeting down. Joe could tell I was starting to struggle and lose my head. My leg at times doing a full ‘Elvis leg’. Joe guiding me through the beta when I got cruxed out.
We eventually got completely snowed out and decided that was high enough. We stood for a while marvelling at everything around us. With all the recent snow there was not a soul anywhere on these mountains. It was just us. The space to think. To feel. To live. To revel. ‘The ecstatic joy of pure being’. Being able to share these experiences is what it is all about. To be in these places with people you care about, doing things you love. These moments you can’t convey to other people. Moments you can never fully relive. Moments I’ll always look back on in awe, no matter how old I become. As I stood there, I knew that when I die I’ll smile, knowing that I’ve felt beauty that is inconceivable, that no words could ever convey.
It was now just the simple task of downclimbing everything we had just quested up. Dan was waiting for us at the bottom, nervously debating at what point he should call mountain rescue.
Packing up our stuff a fight broke out between Dan and Joe over water. Something so minor quickly divided us. In silence we set off and bombed it down knowing we had a lot of distance to cover that day. The goal was to reach a hut on the other side of a big technical pass.
Joe and I didn’t see Dan for most of the day. I think it was easier for him to be apart from us than to be with us. He had lived in solitude for the last two months hiking across the Alps. Joe and I kept getting annoyed with his selfishness, but I knew he was just learning how to deal with people again. He was a solitary creature being forced into a herd.
By evening we began the final ascent to the pass. We climbed up scree as ibex pranced above us. In an ocean of rock, we tried to work out where the pass was. Jagged ridgelines all around us broken up by towering spires. Dan was nowhere to be seen, and the terrain was getting sketchier and sketchier. We climbed across exposed wet rock, up vertical sections pulling onto steel cables while my feet slipped on ice. We’d been following Dan’s footprints but now we hadn’t seen any for a while. I could see Joe’s uneasiness growing. His fear of seeing Dan’s body lying somewhere down below, somewhere we would never find.
The last beams of light were staggered across the various ridgelines, cutting shadows across the land. We were post-holing up to our knees in fresh snow. I was thankful for the mist, not being able to see the drop below. Being in the mountains it’s hard not to experience ego death. You feel so small in the immensity of it all. You feel so insignificant and yet you feel so much.
Finally, we made it to the top and I could see Dan sitting there. My joy at him being alive quickly wore off and soon we were all shouting at each other. But the setting sun cut our fight short. The threat of darkness and the need to get down was more important. Only a few minutes into the descent, the only light was from our head torches. After some snow fields and via ferrata, we saw the distant light of the hut. It started to rain, and the distant glow never looked so welcoming. The light was getting closer and closer. We made it. The hut warden was shocked when he asked where we came from. Turns out we were the only people to have made it through that pass in the snow. A testament to our stupidity. Our fighting was irrelevant compared to the joy of a fire and a hot bowl of goulash.
The landscape we had been passing through was of another world. A rough wilderness where beauty is the most common of things. I would stop and try to look all around, but I couldn’t absorb it all. It was everywhere and yet I couldn’t hold onto any of it. I was just passing through. I knew I would wake up the next day and not be able to truly remember any of it. It existed only in the now. Beauty only exists in the present. Like everything, it will pass, but I think that’s okay. Leaving those moments as moments. No matter how much you want to, you can’t hold onto any of it. If you try to hold on forever, you’ll drown in memories of the past. I think this is the nature of everything. Relationships and times of your life can’t always be forever, but that doesn’t take away their significance or beauty. These times with people can burn like fireworks exploding against the dark sky, but fireworks can’t burn forever. If it was forever, it would be but a mere candle.
We stood at the base of Triglav. A helicopter was flying around looking for the body of a hiker who had died up here. With all the snow we never thought we would be here, but here we were staring up at its three peaks, its crown. The tallest mountains in Slovenia. The plan was to go from a hut on one side, then to move up and over to a hut on the other side. We began pushing up. I could see a woman laugh at Dan as he passed her in his unbuttoned shirt, shorts and trainers, while she had mountaineering boots, crampons, jackets, helmets and ice axes. As I reached her, she said “whenever there’s one crazy there’s always another not too far away.”
Things quickly got technical. The rock and snow fields were steep with plenty of via ferrata. We made our way up. All three of us stood at the top. We embraced in celebration. Despite everything we made it to the highest point of the route. In a sea of snow, here we were looking down on the world below. The sun was starting to set and all around us lay layers of purple, blue and yellow. Along the horizon you could see the curvature of the earth. This beautiful, beautiful world.
The temperature was beginning to drop as we began the descent. The hut soon came into view and with it the dream of warmth. This dream was interrupted as all of a sudden we cliffed out. Standing on a snowy ledge clipped into a cable, we looked around. Below a vertical drop, we could make out some cables. We had no rope and to get there would require a hail mary jump down the snowy drop while trying to catch the cable. In all likelihood we would be plummeting down into the abyss below. We’d made it so far to get here, but we all knew we were seriously close to the line. Joe made the call not to go any further. He suggested we go back up a bit and bivy up there for the night. Things would get dangerously cold if we slept up here, so I made the heartbreaking suggestion to retrace our steps and go back down the other side. Back over the top of everything we had just climbed.
In the pitch of darkness, we put on some layers and turned on our head torches. We looked at each other with sombre eyes, knowing we had to lock in. This wasn’t a game and we knew there would be no room for mistakes. We climbed back up through snowy chutes, traversing icy rock, everything we had just done but now in the dark. We were taking our time and making smart decisions. It was already dark so there was no need to rush, it made no difference. The only focus was to make it down alive. With the temperature drop, the snow was freshly frozen which made the descent easier, being able to kick in solid boot packs. The light from my head torch was slowly dimming until it died. This wasn’t the best time for that. I slotted in the middle between Dan and Joe, desperately trying to occupy the little bubble of light around them.
It got scary. Real scary. But you didn’t have room to let fear into your head. You couldn’t let it mess with you. You couldn’t let it distract you. You had to be there. I was wholly there. To survive you had to be present. If you came out of that moment it would be over. This intensity of living. Existing in the space between life and death, everything dissolves away apart from the sole need to live. Moments so pure, you could die for.
We made it. We made it down. A group outside the hut had been watching the dots from our headlamps descend down in anticipation of the worst. I’ve never hugged anyone so tight as we collapsed onto the ground. It was only now that I could feel the amount of adrenaline in my body. I hadn’t noticed the stars but the whole night sky was dancing with them. “You can only know the value of life when you are that close to losing it”, Joe said. I lay listening to my heart beating. I felt the value of being alive and the value of others. I felt so happy to be lying next to them. To not be alone. To feel the sense of brotherhood between us all. Love gets in the way of death, for love is life. It’s for love that I did not want to die.
The next day we quit. We got a hitch to town from a circus fire dancer and got a bus to Lake Bled. We’d had our fair share of adventure. With the weather window being over, why suffer more when we didn’t have to?
Walking around Bled I felt nothing. From the peace of the mountains to this chaos. All these tourists had come to see how beautiful this lake was but to me it was nothing. Nothing compared to the beauty of the mountains. To the peace of the mountains. A fall from grace. We felt aimless. Normal civilisation wasn’t meant for us. Stressed and anxious we wandered around, but it wasn’t long before with a grin I proposed we got back on the SMT.
And so, we walked. Three Dharma bums partaking in the rucksack revolution. Through the rain and cold we placed foot after foot. Our feet wrinkled from the river-like trail. Nights spent shivering for warmth, sneaking into firewood sheds. Having quit the trail, everything now felt like a gift. I had accepted that the trail was over and so none of this we were meant to experience. Everything we passed by now felt special. These were miles I was never meant to walk. There was no rush because we no longer had a goal. There was no destination. No goal but to live, and with that came a feeling of immense freedom.
One of the last nights on trail we barricaded ourselves on this porch. We flipped a table to block an approaching storm. We each had our own form of protection. Dan had strung up his tent horizontally, Joe was lying under a plank of wood, and I was wrapped in my plastic groundsheet. Despite my burrito I was completely soaked and spent the night shivering feeling hypothermic, but I’ll always look back on this night and smile. We lay there in the rain singing. Singing ‘So rock me mama like a wagon wheel, rock me mama any way you feel.’ A song about a man traveling home to see his lover. Initially it saddened me. I no longer had someone I loved to go back to, and the idea of home felt alien. This strange abandonment or aimlessness. But I now felt weirdly okay with that. Despite this loneliness, I felt love for Dan and Joe, love for friends elsewhere, love for this life. I think I agree with something Joe said, that love is the only real thing in this world. I think it’s the only thing that matters. It’s the most priceless treasure in the world, and with it the whole of life lies open.
With the leaves now falling from the trees, our time on the Slovenian Mountain Trail came to an end. Together we’d carried the fire across Slovenia. This trail taught me that it is only because of others that my fire burns bright. Mad to live knowing that I don’t have all the time in the world, only that which I’m given and while I’m alive I intend to live and to love. There have been times where I’ve lost that. But I now feel a duty to love, because when you lose that you lose everything. There is no life but in love.
At the beginning of this month, I had the absolute pleasure of attending one of Laura Marling’s four nights of residency in Hackney Church. In case you’re not familiar with Marling, she has been a steady presence in the indie folk and singer-songwriter world since the 2000s, releasing her first album ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim’ at the age of just 18 and winning the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist in 2011. Her classic sound has led her to be compared to the likes of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. Having been a fan for a few years, I was excited by the prospect of seeing her in such an intimate and atmospheric venue.
Marling opened with a fifteen-minute number of four interwoven songs from her 2013 magnum opus ‘Once I Was an Eagle’. She joked we’d passed the endurance test, but really it was no challenge: her intonation is addictively Bob Dylan-esque and she sings lines like ‘I will not be a victim of romance’ as if they’re an incantation, with an admirable acerbity. The crowd were engrossed: to her, singing and playing is entirely instinctive. The first half of the concert was dedicated to her reasonably extensive back catalogue and for the second half she was joined by strings and a choir to perform the entirety of her new album, ‘Patterns in Repeat’, as well as a couple of cult-classics.
Alongside her quintessential odes to women persecuted or misunderstood, the principal focus of her new album is motherhood. Alluding to Cyril Connolly’s assertion that parenthood and creativity are incompatible, she stated on the album release day that she hoped ‘if nothing else this album serves to represent the possibility that the pram in the hallway is not, as it turns out, the enemy of art’. She is undoubtedly successful at proving Connolly wrong. Almost paradoxically, reflecting her precise use of words, she sings in the title track ‘I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me’. Despite this complete candour, the album never borders on saccharine, she retains a dark edge: her artistic integrity and storytelling capacity runs too deep.
From the new album, ‘Caroline’ has quickly become a classic. Reminiscent of Leonard Cohen, it’s haunting and utterly timeless. The ingenious idea of forgotten lyrics (‘A song I only just remember / That goes oh, something something, Caroline’) reflects Marling’s wit, which was delightfully highlighted for me during the gig when a fan shouted out ‘we love you, Laura!’ and she replied, knowingly, ‘good, good’. Her quiet confidence is palpable: even when she sang the wrong lyrics in one song and suffered some technical guitar malfunctions, she resumed the song unfazed, clicking back into an almost ethereal state of absorption which was incredible to watch.
Recorded in her home, the new album features faint baby gurgles and chirping birds, which complement the soaring string sections to tether the album to a strong sense of reality, different from earlier albums of which the narratives are more fantastical and abstract. ‘No one’s gonna love you like I can’ is another standout: a gut-wrenchingly beautiful two-minute song which she performed on the piano. It is perhaps the closest to sickly-sweet she gets, but she retains her usual playful blend of sentimentality and sharpness (‘You were saying something strange just to make me misbehave’). Hearing this song live, it’s apparent that the album is more hopeful, expansive, and forwards-looking than her previous works; the song takes flight with the help of the strings as she sings ‘And if life is just a dream / I’m gonna make it mean something worth a damn’.
With no opening act nor encore, something Marling fans have come not to expect, she closed the show with the song ‘For You’, from her 2020 album ‘A Song for Our Daughter’. Released three years before having her daughter, she now refers to the album interchangeably as ‘Premonition’. The tone aligns with that of the new album as she sings ‘I thank a God I’ve never met / Never loved, never wanted (For you)’. A fusion of her innate scepticism and her joy at becoming a mother, with a lilting rhythm, it rounded up the concert charmingly. She waved quickly at the audience, unslung her guitar, and headed off-stage, embodying her understated and underrated genius.
Desperation smells like curdled milk. A persistent, rancid odour which sits in nostrils, clings on clothes and spreads like oil. Tessa could smell it on the rat sitting before her. He’d been trying to chat her up for the past five minutes.
“What college?” was the grand opener. Tessa glanced up from her pint of Kopparberg – an hour old and lukewarm. She was a little bemused at what stared back at her. A pale-faced rat, dressed in a tanned Schöffel, tattersall shirt and club-stained Reeboks.
“Uh…”. Tessa’s mind went blank. She’d never spoken to a rat before. “Mildert”, she lied.
“Fuck. Unlucky”, his underbite rattled back. He took a seat opposite Tessa, his marble eyes fixed on hers. “I’m Hatfield”.
“Right. Yeah, no, I’m just waiting for my friend, so…”. An age’s worth of spilt alcopops glued Tessa to her seat. She reached for her phone.
“What’s your name though?”, the rat inquired. Tessa couldn’t decide what was more terrifying – being propositioned by an anthropomorphic rodent in Britain’s saddest nightclub, or having to dust off the freshers’ week pleasantries (“what course?”, “where you from?”, “Surrey? No way!”, et al). Before she could choose, Tessa found herself answering his question. “Tessa? I’ve literally never heard that name before in my entire life. I’m Ollie”. He extended his paw – bearing a signet ring and Patek Phillipe watch. Tessa shook it, shivering at the caress of his claws. “Do I smell a Northern accent, perchance?”.
“Uh, yeah. Liverpool”. Tessa took a long, strained blink. Some respite from Ollie’s sharp gaze.
“Fuck’s sake, sorry to hear that,” Ollie sighed with an eerily genuine earnestness. “I mean, least you’re fit though, right?”. He scratched his nose with his arm, leaving a snail-trail of snot across his sleeve. “What you drinking though? Looks shit – lemme get you something. Treble?”
“I’m alright, thank you”. Tessa attempted a carefully calibrated smile. Musn’t lead this twat on, she mused. She glimpsed around for any sign of her housemate, Georgia, who’d been led astray by a stranger’s promise of ketamine ten minutes before. No luck.
“Where are your mates?” Ollie hissed across the table. “You on your own?”.
“No”. The smell was growing too pungent. Tessa stood up. “Excuse me”. Without missing a beat, Ollie rose from his seat. His wiry frame towered over Tessa like a palm tree in the wind.
“Which is it, then? Mine or yours?”, he squeaked, flashing his snaggletoothed grin. “You what?”. Tessa backpedaled.
“Well, I mean – we’re obviously gonna shag, aren’t we? Mine or yours?”, Ollie queried with a bizarre tinge of sincerity. He reached for her hand.
“You’re fucking vile”, Tessa scoffed, slapping away his coarse paw. “Piss off”. She spun and made a beeline for the smoking area, beads of sweat dripping down her forehead. A packed dance-floor stood in her way – a teeming scrum of paralytic students, swaying in vague rhythm to Sugababes’ About You Now. To her horror, Tessa could not shake the stench. It seemed to only grow more potent.
A searing pain suddenly exploded in Tessa’s neck, hurling her down to the ground. Her head hit a puddle of cheap spirits and lemonade, as she shrieked with agony. Tessa’s peripheral vision was dominated by Ollie – his front teeth sunk deep into her skin, effortlessly tearing through muscle. Her screams slowly dissipated through a fountain of blood, as her eyes fluttered up towards the crowd.
Through muddied vision, Tessa made out a slender figure – swaying with the music. Another rat, his chestnut loafers a foot away from Tessa’s drained face. Passionately kissing a half-conscious Georgia. Leisurely moving towards her neck.
As someone who has the St. George’s cross blu-tacked to my wall, I am often asked why I display such a controversial visual. Whilst patriotism is a divisive topic in itself, ‘Englishness’ seems to be most commonly defined by extremism. During the destructive riots over the past year, the English flag was often seen towering above the heads of angry racists, and for much of modern cultural history, has become a stamp on the letters of bigotry and exclusion.
I must admit, I find it a shame that we have seemingly surrendered the concept of Englishness to the extreme margins. I suppose we witnessed the wave of “Cool Britannia” in the 2000s that led up to 2012 Olympics, which for many of my peers seems to symbolise the peak of their limited patriotism for this country, but even so, that was a pride in Britishness, which seems to be somewhat easier, and less awkward to associate with. And whilst Wales and Scotland have been able to foster a more inclusive cultural nationalism, it is the United Kingdom’s biggest player that has been unable to do so.
In 2009, Jez Butterworth premiered Jerusalem, a play that sought to resituate cultural Englishness into a literary context, and also comment on how rural Englanders respond to their changing cultural landscape. The play focuses on the eviction of Johnny Rooster Byron, an English traveller whose caravan is at risk of demolishment by the local Kennet and Avon council. Upon first impressions, Byron is the personification of aged and chauvinistic stereotypes, his discourse is filled to the brim with derogatory and colloquial euphemism. He drinks, he spits, he is the epitome of the ‘social underclass’ that so many people associate English pride with. Crucially, he’s an outdated anomaly, a glitch, a rural caricature that simply cannot keep up with the mechanisms of modernity. And yet, it is with this archetype that Butterworth believes a realisation of English cultural nationalism can be reimagined. Johnny’s surname, Byron,immediately ties him to the English romantic great. Johnny also bears stark similarity to the original author of Jerusalem, William Blake. At one point, Byron reminisces about his legendary performances before his fall into social isolation and obscurity, supposedly prancing across three double decker busses at the local Flintock fair – these illustrious tales of greatness much resembling the infamous hallucinations of Blake. Furthermore, his fall from grace has colonial tinges. As Johnny Byron grapples with his isolation, England must surely construct an identity independent from its imperial past.
By the play’s culmination, Johnny’s syntax has transformed into lyrical and decorated soliloquies, his flourishing final monologue a clear ode to English mythology and folklore. And whilst choosing to stand by his caravan, Johnny Byron self-actualizes and reconnects with a rural form of cultural Englishness that has become so lost and mistranslated, and argues that there is rich form of English identity that can indeed prosper in the modern world. Englishness is not an unstudied concept in the literary scape. In E.M Forster’s Howards End, for example, a similar mythical and artistic enlightenment is discovered by the protagonists. Forster, however, seems to commit the English middle classes to this task of reimagining England’s green and pleasant pastures. Butterworth imagines a revolution from the bottom-up and suggests that class-consciousness is integral to forming a cultural richness for a nation that seems so fragmented. Perhaps this debate is trivial, perhaps we can never reconcile a version of Englishness that is fuelled by folklore and romanticism, as opposed to exclusion and suspicion. Perhaps, patriotism is just a dusty book on the top shelf that this generation has no interest in reading. But I do feel it is our responsibility to re-imagine a more accessible and deeper Englishness – after all, the alternative is throwing it to the beer-bellied wolves.
Thom Yorke and Hamlet, if you are a self-confessed, somewhat pretentious student of the arts, an admirer of the trope of the tortured artist, or ideally both, has a combination ever made more sense or had a greater natural appeal? April 2025 will allow this question to be realised as Radiohead’s sixth studio album and Shakespeare’s longest and arguably greatest work are reworked to form a coalition and come to the stage in the form of ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief.’
‘Are you such a dreamer, to put the world to rights? I’ll stay home forever, where two and two always makes up five.’ These opening lines of Yorke’s album allow anyone familiar with the basic workings of ‘Hamlet’ and its profoundly mentally complex protagonist to see the thematic links between the two creative masterpieces. However, it was theatre director Christine Jones who spoke the connection aloud, allowing for this reworking to be conceived. In an interview regarding the project she discussed the psychological impact of seeing Radiohead live in 2003, the year Hail to the Thief was released, recalling, ‘it changed my DNA.’ She then goes on to ponder on its Shakespearean echoes, stating, ‘Not long after, I was reading Hamlet and listening to the album. […] There are uncanny reverberances between the text and the album.’ Additionally, Yorke has said he finds this project an ‘interesting and intimidating challenge’ with the RSC claiming the result of this challenge to be a ‘feverish new live experience, fusing theatre, music and movement.’
But what is it that makes this collaboration genuinely exciting? Shakespeare’s folio has been reworked, reworked, and reworked again, often with fairly dismal consequences. As an excited, newly inspired fan of Shakespeare I headed to the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at 16 years old to watch their production of ‘Richard III,’ a favourite play to this day. However, I found myself greeted with Richard and the rest of the cast in sports strips, forcing comedy and delivering Shakespeare’s meter in a manner which made it appear they were about to burst into freestyle rap. When attending a production of Shakespeare I don’t generally wish to feel on edge with concern that Lin Manuel Miranda might jump out of the stalls at any given moment.
This production is just one example of an endless list of Shakespearean reworkings that fall short of their expected critical reception, often deemed to be jarringly stripping the productions of their original integrity. Granted, this ‘integrity’ often includes prominent themes of patriarchal oppression, with Shakespeare’s supposed ‘heroines’ rarely given the opportunity to be even somewhat developed characters. However, as upsetting as these themes can be to explore in theatrical characterisation, if in every modern production of these plays, we must turn their original structures on their heads, are we still performing Shakespeare at all? Or do we just feel so collectively guilty for hyper-canonising the ‘Bard’ and his misogynistic tendencies in the way we have, that we must make the plays an ode to today’s rightful quest for equality as to allow them into our modern creative spaces?
Herein lies the crux of what I find to be appealing about the upcoming ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief,’ I am hopeful that it will be able to find balance. Radiohead’s emotive melodies and lyrics that act as the building blocks for ‘Hail to the Thief’ hit so precisely on the themes of mental turmoil, paranoia, and grief that bleed from ‘Hamlet’s’ every syllable. Hamlet’s impassioned musing of ‘what piece of work is man!’ appears to be a line of thought that has resonated with Yorke across much of his musical career as he explores the psyche and its failings consistently and in great detail from ‘Pablo Honey’ through to ‘A Moon Shaped Pool.’ When this music soundtracks the conflicted, poisoned and often stagnated mind of Hamlet I am hoping that the play’s, still deeply relevant, discussion of the human condition will be what audiences are left most focussed on. Consequently the play should be able to modernise itself; as the reason for its hyper-canonisation becomes clear, it speaks to what is innately human in all of us, time period irrelevant.
When the original core of the play is left intact having been exposed against the sounding board of Yorke’s art, today’s audiences should then be leaving feeling encouraged to contemplate the problematic elements of the play on their own, without having them thrust upon them. Ophelia’s quiet power in the face of dehumanising oppression, possibly unintentionally present in the text, can float its way to the fore of the mind naturally with the support of Yorke’s soundtrack. Shakespeare’s misogyny and its modern reverberations can therefore be able to co-exist with his genius as each layer of the play can be exposed intentionally and evenly without a clunky imposition of creative guilt heaped atop the play’s 4,167 lines.
Although there is much more to be said on the complexity of modernising Shakespeare and the challenge of locating its resonance within modern media, not much more can be said on this production in hope. Having bought tickets for the show in its first release I hope to be proved right in my high estimation of its quality. However, they do say never meet your heroes and perhaps the seemingly ideal combination of an all-time favourite band and one of the greatest works of literature created may not quite meet the mark. Nevertheless, ideally, I will not be left still roaming the creative ether in hope of one day finding the perfect Shakespearean reworking.
Five years does seem like a long time to take to get around to reading the highly anticipated follow up to Call Me By Your Name, one of the most iconic books/films of recent times. But then again I’m just your average common reader so I can’t be hated for taking this long. And the book was published twelve years after Call Me By Your Name anyway. So Find Me basically had to wait twelve years to get published, and then another five years to finally get picked up and read by yours truly.
Still, that pales in comparison to the twenty years the characters – Elio and Oliver! – had to wait to finally reconnect. And the reader of Find Me might feel themself to be sharing in their waiting: as has been decried by almost every reader of this book, you have to push through over two hundred pages of seemingly unrelated material before the terrible twosome themselves finally get together properly in the last fifteen or so pages of the book.
Waiting – being made to wait, making things wait – is clearly a big thing in the book. And it reminds me of the opening of Call Me By Your Name in fact: Elio’s recollection of Oliver’s constant and apparently meaningless use of the word “later”. One difference, though, may be that in the earlier book, we are made to wait and watch the romance develop, and the plot quicken and get weightier, and that’s really part of its appeal. Whereas with Find Me, your average reader is just waiting for the book to give what it needs to give, in order to justify its existence.
And that’s the issue, isn’t it: this was always a book cursed to inherit all sorts of waiting, from the characters, the readers, the writer himself, and around the narrative skeleton of characters less pretentious and robotic as these ones, it may be the stuff great novels are made of. But Aciman seems to have misjudged the capacity of his characters to satisfyingly dramatise this waiting. So, apparently in order to add substance to his novel, he makes the cardinal sin of producing a novel that relies on the author’s (characters’s) intelligence and cultural knowledge to work.
Thus in this instance, what you end up with, annoyingly, is a highly stylised and conceptually intriguing novel whose characters come across as utterly transparent, lazily drawn puppets, the sole purpose of whom is to voice (sometimes implicitly but gratingly often explicitly) all the theory and cultural reference and intellect with which Aciman feels compelled to salt his text. They certainly don’t think, talk or act the way people do, but they think, talk and act the way Aciman needs them to in order to fill the black hole in his text left by all the implicit waiting. And it doesn’t even pay off: when the characters finally stop their wholly unconvincing, preposterously robotic and referential and incessant dialogue, it’s seemingly only ever to pose little rhetorical questions inquiring into the nature of their own minds. Obviously, not all character-narrators owe the reader complete narrational and mental transparency, and a bit of unreliability and unclarity is nice. But one can only really groan when it becomes clear that the questions, for instance, are only there to hint at and suggest an awareness of the psychological depths and recesses that Aciman apparently can’t be bothered to plumb. Consider these random quotes where Sami Perlman is talking about getting to know the woman from the train: “Had I once again spoken out of turn and crossed a line?”; “When was the last time I’d spoken to someone like this?”; “Had I yet again snubbed her without meaning to?”; “Was she teasing me?” Girl, I don’t know! And it doesn’t look as though André Aciman does, either. For this whole first episode of the novel, nothing seems real, and not in the good way. Knowing each other for one day, Sami Perlman and Miranda, the woman from the train, decide that theirs is the greatest love story ever told, discuss having a baby and consider getting matching tattoos. I literally was not convinced for a single moment. Questions like these worm their way into Elio’s part of the novel as well. And again it just seems like lazy writing.
There’s actually another little stylish trait that grated on me while I was reading Find Me. All four sections of the novel are strewn with these unbelievably cringe-inducing and irritating italicised phrases. I think this is a longstanding trait of Aciman’s actually – it was in Call Me By Your Name, too. But here, it’s just unfathomable. Or, at least, at first it was. Though there wasn’t ever much evidence throughout the novel as far as genuine narration is concerned, I was able to gradually come into an awareness of the nature of these italicised phrases, and I think it has something to do with tense. Though the whole novel is told through the minds of the narrators in the past tense, the italicised bits of narrative appear to be thoughts directly lifted from the characters’s actual minds at the time they are describing. Have some examples: “Why am I not even hesitating?”; “This is what I’ve always wanted. This and you.”; “I shook my head. Like you needed to ask.”; or even the woefully mechanical: “Just kiss me, will you, if only to help me get over being so visibly flustered.”
Now then. This struck me as extremely unnecessary. Doesn’t all past-tense narrative, its goal being to recollect and present the sensation of events as they had happened, work through burning the fossil fuel of present-tense sensations that have buried themselves in the brain? That is, given that all past-tense narrative operates via the previousness of a present-tense sensation pressing itself through time zones into a new present, and that that is the implied machinery of all past-tense narrative, especially one invested anyway in time, why should the writer even bother to distinguish between the two? Again, it seems to me to be a sort of gimmick, insisted upon by the novelist in order to fraudulently suggest a crisp and clinical awareness on his part of the stream of perceptions, travelling and morphing across time zones in and through his characters’s minds. But for the reader who has unhappily admitted that the characters in the novel are literally insubstantial, you have to regretfully accept that the questions are just there to create the illusion of insight.
This leads me on to another of the novel’s problems. If these annoying little italicised bits only serve to arbitrarily and for no reason severe the time zones of the narrative on the level of form, it may only be because the novel brings with it so much sort of theoretical baggage that Aciman seems to insist on including in the novel, apparently just as a way of justifying or advocating for the underperformance of the narrative itself. Aciman, a Proust scholar, can be forgiven for trying to make his novel pretty Proustian. But only up to a certain point. The characters have annoying conversations about time, and fate, and strike me as how Proust may have written his novels if he had written them to a deadline and on the toilet. William Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust, Bach, all worm their way not only into the novel, but into completely unrelated conversations. And often when they do so they do so clumsily. Consider the unforgivably clunky Shakespeare reference, when Miranda’s father describes her as having “a tempest” inside her. If reading Dostoyevsky on a train is improbably enough, talking to the stranger on the train about why you’re reading Dostoyevsky is more improbable still.
If the explicit engagement with cultural reference and intellect is grating enough as it is, the implicit cultural and theoretical inheritance is no better. There are two cultural patrons of this novel: Proust and Freud. The Proust bits are either terrible or nice. When Aciman successfully brings Proust into the novel, it’s because he’s written a passage of thought so attractive in its grammar, in the placement of its different lexical weights and even punctuation, that one feels highly impressed. I’ll transcribe a nice bit, from Elio’s section, here:
“What never ceased to amaze me and cast a halo around our evening was that ever since we’d met, we’d been thinking along the same lines, and when we feared we weren’t or felt we were wrong-footing each other, it was simply because we had learned not to trust that anyone could possibly think and behave the way we did, which was why I was so indifferent with him and mistrusted every impulse in myself and couldn’t have been happier when I saw how easily we’d shed some of our screens.”
See? Nice! This works well largely because it’s a pleasant contrast to the novel’s utter lack of character insight; the passage offers a detailed and sharp unravelling of Elio’s motives and thoughts in a way that feels natural and self-fortifying. But parts like this are few and far between, and indeed I had to work quite hard to find my nice example.
There are also some plot points that are quite heavy-handedly Freudian, and these come across as sort of amateurish. I mean, the sexual psychology of Call Me By Your Name itself was liable to read in all sorts of Freudian ways, but in Find Me it gets a bit crazy:
“I loved […] being coddled this way, loved when he started rubbing a lotion on me that felt wonderful each time he poured more of it on his palm and touched me everywhere. I felt like a toddler being washed and dried by his parent, which also took me back to my very earliest childhood when my father would shower with me in his arms.”
I mean, come on. That sounds like if you pushed a microphone into a stranger’s face on the street and asked them to say something that sounds like something one of Freud’s patients would say. This man is a professor! Throwing Freudian-sounding little bits of lore is not enough to actually construct a narrator; but it appears to be all Aciman has at his disposal – alongside rhetorical questions and Shakespeare references, that is.
Aciman’s marginally more subtle involving of the Freudians, though still pretty obtrusive, may be in Find Me’s unusual fascination with dying, soon-to-be dead and dead fathers. Almost every character – I dare say every – has a father who is one of these three. It’s like a weird remix of kill your gays – kill off the fathers, and their sons will start being gay, acting gay, or come out as gay, or reconnect with the gay lover of that one Italian summer twenty years ago. I don’t know what the reader is meant to make of this. And I don’t know what Aciman was perhaps wanting to demonstrate: maybe he was just hoping to repeat an event throughout time frames and throughout his novel and hope that eventually it sediments into something bearing the semblance of relevance in the reader’s mind.
But I think the worst crime this novel commits – and the one there is absolutely no excuse for – is the disgusting omnipresence of clichés so ridiculously overused that you can’t even yawn or roll your eyes at them because you’ve already yawned and rolled your eyes at those clichés throughout your life anyway. My hand almost cramped underlining them. Here are some:
I stared at him. “You know I’d like to.” And this wasn’t the single malt or the wine speaking.
My heart was racing, yet suddenly I felt awkward even if none of this was unfamiliar to me.
[By] now his body knew mine better than it knew itself.
I have nothing to add to this. It speaks for itself.
You know, there’s a bit in this novel where Elio’s much older lover, Michel, describes their morning sex, having taken place after their night time sex, as their “hasty little […] sequel”, and if this weren’t such a lazily and amateurishly Freudian book I’d feel a morsel of guilt about reading those words as a bit of a Freudian slip on Aciman’s own part, too. But I don’t, since if any book opens itself up to criticisms of the nature of its actual writing, it’s this one. It’s a shame. A lot of the things everyone hated about this book I saw no reason to hate. For instance, I didn’t really care that there wasn’t much Elio-Oliver content, and would have been perfectly happy reading about the sexual adventures of Elio and his father (not together, I hope! But for a book this Freudian it’s not out of the question! (I joke.)); but this hasty little sequel to Call Me By Your Name is lazy in too many ways for me to like it any more that on a neutral level.
‘Insects are drawn to carcasses. They swarm above them- like the ragged form of a departing soul’.
(Excerpt from The Meaning of Metamorphosis)
They flit from the reeds that slip above the water. They flit from the trees that huddle in forests and the wild heather- like a fallen shard of a sunset’s hue- that flares across the slopes. Forming serpentine shapes, the insects sway and plunge in movements directed by something otherworldly. They skim just above the loch, coil around branches, weave among grass. The butterflies are the most beautiful. Their wings, when the light glances off them, at just the right angle, are nature’s stained-glass windows. Light illuminates much of the insect’s beauty. It glimmers on the spider webs, and glimmers on the dragonfly wings; that come night cluster around lamps meaning their weird bodies can be closely marvelled at. Avery learnt from a young age, placing lamps outside her caravan, invites insects to cluster. One of the more unusual beauties is the sound they make. For Avery she cannot think of a piece of music that could rival the insect orchestra.
The thrumming. It’s what she calls the collective voice of the insects. It thrums through the ground, the air. Its permeance means it often melts into the background, but if you listen for it, then it’s deafening. Avery could feel it, the thrumming, as she sat balancing the notebook open across her knees. The binding had disintegrated long ago, leaving the loose sheets of paper to be sandwiched between the covers. The scratching of her pencil itching her curiosity as she sketched- in fragile detail- a butterfly. Her pen strokes pay obsessive attention to mark even the most insignificant of details. If you turned to the front of the book, you would see the title written neatly in the middle of the page with her name printed underneath:
The Meaning of Metamorphosis
Avery. C. Tomlinson
Insects fascinated Avery- in every way imaginable. Yet one process had become something of an obsession: metamorphosis. The process that makes a tadpole a frog, or a caterpillar a butterfly. Avery spent hours cataloguing insect behaviour, appearances, habitats, and food sources in her notebook. It was crammed with tiny spidery writing and large sketches that started off in a straight line but ended up slanted, so the writing on every page was slightly lopsided. She worked on it whenever she wasn’t cooking or cleaning.
Completing her sketch Avery headed back up the loch to her caravan. The caravan was nestled under the cover of a few sparse trees. It had been patched up so many times nothing of the original structure remained. A wooden veranda had been constructed around the caravan with poles at either end that dangled paraffin lamps. Once inside the caravan was cluttered, with stuff covering every surface. Mainly it was paper, drawings, and small sculptures. A few pebbles, flowers, mismatching crockery. Yet by far the strangest addition was a large wooden table at the far end. A large tree branch had been suspended a few inches above the table. Hanging from this branch were twelve chrysalises. They looked ornamental hanging there. Coloured a deep jade and speckled with gold. If you watched very closely you might spot their occasional quiver as something happened inside. Sheets of paper plastered the table below them with Avery’s endless observations and drawings. Avery placed her notebook safely away and went over to examine the chrysalises, gently touching one before noting down its texture. She proceeded along the line looking for even the slightest change. Her notes already track how initially these chrysalises had been a very pale green before transitioning to this deep jade and gold. The one at the end was even beginning to show a hint of blue.
How Avery knew something was wrong she wasn’t quite sure. Maybe it was the change in temperature when the door opened. Maybe it was a sound she had subconsciously picked up on. All she knew was suddenly she was no longer alone. Before she had a chance to react Avery felt the claw grasp her and pull her violently backwards. Snapping her neck back, her knees buckled. Taken off guard it took a few seconds for her to wrestle free and twist to face the creature. It was a blur, a flash, a stinging pain on Avery’s cheek. She saw bared teeth and matted grey fur. Gaunt and gnarled, it lurched- clawing, and spewing a guttural intonation. It scraped her face, tore at her clothes. The weight of it was light but the force of its attack knocked Avery- who stumbled, then fell. Half-blinded. Spittle flew in moist goblets- rainforest rain. It reared up, eyes devoid of anything, the rational sacrificed to instinct. Puppet to the primitive. Avery heard her fluttering breath in her ears. Screeching wings flapping… not wings, clothes? “Muriel?” The wild creature came into startling clarity as Avery lay on the ground, blood smeared and dazed. The vicar’s wife. Not some animal. Just the vicar’s wife. Muriel screeched again, that awful animalistic sound. “Satanic child” the words mangled by her hoarse throat were barely recognisable. She spat it out as if its presence burned her tongue. Avery felt something hard and blunt hit her once. Twice. “Devil spawn”.
‘What drives the change tadpole to a frog, what alchemy delivers the winged butterfly from the slovenly caterpillar?’
(Excerpt from The Meaning of Metamorphosis)
She learnt it through the stares in the village, from the butcher who cussed at her from his shop. From the young boys that crossed the street to avoid her, and the children dragged frantically by parents out of her path. The whispers as she passed were as loud as the screaming abuse that snapped at her heels as she ran away. She was hungry because the town would not feed her. It was as if her money was stained.
She pieced it together, news clipping pasted over some gaps. The vicar’s daughter, sweet angel Annie, salt of the earth Annie, all the children wanna be Annie. No longer. Now dead Annie. Gone Annie.
And no one knew how Annie died. Healthy then suddenly not. Breathing then stilled. But they did know. The creature in the woods, they said, that lived among the bugs. Whose mother made the potions and chants, communed with the dead and dealt in the dark arts. She killed church choir Annie.
Yet none of them probably knew Avery’s mother, the women who mixed not poison healing potions from flowers, soothing lotions from leaves. A woman who praised the moon and whispered to the woods thanking them for their fruits and air and medicinal properties. A woman who was gentle, a caring soul. However, to the villagers she was the one no one could understand. And that lack of understanding bred fear. She became the cause of bumps in the night, rotting crops and diseases that bedded households. And Avery her daughter; her spawn. Avery had killed Annie. The motive was hazy, the story heavy with embellishments and interpretations picked up from fireside chats and tales to the children. All converging on: Avery killed Annie.
Avery stopped visiting town. Before she had been reclusive, sure, daughter of a feared misunderstood mother but a girl the town would tolerate, entertain, feed. She had, if not friends, acquaintances, people she would talk to. She would sometimes sketch families, paid a pretty penny for her troubles, or bring some vegetables to sell at the market. But the Vicars wife had taken this, bathed it in the poison of her tongue. This isolation was different, it was personal, targeted with no respite. Avery was no longer Avery. She was the embodiment of sin, the devil, a bundle of peoples’ angers and fears. Hate can do that, scarily fast. Dehumanise you. You become distorted in people’s perceptions, a reflection of what they fear. The truth was a peculiar thing, it was liquid and malleable. Avery was no longer Avery. The village had chosen their truth and would see only that. Not Avery but a creature, a poison, a child killer. She had become like the fallen angel Lucifer they preached in church, a concept abstracted from her individual: an object of hate with no life or being behind it.
She felt it for the first time that day. When she walked out of the village for the last time. The blood was beginning to congeal on her forehead, like some third eye, from where some young boys had thrown a rock at her. The rock made contact leaving her head singing and eyes slightly blurred. Blood had run down her nose and slipped into her mouth. Sharp and metallic like biting a copper penny. She felt something bloom in her gut, dark and cold that drew her stomach into knots. Something alive.
Avery had enough food stockpiled to last a few days. She had the few edible plants that grew in the nearby forest as well. She didn’t see any alternative but to hope at some point the hatred would pass. She continued observing her insects, and her pet study watching the chrysalis’s swell. She sometimes wished she was like the bee, who could change pollen into honey, to Avery this was as miraculous as turning water into wine. She considered scooping honey from the beehives when she felt very hungry. But restrained herself, she wouldn’t destroy such a beautiful creation as the hive.
Avery had been sleeping poorly. She would awake in cold sweats from dreams where the vicar’s wife Muriel was slowly strangling her or beating her. In that moment between dreaming and waking, shadowy furniture in the darkness would morph into her leering form.
She had been awakened by one such episode, when she heard the tinkling of glass, that sent the silence of night similarly falling to pieces around her. Creeping to her window framed by the slither where the curtains didn’t quite touch, she could see two shadowy figures. A rock hit her deck. Then her first lamp hung outside the caravan; smashed. The light died and the bugs that clustered it were engulfed by the night. Then the next lamp, then the next. She wanted to scream, to cry as the bugs fled and the lights winked out. She thought of the bugs fleeing into the night alone and separated from their families. She thought of herself sitting in darkness on the deck without their companionship. A rock sailed through her window dragging the cold and darkness of night in with it. The last light fell away shortly after. Avery lay in darkness; the insects had fled leaving her alone. She wanted to cry for now she was truly alone. In that moment it seemed her final resistance had been extinguished. As the darkness hemmed the cabin in, her head began to pound.
It had grown and spread from that moment the vicar’s wife had knocked her to the floor. What had bloomed in her stomach had now burrowed itself into her mind. It had wrapped her spine and polluted her blood. It was something dark, primitive. Like a cuckoo egg deposited in some different bird’s nest, when the chick hatches it knocks other eggs out, killing them. Taking control, seeping in. Avery had no room, she felt herself pushed and pushed. Compressed within her mind. She was suffocating under the weight that had no form but merely a presence. Like a current in her mind. Pounding. There was no strength left to press back. Better to submit. To huddle in the corner. A fly in a puppet. No control of her limbs any longer. The thing that was left was Not Avery. Avery was before the hatred; the lamps being extinguished and the fleeing of the insects. What it was, I cannot say. I can only say very clearly what it was no longer.
‘When the chrysalis is shed what emerges is unrecognisable. It has undergone such an unfathomable change so profound that it truly cannot be considered to be the same being which it formerly was.’
(Excerpt from The Meaning of Metamorphosis)
When the time came, from a distance, they looked like fireflies delicately suspended over the loch. Their numbers doubled by the reflections. It looked beautiful, almost mythical. Flowers of fire charring the night like stars that had fallen and just been caught before the extinguishing water. Yet if nature had any wisdom to impart it was often the things of great beauty that are deadly. The villagers gathered around Avery’s caravan, drawn like the insects every night. Muriel faced them all. Her flaming torch she brandished overhead. “We must be driven by the Lord’s wishes. We must be just. We must forgive. We must have mercy. Yet we must also protect ourselves from the devil’s temptation. His allure to The Under. Where sinners are roasted on spits. This girl was bad from the start. It started with her mother’s potions and false gods. Her unnatural and sinful ways. Now her daughter has carried the blackened heart and taken my dear Annie.” Tears fell down Muriel’s impassive face.
“We must end the circle of sin, end the temptation. This is not a trial. This is a rescue party. We are saviours guided by Him. We shall free this girl from her sin. She will be judged and atoned by our father. Where he will cast fitting judgement. We are merely to deliver her.” Muriel’s speech was met with pounding feet and gleaming eyes. She raised the torch above her head. “Father deliver us from evil,” she cried and with that tossed the torch through the caravan’s front door.
As the fire unfurled its limbs inside the caravan the chrysalis on Avery’s desk began to quiver, then split. Blossoming like a flower, thin legs protruded pushing the fragile structure open, until the insects wriggled free. What crawled from the chrysalises was not the expected butterflies with wings like Picasso pieces. They were butterflies cloaked for funeral mourning. Moths with wings of aged or scorched parchment. They swirled upwards in their cloud, the eclipse of moths. Like burning paper scooped from the fire. Disappearing out the window, out of harm’s way.
The thing that used to be Avery- that was now a Not-Avery creature- watched from the shallows of the loch as her caravan went up in flames. The eclipse of moths settled on the reeds around her. Eclipse: when one thing completely hides the other. Completely trapping the other. An unnatural eclipse had occurred within Avery. By what, it was not known. Something dark. It was moulded and fed by the villager’s hatred, driving her to attain a gleam of madness in her eye. Avery was the devil, they had proclaimed. So, she had become just that. Avery had changed. She was no longer the girl she was before. Not-Avery climbed out of the loch. Silently approached the villagers. She clasped a knife. Her eyes were dead.
‘Once changed, it can never un-change. Metamorphosis is permanent it seems, a process where a new creature is born, one utterly changed; forever.’
(A line among the charred remains of The Meaning of Metamorphosis.
