Tools of the Trade

I went on a breathtaking walk yesterday, from Kingswear to Froward  Point, delving into green clefts, glimpsing patches of Mediterranean blue - sea?  sky? - we could hardly tell which was which along the brush stroke blur of the horizon. Walking through an overgrown gully the smell of cut nettles and grasses was everywhere.  Ahead of us on the path a man was scything the verges -- and I mean scything - his blade catching drowsy flowers unaware, filling the air with the scent of bruised leaves and severed stems.  He said he always worked by hand, when we stopped for a chat, because he liked the silence and the lack of fumes. As we walked on, behind us we could hear him sharpening his scythe, and the knifing whispers as he set to work again.

It made me long for a clean sheet of paper and a sharpened pencil. I regret the fact that I work on a computer, but it’s pragmatic: it makes revising much easier -- you can draft and then re-draft and re-draft again without what you are trying to say disappearing into a knot of scribblings out. And I think it's quicker; I think it is… But to satisfy the longing for a blank sheet of paper, off white in colour, faintly veined with turquoise lines, I make notes by hand.  Every thought I have goes into a little red book: jottings and plottings, small epiphanies, this and that.  It's the rawest of raw material, the first engagement with an idea, the freshest and the truest.  And I always write in pencil, and I love the way it starts off as sharp as a pin and becomes softened and blunted by my scrawl, so like the man in the hedgerow, I have to sharpen it before I can start again.