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And so the youngest has gone. I’m driving home now, along the Fosse, the rain hard on the truck’s roof, hissing as if boiling beneath my wheels.

We’ve learnt, over the years, of ways to make going-away easier. Both our girls boarded for college, so we know the drill. How to pack. To disbelieve them when they say they have all their chargers, and none of their sister’s jeans.

We know what to do when we arrive, too. To be charming through interminable admin, to smile and chat in queues for keys and ID cards. To radiate confidence, that of course everything will be okay, and look, what a nice view from the window, how lucky to be so near the common room. We make beds and organise wardrobes, and soothe our way through conversations of forgotten favourite hoodies, tasks undone at home. We prop up photos of dogs and ponies – never people, and reassure that no one knows where they’re going, but you’ll all soon learn. Be kind. Use your powers for good.

Then we give hard hugs and kisses goodbye, and don’t tell them how much we’ll miss them, how proud we are of them. How brave they are, and precious and God, loved so much.
We don’t tell them these things because they must not see how afraid we are. How empty our hearts will feel, when we’re home and not laying the table with the spoon they like, not swearing at the abandoned pizza boxes and filthy socks left, balled and inexplicable, beside the knife block.

They must not know how it feels to open and shut curtains in a room that no longer reeks of fake tan and cheap vapes, and to look at bed linen that stays clean and immaculate, day after day.
They must know none of these things.

And so I drive on. Through Stow, towards Moreton. There will be no more Drum and Base Father being revolting through my kitchen speaker, no more morose cowboys with their saccharine lyrics, that crack my heart on repeat.

The rain grows heavier, the traffic slower, but I don’t mind.
This is part of it, I’ve learnt. Nothing makes this bit easier.
I sit at the lights at Moreton. The rain splats fat drops down my windscreen. I turn up my window wipers, wish I had something similar, for my face. As it is, I use my sleeve. Remind myself that going-away is not an ending, not a finish.

The lights turn green, and I let the truck roll on.

It’s just after noon, and cold, I’m cold. We’re walking over the fields below the dryer, through long whip-ribbons of rye. It winds around my boots, makes my knees wet through my jeans. I barely notice. My steps are slow, I’m holding my coat in tight, rounding my shoulders. The dogs stay close, unused to me being so folded-in, like an old umbrella. I wish I could shake myself.

We’re headed to the flat margins of the old railway fields, paths I can walk without thinking about them. I need all my thinking power, for something else.

Yesterday, a friend said I’d given up. She meant on writing, on books, on trying to make my voice heard. She said it really in passing, it wasn’t meant as an attack, it probably wasn’t actually all that much to do with me, and more to do with her, and the day she’d had. But it was like an iron to the face.

I thought, when she said it, fuck off. Fuck right off. You’re wrong. I’ve never given up, not ever, not in twenty years of trying.

I’ve thought about this all night. And this morning. It’s painful, like a tooth that’s been worried at. What if, actually, I had given up, but didn’t realise? If I’ve somehow assimilated failure as part of my character, wearing it like an ugly brown hat, sweat-stained around the crown, rendering me squat and mushroom-like to the world?

I climb a stile, jump off high, irritated by the mushroom thought. I want to fling this hat, frisbee the horrible thing into the Sor brook, watch it sink. I can hear the crake of a crow. The shrill demands of half-grown lambs in the old mill field. I’m angry, now. Not hurt. Not beaten. I whistle in the dogs, pick up my pace.

I’m not giving up, I won’t. I want to tell the stories of the women in Nightwalking, I want to make people see how important it is to face fears, to overcome them, to not let your own self doubt wear away the ground beneath your feet. And I want to call out things I find unfair, or sexist, or plain wrong. I want to write truths, and make things change.

We’ve reached the railway fields now, I’m marching, practising speeches in my head, feeling some kind of fire taking hold in my belly, warming my core. I take off my jacket, tie it round my waist, stash my scarf. The dogs sense my change of mood, game on. Pants is wheeling out to my left, Dora’s no longer worrying beneath my feet. I storm past a bank of goat willow, inform it of my intention to do more, try harder, engage, persuade. Fight.

That, I think, is what my friend meant. Not that I had given up on my dreams, but that I’d stopped fighting for them. I let that bloody mushroom hat sit on my head. But here’s me, taking it by the brim, standing up straight and tall, and I’m throwing it, hard, my best long-arm, watching that hat arc high in the air. If I had a gun, I’d shoot it.

I watch it fall, drop from view. Perhaps in the water. Then I walk away, head for home. I’ve got stories to tell. Dreams to chase.

It’s barely four, but already there’s a mercurial, silvered quality to the light. The mud  on the pathway gleams in the flat patches, and the crows are loud in the cricket oaks, arguing about sleeping spots.

The dogs and I are in the fields below the dryer, Pants looping over the long, stitched lines of rye. The sheep are gone now, until Spring, and the fields are easy to walk, good for a quick whiz, when you’re behind with everything you should’ve done.

I check my watch twice in ten seconds, knowing I’m late for the horses, then catch myself. These days, my brain will pluck at the slightest worry, stash it away in the Basket of Woe. I like to unpack the basket whenever I get a moment of stillness, all these things to worry about, to turn over in my hands, say whatever am I going to do with you? Nothing, usually. I just put them back in the basket, carry on lugging them all about.

I read, recently, that a basic aspect of anxiety is the unexpected (the paper’s here, by Thierry Steimer and is FASCINATING). To combat this, I’ve been trying to think through the unexpected part of things, so they at least become expected. I’ll be late to the horses, so? It’ll be dark. I’ll have to put them to bed in the dark. So? Um…I might…No. I have just as much chance of sloshing a water bucket down my thigh as I do in daylight. Just as much chance of upending myself in the gate bog.

How many times do I do this anxiety thing, feel this tightening in my stomach, grip the handle of that damn basket so hard, my fingers grow numb? There is no real consequence to my being late for the horses, my brain just grabbed a thought – I’ll be late – and scrunched it quickly into the woe basket. How to stop it, that’s the thing.

The temperature feels as if it’s dropped whilst we’ve been out. There’s a very faint veil of mist, twisting through the alders down by the brook. The air is very still, cold, the dampness of the morning still evident on bent grass, the rosettes of field thistles. We trespass up the rye, back up to the dryer barn, come along beside the horses’ field. I reach the place where the hedge stops, stand to watch them for a moment. They’re stuffing their faces with hay, utterly unbothered that I’m not there with my barrow, their tea.

Across the field, Ferny lifts her head, looks at me. I click at her, call her beautiful. She flattens her ears, drops her head. Couldn’t care less, the furry fecker, about baskets and worries and nearly dark. Bubbles comes in too close, and Fern swishes her tail at him, tosses her head. Then she returns to eat, ears twitching to track him. As I watch her, I imagine the woe basket, placed neatly by my feet in the long grass. I’ll pick it back up again – I’m a mum, a wife, of course I will – but for now it’s on the grass. And I’m just watching the horses.

My legs are fizzing again, my shoulders ache from being bunched, irritably, up to my neck. In the liquid dark reflection of my kitchen window, I can see the heavy red casserole pan, streaked black with  baked-on midweek stew. I can see the long stretch of table with spilt cheese, empty jugs that held orange squash, sharp baguette bread crumbs that will catch in the grooves of the oak, and spike the elbows of the unwary. Away from the table I see the wicker basket with the line-stiff laundry, the bulbs unplanted, the sheaf of phone messages, unreturned.

I long for the cool of the night as if for a lover.

But I don’t go, because I’m afraid of the dark. I’ve just read John Lewis Stempel’s new book, Nightwalking, and it told me all about a world I loved but have forgotten. I never used to be afraid, of anything much, but now I drag around fears like some smelly weighted blanket, its stifling folds high on my back, chafing at my neck.

I do not want to feel this way, anymore. I am writing a new book. It’s to be called (Woman) Nightwalking, and in it I’m going to find women who nightwalk, and I’m going to learn their bravery, or their indifference. There will be twelve of them, and I’ll walk with them, see the dark world as they see it, fit my footsteps just behind theirs.

In his book, J L-S talks about the importance of bearing witness to the night-time world, in order to protect it. But I can’t bear witness, if I’m too afraid to walk without sunlight, and neither can any of the other women I know. I’m not the only one too scared to do this, there’s hundreds of us, thousands. Those fears might be well justified, well learned, but should we be paying the price for them that we are? Should those fears stop us going where we please? Stop us from pausing in the shadows, to watch a fox slink past. Or idle on a darkened path, to observe pale moths totter sugar-drunk on a honeysuckle? I don’t think so. I don’t want to pay that price, and miss such things.

Outside my kitchen window, our security light flicks on. It’s one of our hedgehog family, bustling its way to inspect the base of the bird feeder, in the dogs’ garden. I watch it pootling about until the security light fades, and then my reflection has returned in the silk black of the window. I look less square, my shoulders have dropped. The frustration, that maddening fizz, has almost gone. I feel resolved. Decided. Something within me has clicked into place. I might not be starting my journey – my nightwalking story –  tonight, but I will be starting. And that’s enough. To stand at the start of it. Stand with me? Then walk beside me. There are secrets to see in this world, things we women need to know.

 

You can support this book by re-posting, re-tweeting, talking about it in the pub, the office, the street. Its message is important. Women must feel free to walk alone in the night. We cannot protect a world we do not know.

More info here.

I found a family’s dinner diary on Twitter the other day, and was riveted. The grown ups ate steak with sauces (midweek), and the children ate Quorn fingers. They all had chocolate mousse for pud. It was fascinating.

So I thought I’d copy the dinner diary family, and start ours on the 1st October, especially as I’ll have my new kitchen by then, and can take arty fabulous photos. Was I mental? OF COURSE I don’t have a new kitchen yet, I still have the old one, where the oven door is lasciviously licked clean by a frequent-guest Labrador.

Never mind, all day long I’ve vaguely thought about making quiche, because Next Door delivered some home-grown freshly-julienne’d coleslaw, and how lovely, to start a Dinner Diary with a quiche? Love quiche. But HA! That was not to be. A crisis involving a cherry picker and a man called Dennis blew up about 2pm, and tipped me into cope-mode, which means doing anything domestic at top-speed and half-quality. At five, it was clear that the quiche was not going to happen. At about quarter past, I realised that fact.

So dinner this evening was Fridge Bum Soup or Emergency Pasta, whereby you fry 2 slices of bacon and then bung in a brick of frozen (home-grown) oven-baked tomatoes (with covert peeled marrow), then leave the eldest daughter in charge whilst you charge around the countryside looking for pony poo to scoop up in the semi-darkness. Eldest daughter dislikes cooking, even more so when left in charge of half-chopped fridge-bum soup (3 wizened carrots, 3 yellowing leeks, an onion, really quite sprightly celery and a stock cube).

Peeled soaking child from pony, rushed home (bloody top road closed, so we have to detour, literally, to the next county). Eldest daughter had done everything perfectly (just in case she reads this), but insisted on using a half packet of linguinie pasta and half packet of ancient Reginelle, which everyone hates because it’s like sucking octopus legs.

Dished up both soup (blitzed, with a few strings of linguinie and a slosh of pasta water) and pasta. On the table were also two heels of cheapo-rip-off Parmesan and Orange Cheese, which is the only cheese eldest daughter will now eat.

Smothered my soup in last of Cheddar, ate it with buttered bread. It was HEAVEN.

Emergency Pasta had lots of rolled tomato skin shards left parked on bowls, and enough left for the dogs. Posh Reginelle was declared still awful. But at least the Parmesan heels are gone, and it’s another dinner dealt with (why are there so many? Day after day after day? Why can’t we all eat bloody cereal?).

Pudding hasn’t happened yet, but I confidently predict it will be a crap wafer bar from the lunch-box-only cupboard.