Years ago, I bought a book in a charity shop which became a kind of bible to me – that’s to say, I read bits of it, could quote some of it and didn’t understand (or misunderstood) much of it. At the time, I was living a pretty painful existence. I’d failed at university for the first time, and this was quickly followed by my second spell on a psych ward. When I came out, I was determined to stay sober but very quickly found myself drinking and taking all manner of things to escape myself. My friend let me kip on his sofa and all I really remember about that period was that I was subsisting on three three-litre bottles of white cider a day and attaining those bottles was my raison d’etre. All my hopes and dreams of becoming an actor were gone, because my confidence was at an all-time low, and I had little hope for anything else. I didn’t really know how to get out of this situation on my own, and then my dad became ill.
The reason I was living with my friend was because my relationship with my dad was fractious, but here was an opportunity to have meaning, a purpose (it also gave me a menial wage): I decided to try to be his carer. Whilst I still had many years of addiction left in me, enabled and joined in with by my father, this role became an anchor. My boat was floating and the seas were often choppy, but I couldn’t stray quite as far as I had been in the period immediately following my return from uni – there’s a real lesson in that for anyone in the madness of addiction, find an anchor.
In the wake of these best intentions, I started reading again, daily, collecting books from charity shops and spending time in the library. I would sit in cafes and drink coffee (at least before 10 or 11am) and read and write. I was in the forever-phase of trying to quit drinking, and it was an up and down battle that went on for years, until dad passed. One of the books I found, the one I’m referring to here, was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, an anthology of the best songs and poems in the English language, up to at least as recently as John Masefield.
I didn’t read it all, I certainly didn’t grasp – or even try to grasp – it all. My dad, in our many arguments would call me a pseudo-intellectual, but really I was never much concerned with being or looking intellectual (not that he believed or ever really understood that), I just found interest in lots of different places (of varied merit), and some of the places were little corners in this book. I memorised Ode to a Nightingale from the Golden Treasury, not so I could recite it at parties (what parties did my dad think I was attending in the noughties?), but because I was an actor and I liked the way the words sounded – and it was full of drama, especially when you read a biography of Keats.
It's a line I first read in this book that brings me to this point in my life, where I’ve decided to write a blog, a line written by the same man mentioned above. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” It’s “all ye need to know.”
In recent years, I’ve used social media as a diary of the adventures I want to remember – without it, I’d have lost much of it, because my memory is appalling; in fact, without photos, I’m sure my childhood would be an almost total blank (much of my teens and 20s are). I’ve made an active choice to use Facebook and Instagram in this way, and aside from the odd meandering emotional blog or finding myself drawn into a political debate, the last few years have been travel, books, theatre, and trips with friends and family. I’ve had some incredible times, some challenging, but ultimately amazing experiences. But there is more to my life than this. Some of it is the profundities of travel, some of it the awe of community work; some of it is the pain of life and the difficulty of trying to maintain self-appointed responsibilities in work, community and relationships (often, I feel like I'm an asterisk trying to fit into a hash hole).
What I came to realise in my 20s, when I became a prolific reader, was often the most beautiful truth of life does not come from overcoming adversity, but from living with it. Because that’s what life is, adversity. Overcoming it is just the illusion of a happy ending. But it’s a great way to sell books.
Forgotten Field
Dewy field of May birth,
Helplessly surrendering to the sun’s creamy glow,
Alien to dweller of multi-changing metropolis –
A forgotten field is that I bestow.
Rhythmic aisles of bruised bluebells,
Dancing with the foreign breeze;
Forget-me-nots give a forlorn cry
From amongst the sweeping green;
The dandelions’ golden roar above silky buttercups and daisies –
Childhood memories of innocent curiosity,
Rich with incense of salubrious verdure.
Skeleton beech tree, emptied on the lea,
Perfect to perch upon:
Bald, brittle, weathered souvenir of its long, simple history –
A forgotten field with a forgotten tree.
Army of woodlice, seeping out in formation;
Bullet beetle trundling up a rifle brown bone;
Tired fly twitching in the shadow of the dead,
Haphazardly leaping into fearless flight –
The summer of life, enforced curiosity,
Milk of fungi, sticky in elbows and knees.
But all around the corpse,
Messy green hair, worming stop motion;
Rainbows beading matt petals, flattened underfoot;
Sun in a hollow sea, lighting ether in creation,
Breeze in the flame, warbling silent relief –
A forgotten field to be remembered.
The forgiving living takes its dead:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
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