Open. Fresh. Ready for Adventure.

Open. Fresh. Ready for Adventure.

by Kelly McKain

 

When I first started writing, in the evenings and weekends, around my jobs in marketing and then teaching, it was the most exciting thing in the world. That was twenty years ago now. I would stick a pin in the tube map on the back of the London A-Z, travel from my first flat in Beckenham to the nearest station, walk out into a completely unknown area, find a café, and write. I would often start by writing about what was on the table – the shape of the salt shaker, the smear of ketchup on the cracked vinyl, or the spotless white linen, if I’d landed up in Chelsea. I’d explore further, into the sights, sounds, smells, the feel of things, the humidity, and when food came, the taste, the textures, the colours. Sometimes I got chatting to people – even made a friend. I was a big fan of Natalie Goldberg’s books Wild Mind and Writing Down the Bones, which are packed with starters to get you writing. 

Some of my favourites were when you start writing, pause then put ‘what I really want to say is’ and kind of drop down a level inside yourself and find a new starting point. Do that a few times and you’re deep into places either profoundly personal or intensely universal, into memory or imagination, or you’re writing yourself into natural wonders or Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome. The clatter of a tea cup at the next table would bring me abruptly back from what felt like some kind of shamanic journey. ‘What I really want to say is’ can lead you into a rampage of ranting fury or a bliss-soaked reverie. It can lull you into sharing your deepest secrets, maybe some you’d even been keeping from yourself, with the page - and possibly the old guy with the ragged beard but clearly pin-sharp eyesight who’s waiting too-close by for his takeaway americano.

I am one of those extremely lucky people for whom writing became my day job, and ‘work’ became drafts and edits and meetings and developing ideas and submitting proposals and lunches and chats and workshops in schools and book festivals. And, even, travelling to other countries on book tours (and having literally the most astonishingly lavish breakfast imaginable in a hotel in Warsaw – honeycomb in a glass case with a little tap included!). As well as, of course, the rejections and upsets and let-downs and financial lurching from feast to famine that are all par for the creative and freelance course. Along with my two wonderful children, along came routine and a kind of accountability that I was very happy to settle into for a few years. But they’re older now, and I have a new spring in my step following all the lockdowns and restrictions. Throw in the freedom of worry-free co-parenting and a few hours in a new city – Bristol, home of my beautiful partner - I recently took myself off on an adventure, just like in those early days.

It was absolutely lashing it down with rain and my feet already squelched in my boots – later they’d be sloshing. I walked up unfamiliar residential roads and glanced into windows, into lives. I walked across the downs, traffic loud on the wet main road, with absolutely no idea of where I was going. No one in the world knew where I was and I didn’t have to be back at a time do anything, or be on call, and then… my little, quiet adventure in the rain led me to a botanical gardens, which I had no idea was even there. 

It was surreal. One minute I was in the cold blustery rain, and the next I was in a tropical glasshouse, watching fish dart around a pool with vanilla, cacao and one of the four original citrus fruits, apparently (which I’d never heard of) surrounding me. I started with the fish, just like the salt shaker on the café table over two decades ago. I watched them under the sparkling water, felt the humid air, smelt the… what was it..? Where was it coming from..? A web of scents, from pond-dredgy sludge to heady spice. 

Rain hammered down on the high glass roof – rain from another climate, another country. Not a single other person was there – this adventure – this open, fresh, adventure – was all mine. And, for this author, it was the beginning of a whole new chapter.

by Kelly McKain

www.kellymckain.co.uk

www.soulsparks.space