As my bus rolled past Shoreditch Park on a drizzly morning, I reflected once more on how everything I write about (or think about writing about) is really about love. Even when I wrote about the last meals we might ever eat for the upcoming issue of Table Magazine, I was really writing about my friends, and how much I love them.
I have this theory on writing, actually; that it could be compared to the practice of butterfly collecting (officially named “Lepidopterology”, I learned today, which I can hardly spell let alone pronounce). Writers approach these beautiful, fleeting topics such as love and try to pin them onto a page with thumbtacks in the shape of letters. And there are moments when it feels like you have really succeeded. You look upon your words, all carefully weighed and gently placed into an exact order, and you feel as though you have finally been the one to perfectly capture the elusive object. But the reality that we are all aware of, both reader and writer, is that unlike butterflies a topic such as love is constantly changing and impossible to capture forever. We keep chasing them, keep scooping into our nets what we think looks like love, until we realise that, impossibly, what we have captured was not a butterfly at all but a moth.
Incidentally, Helena Fitzgerald’s recent newsletter on old loves touched on this:
“Writing about love is impossible and pointless. Putting it in language immediately deadens it and turns it into a fiction. Nothing that feels, nothing that wants, nothing that moves, stays the same even from one moment to the next. To write about something is to try to capture it in a still form…But love dwells …outside the lines, beyond the place where things are named and then stay in the shape of that name.”
Still, we return to this topic, both as writers and readers. I think it’s because sometimes writers do come close to succeeding and that offers insurmountable comfort. It’s why I like poetry so much. The ultimate test of wordsmithing is to distil something infinite into just a few lines. It makes life feel withstand-able; as though love’s being able to fit it into a jam jar composed out of words means we can get through a difficult day. My favourite love poem is by W.S Merwin, which reads:
Please one more
kiss in the kitchen
before we turn the lights off.
He wrote that after his wife died.
Coming back to London after a summer of lying under the Greek sun and eating figs in France feels like the equivalent of the lights being turned on in a nightclub at 3am. Everything is suddenly too bright and close and raw. But returning to reality after a sojourn so languid was always going to feel that way. It helps that this city feels infinitely steeped in warmth for me (ironic for a notoriously cold and wet destination). My friends always teased me for having a favourite bus route (the 341, for those asking), but honestly, there is something so wonderful about knowing the contours of a city, of being able to see landmarks where past versions of yourself once existed. This Sunday I strolled around Clissold Park with two friends in the early autumn sunshine and it was like visiting an old home. How many times have I circumnavigated those pathways, or laid on the grass under a shifting sky? How many coffees have I shared in that neighbourhood, with people I might never have known unless I moved here?
Isn’t it wonderful that you don’t yet know all the people you are going to love?
London is hard to break up with if only because it holds so many people I care about: friends and family and new babies and even versions of myself I have come to cherish. On Tuesday night I made my brother and this tahini broth from the Tart London cookbook. It was the same meal I made on the first of January, alone in my shared house. I was hungover and had just returned from a salvation-seeking swim in Hampstead Heath with my friend Anna. Her boyfriend hadn’t swum because he “didn’t feel like being brave” that day and I don’t think he realises how much I loved that statement, and how often this year I have thought about loving yourself enough to not be brave for a day. I think he captured a butterfly in those words, to be honest.
Here are some other specimens of love I keep returning to or have recently been exposed to, in case you needed the extra inspiration:
Modern Love (Season 2, Episode 1): On a Serpentine Road, With the Top Down (available on Amazon Prime)
Master of None, Season 3: titled “Moments in Love”
The photography of Lottie Hampson
The little drawings by Lucy Mahon
And finally: a recent read, Sorrow & Bliss by Meg Mason. I hope I can write something half as good one day.
Beautiful, thank you Anna…… so much loving still to come
Jamie-Lee introduced me to you and I am so very pleased that she did. Your writing is beautiful and an absolute pleasure to read.
Thank you
Laura