A Writer's Diary: 01.04.26

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Writer’s Diary - April

5:17

It is a Tuesday morning as I write this and I’m back home in Northern Ireland. The sky is a familiar greyish colour, a colour that formed the theatre backcloth of my childhood, and I’ve stolen some time to sit here and type. There are voices coming from the kitchen of my two little ones, my wife and and my parents have some mid-morning coffee and toast. I planned this week off a while ago. Since becoming self-employed in January 2024 I’ve learned a good many things, but chief among them is when to take a break, because when you’re working for yourself nobody books that in for you. In my first year I found myself working six sometimes seven days a week as I didn’t want to lose out and want to ensure I was earning enough. It wasn’t long before I realised just how unsustainable that was. And now, while I don’t give myself heaps of holiday, I make sure to give myself the weekends off as well as a week during the major school holidays to make sure I’ve rested body and mind, and so I can spend time with the children, and indeed my wider family, and so I’ve built up enough of a reserve to start back in to a busy schedule upon my return. Work, work, work.

It’s nice to walk around the house that I grew up in though. I’ve written about this place many times in poems, but it’s good to return to it here in a looser form of prose. Returning to my childhood bedroom is a funny thing to do. I look out of the window and see the fields I used to see, the light shifting above it, and the top of a tree which rises up through the central horizon. That’s looking out to the north. The greenhouse’s frame, its third iteration in that particular spot of the garden, has faded in the sun and its paint is cracked, but my father still tends to the plastic trays of seedlings, and the battery powered radio remains in place. I sit here in the lounge, a cold room when the fire isn’t on which is most of the time apart from weekend evenings, and look out onto another hill with a row of ghostly looking trees, not quite poplars, but not quite anything else, that don’t seem to have ever changed shape or height since I was a child. The traffic is fast along the main Killyleagh road down the lane from the house, and more supermarket delivery vans and couriers can be seen hawking their wares up and down the road either going into Killyeagh or returning back to Belfast, presumably, through Crossgar. So, what is home? A place that changes but doesn’t change, or as Michael Longley wrote in his poem ‘Remembering Carrigskeewaun’: ‘home is a hollow between the waves’.

Since I wrote this piece last time, it’s been a busy time personally with lots of teaching as students get ready for their end of year exams. But globally it’s also been a manic time, with the war in Iran dragging on and sending massive financial shockwaves around the world. We live in uncertain times. When have we not? But there seems to be a volatility to the world that I don’t remember there being before. And yet, as humans we find a way to keep going, don’t we? We live our lives, and make our daily bread. As Robert Frost once wrote ‘In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.’

And so we go on. It’s almost been a year since I started writing this blog in a hope to put the business of writing at the forefront of my life, building a more regular habit of writing, and build an audience of readers who want to connect with my thoughts and ideas, as that’s what I look for in authors: a sense of connection. ‘Only connect’ wrote Forster, and it’s only really now with my fortieth birthday looming this July that I really understand what he meant by that. Connecting with people through my blog is really what I want to achieve with this, readers who relate to what I’m writing, or appreciate it, and want to follow my journey as a writer, even if that journey is one that seems to go round in circles at times. Would it be too strong a word to say that I look for a sense of allegiance in the writers that I follow, read and respect? Maybe not. And I’m not talking about the kind of political allegiances which seem to be currently so febrile between countries around the world, but a kind of personal allegiance to another’s sensibilities, determinations, motivations, aspirations.

It’s now the evening as I sit to finish this piece. The fireplace is silent, the little voices that peopled the silence of the morning have shushed, as the youngsters sleep in their beds. The curtains are drawn and the days of the holiday dwindle. There is much to do, much to write, and many more connections to make. The clock ticks on the mantelpiece. There is still the sound of traffic. Life going on.

On the wall opposite me is a photograph of the north coast, which is were my father hails from. It’s the only thing in the house which references his provenance. In it, the waves whiten as they reach the craggy cliffs. I never tire of the sea: the sea in real life or in poems, or paintings or photos. What I love about this photograph is the contrast of it being a still image which happens to capture such vitality. And in many ways isn’t that what all art is trying to do? Nietzsche said ‘all art aspires towards the condition of music’ but I wonder if, rather, all art aspires towards the condition of the coast, sea meeting land. What is a poem but a moment of intense energy captured by still words on a page?