Fleeting/Lingering

Here I am again, feeling like I’m coming up for air after being submerged in the swirling depths of work and life admin and courses and family life and a million and one other things…

Thank you for your thoughtful comments on my previous post. I read them but just didn’t get around to replying. Like I said, life gets in the way.

I’m currently doing a photography course. It ends just as school finishes for the summer so that’s good timing. I had a Good Think and decided to try and take my photography further in terms of making a living from it: family shoots, brand storytelling, maybe even weddings (yikes). So I need to bolster my confidence and technical knowledge, and invest in a bit of equipment too. But it’s something I enjoy and which would fit in with taking care of Joe and working part time in the gallery.

The landscape images I asked you about: well, that’s ongoing but not high on the list at the moment. The list is long.

But on Wednesday I met up with some of my very best friends back in my home village. Two of them I haven’t seen in a few years so it was so nice to have a bit of a reunion, and to know we’re all near one another again. We went to a little tearoom and caught up then obligations called and we went our separate ways.

It was another hot, balmy day and although I had to call in on another friend (to collect some more Hornsea Pottery things) I had my camera and went for a walk through Musbury. I couldn’t not.

I grew up in a village called Helmshore, in the Rossendale Valley, which is situated in the Lancashire Pennines. It’s changed a lot - people like living there because it’s reasonably commutable to places like Manchester - so there’s been much new housing popping up. But some things don’t change that much; I still see people I knew when I was little, and much of the countryside still remains.

This part of the village is what I call ‘the old Helmshore’, with its old cotton mill (a museum since the 1970s) and terraced houses and little bridges and cobbles and secret cut-throughs. It’s the place I remember most from early childhood.

Musbury itself is a valley with a winding stream, and you can walk seemingly forever into the wilds. We used to come for picnics in summer with the Bevis boys, a motley crew of four brothers who lived behind us with their mum (their dad was mysteriously absent). I was very small, my brother in his early teens, and we’d head here with our tinfoil-wrapped sandwiches to build dams and sit in the deeper parts of the stream so the water came up to our necks.

At primary school we brought picnics too. This being the 1980s, risk assessments weren’t a thing, so often our rambles would be impromptu. A hot day would result in a spontaneous rounders tournament or some kind of outdoor adventure.

Ee, them were t’days etc. etc.

Walking along these paths literally makes my heart sing. I can meet up with the ghosts of little me, and my brother in his Dunlop plimsolls, and my mum in her summer skirts and sandals, and we can wander together. I can remember the kissing gate (still there, just) and the tiny stone bridge which has now collapsed into the stream, and the ruins of a cottage with the remains of an orchard around it.

I know these places intimately and yet it’s good to reacquaint myself with them all over again. To note the changes and not lament the passing of things too much.

Although it was a fleeting visit (always one eye on the clock because of school), I got to linger and reminisce but also to savour the here and now. And to notice some of my favourite things: a charm of goldfinches, the sound of grasshoppers in the long, dry grass, a weathervane atop a cottage roof, thistledown, butterflies, the stream slowly trickling by. The ground was hard and dusty and the sun hot.

The bluebells have gone and the foxgloves are already shedding their little thimbles, one by one. We’ve had weeks of heat now with just the odd short-lived rain shower. It feels like we’re heading for high summer.

I like to walk Musbury for the foxgloves. They’re at their most photogenic during ‘golden hour’, of course, but I’m fine with midday if needs be. I’ve caught them before they go to seed and the hawthorn berries start to redden, signalling another shift in the seasons.

I’ll have to bring Joe for a picnic, I think. Or maybe meet up with some of our friends.

But on this particular day I had it all to myself and I think I needed it. Life’s been hectic lately - a major stressor has been the seemingly constant digging up of the main road near where we live. Temporary lights which can be there for weeks on end, causing traffic chaos and turning the school run into a 45 minute journey each way. My nerves have been frayed I suppose, with the need to get to places without being late and the fact that any child-free time has been dramatically diminished. As soon as one set of lights is dismantled, another pops up again. It’s exasperating.

But it’s good that we’re renting at the moment. Because we now know where not to buy a house.

We’re looking further up the valley, closer to the school and on the other side of Hebden Bridge. Up in the hills. Of course.

Back to my walk.

So I soaked up the sunshine and the summer and decompressed and felt almost deliriously happy because this is my place and it’s where my heart will always be, and once again it’s close enough to return to when I like. I could have stayed all day and watched the sun get lower in the sky, sitting on the banks of the stream and exploring little hollows and copses. But I couldn’t.

So I called in on my friend, collected my Hornsea, and made a flying visit to the antiques place (which looks out across yet more familiar hills and fields). And I bought a few bits of studio pottery because I can’t resist a bit of earthy ceramic goodness.

I drove back home through the Rossendale Valley, across into West Yorkshire and up to the school. I told Joe I’d been somewhere wonderful and he pretended to be interested, when all he really wanted to talk about was the fact that Queen Victoria was only four feet eleven tall.