June

June

I’m not sure Substack is the place for me.

It lacks the familiar Twitter/X feel, scent and I’m a stranger still to its geography, geology. Nonetheless, I’ll be giving it a chance again over the next while, so if you followed initially and stuck with me, perhaps without remembering until this post pings in your inbox, thank you.  

Though I had a great run as a freelance opinion writer, I no longer pitch columns to the newspapers. I was privileged to work with wonderful editors, who are also gorgeous people, and to write on things that interest me  - death, family, attachment, motherhood, politics and latterly Covid19 with the great political, business and public-health confidence trick to minimise it.

But with the move to clicks and algorithms deciding what is published and read, read and published, the preference now for freelance pieces that are light and ‘accessible’ is not for me. Coming up with clickable angles is tedious. Equally, even in terms of writing, alone, many would agree that it’s far more difficult to produce decent copy on the frivolous, than on what moves us about life and living. Writing on tattoos, for example, I wanted to stick the inky needles deep in my non-accessible amygdala.  

In all of this, I’m far from alone: in the last years a number of excellent women writers have absented themselves from the opinion pages, largely because the money is so poor for the effort required to produce quality work, but also because they don’t see their lives and concerns reflected much in what is published. Of course, this is no reflection on the excellent work of colleagues who are still happy to contribute and can do so on a basis that suits them.  Mine is a purely personal choice. I’m privileged that, financially, I can do so. Also, at this stage of my life, my ambitions and interests are internal, as is common. The priority is getting a novel in on time for the rapidly-approaching deadline. It’s set in the early days of Jungian analysis and is about heredity, haunting, music and madness.  I hope you will read it when it comes.

So here, I’ll be writing short pieces about life and living – Time, memory, Gaza, war and billionaires, the Climate Emergency, how neoliberalism will be the death of us. I hope you will still follow and read.

Walking to the supermarket yesterday, for a few moments, the light, the scent, the sensation on the skin made it the 1970s again. Is there an archetypal June that descends on us, arrives in Visitation? Is it available to us if we call on it, invite it in?

In my life as a musician I used to sing the art song June by the British composer Roger Quilter, words by Nora Hopper.   Shedding lovely light on things forgotten, hope forbidden, that’s the way of June.  It does, it is.

June

Dark red roses in a honeyed wind swinging, Silk-soft hollyhock, coloured like the moon; Larks high overhead lost in light, and singing; That’s the way of June. Dark red roses in the warm wind falling, Velvet leaf by velvet leaf, all the breathless noon; Far off sea waves calling, calling, calling; That’s the way of June. Sweet as scarlet strawberry under wet leaves hidden, Honey’d as the damask rose, lavish as the moon, Shedding lovely light on things forgotten, hope forbidden, That’s the way of June.