Eye-phone
(c) Sputniktilt
First birthday. First step. First word. First Christmas. First tooth. First day at nursery…No no. Actually none of that. Far more significant still. The first submission to Scree is in!
During last Wednesday’s launch, an audience member asked me how long it had taken to develop each route, and how did I come up with ideas? But my literal answer of 5 or 6 days was only partial. ‘My entire lifetime’ would perhaps have been more accurate, for how Scree brings together so much. Over 40 years of climbing the Lake District fells since the day I stubbornly refused to be carried during an 8 mile hike up Cat Bells, Maiden Moor and High Spy aged three. Almost 40 years since my obsession with photography began, down at the River Derwent in Rosthwaite, with my Grandpa’s old Rolleiflex strung around my neck, by which point I was already an avid reader and writer; at about the same age I wrote an extended sequence of poems detailing the precise (rhyming) reasons why I disliked every kind of egg. And over 20 years into a varied career path of campaigning, university teaching / research, and arts management, throughout which environmental themes have provided a common thread. (I also once had a night-shift job which involved beating the living daylights out of broccoli, but that’s another story.) Right enough, as launch day approached and I started panicking about having everything ready in time, I might not have appreciated anyone suggesting I’d had a lifetime to get it done, as the length of my working weeks grew and grew! And not a sprout of broccoli in sight to take my stress out upon…
To open this blog entry by suggesting that Scree is my baby is of course a dreadful cliché, as is the implication that it’s been a lifetime’s work in the making. Is Scree not meant to be about new responses to the fells, rather than old hackneyed ones? Is this not about challenging the clichéd ways in which we’ve come to enjoy the fells? We tend to think of clichés as referring to words and phrases, but might they not equally refer to our behaviour and actions (including those which Scree aims to question)? With all of the above in mind, I therefore won’t go on to suggest that it’s been a labour of love, nor will I allude to how it felt handing my baby over to others to contribute to its development, once the website had gone live! More seriously, as apprehensive as I was about sharing the project, it’s of crucial importance to me that others are involved, since participation is at the core of everything Scree represents. Otherwise, the project will be limited to what I’ve got to offer; as a university creative writing lecturer I always found that I learnt as much from students as I taught them, and my hope is that this will be equally true here. That the project evolves in directions, and involves ideas, that I’d never previously imagined.
I was therefore thrilled, over the course of the weekend, to start hearing that people had started trying out the experiments. First, on Good Friday, a friend sent me a picture of a farm track which she’d only noticed as a result of playing the dice game suggested in the Keswick-Threlkeld railway path experiment along the Pennine Bridleway close to her West Yorkshire home. Then on Saturday, a local friend in Cockermouth sent me pics (see more here) of the light reflections he’d noticed in his partner’s (and also his dog’s?) eyes while running up Melbreak, inspired by the ideas behind the Through the Lake Glass experiment. What interested me about Claire’s pic was how one experiment about the scarring of landscapes (Scars: The Coledale Fells) had influenced what she noticed during an entirely different experiment. And right enough, there’s something equally compelling about the curve of the farm track she photographed as there is with that path on Sail (I’m still working on her allowing me to upload some pics!) Great to also see that the experiments really were proving applicable far beyond the boundaries of the Lake District. Meanwhile, Jo had applied my idea of seeking out reflections in bodies of water to the reflective surface of eyes in ways that I’d never have imagined. ‘Light both ways’ is how he describes it, capturing precisely that reciprocal sense of how we both bring qualities to, and take qualities from, the world in which we live. It’s also an interesting twist on my own experiment. If Through the Lake Glass invites us to seek out reflections, as images of the alternative possibilities which the world might become, then Jo’s take on it turns this around and places the focus upon us. Who are we, and who might we alternatively become? I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Jo is currently exploring another possible version of himself having enrolled on a boat-building course in Portsmouth following early retirement from his career as a GP!
On Easter Monday, I headed out on a favourite route up the nose of Grasmoor. My aim over Easter had been to take time out from Scree, since it’s been all-consuming these past months. Of course, this was always going to be an unrealistic aim, since Scree is composed of so much of who I am and how I think. While hiking in the Moffat Hills in South West Scotland with my Dad, with whom I've been in a Covid bubble, I couldn’t help but wonder how crowded the Lake District was now that the ‘stay at home’ order has been lifted. On our own walk up Hart Fell, we only met one family group of four. And once again, on my run around the fells above Lanthwaite Green, the view of Melbreak across the other side of Crummock Water caused me to pause and reflect upon Jo’s photographs. Scree is partly meant to be about slowing down, noticing things more, and enjoying the process rather than obsessing about the ends. Yet even the intensity with which I’d gone about the project during the first three months of this year in order to meet my launch deadline stood in stark contrast to these principles. How to change this? Who did I want to make of myself in participation with this landscape which I love (and live) so much?
Fortunately the coldness of the wind prevented my soul-searching from becoming all-consuming its own right, or else I’d likely have turned into a self-absorbed ice sculpture scratching my chin, what with this recent cold turn. I continued on to Hopegill Head, one of my favourite fells, not least because it’s the only one I can actually see from the bedroom window of my house in Cockermouth. From the summit, ridges head in all directions, which felt symbolic somehow. I hadn’t brought either of my good cameras with me - this being a day off after all - but my smartphone clearly hadn’t been copied in on the memo. There’s something about taking a photo of the view from the perspective of the view. How does the clichéd saying go? Out with the old. In with the…? I chose the ridge to Whiteside because…honestly? Well. Because it was in the direction of my parked van. And as darkness approached, that seemed like the most sensible decision of all.
