“Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places."
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
Often, in the last few days before we leave a country, we feel a little at a loose end, as though we are somehow letting down the memory of that country, not honouring it by doing something properly fitting to mark our departure.
These last few days in New Zealand, in which we park up in a free site, in the middle of nowhere, our only facility a hole in the ground inside a shed, and simply be there for two nights before we wend our way reluctantly up towards Auckland, sadly bid farewell to our van, and then sleep once more in a normal bed in a hostal (which feels weird) actually feels exactly right.
By which I mean the parking up in the middle of nowhere part, obviously, the rest being just a reluctant necessity.
But this is what New Zealand has been, at its finest. Amazing views, unadulterated fresh air, lack of light pollution, silence and nature.
We are missing, of course, our various partners in crime, Michael and Helen, Roxi and Cal, but other than that it is this that for us has made New Zealand special.
I spend the two days we are parked at 'Little Waipa', a spot by a beautiful reflective river, fields, trees, clear starlit nights and sheep, sitting gazing out of the back of the van at a slightly rainy chill which only adds to the beauty, hearing only birds and sheep, and finishing Neville's edit number one.
This, I find myself thinking, is what it should actually be like to be a writer. Writers should just travel around in basic vans, unwashed and unsullied by pollution, materialistic gains and adverts, gazing out at beautiful, deserted landscapes - and probably going a little bit mad in the end. But for two days it is perfect.
I send Neville off to a brilliant company who provide an affordable editing service, and who will return him, when I will be in Bolivia, complete with constructive criticism.
Whereupon I will embark, possibly somewhat wearily, on edit number two. Unless they decide to simply be done with it and hand me the booker prize then and there.
In the meantime, I tap away at my keyboard and gaze out at the willow trees weeping into the water, and the way the rain makes the green of the hills behind them shine in the sunlight - and I rather agree with Mary. There must be magic all around us. In this country. In every country.
No comments:
Post a Comment