It’s hard to explain. I wake in the early morning with a pit in my stomach. I feel like giving up. Running.
But you can’t. It’s happening. Showed a friend from Kent the uglification of Pretty Road. He couldn’t believe it. He loves woodland but here it’s special, untouched for centuries. It rained all day, a relief after no rain for six weeks; Essex and Suffolk Water have started running a save water advert in the cinema. Wet woodland walk with no sun. Scrunching and squelching past the broad beans. Two more iconic trees have gone. You see the razed splintered stump and can’t remember what the tree looked like. Mapping the route of the bypass, red posts on one side, blue string on the other. Someone had knocked aside the post and string over the footpath to the village. It’s brutal, blocking off country lanes and connecting footpaths. It’s hard to imagine the concrete and noise. Impossible.
You have to find ways to survive. I am going to make a Book of Trees. A Country Diary of a 2020s Lady. Photographs. Poems, existing and by me. Housman. Larkin. Celebrate the ugliness and the beauty. Find new paths. The sea kale is in flower on Dunwich Beach and yellow poppies rise from the shingle. Is this the rare yellow-horned poppy that has been destroyed at Sizewell but still exists at Dunwich?
Another definition of solastalgia is that it is a sort of homesickness, a grief for what has been lost. But I like the strength of the word ‘violated.’
‘Solastalgia is when your endemic sense of place is being violated’ – Glenn Albrecht, philosopher.
ness365 