Midwinter Skin

I'm falling in love with Leicestershire's landscapes in this winter skin. Another frostbitten morning today, this time out at Beacon Hill.

Not a whisper of wind and yet it felt as cold as Iceland. My camera kept dying - begging for a warm pocket. But we coaxed these pictures out of it in between ...

The ice and rock looks as stark as anything we saw in the Arctic and the fogbank eclipsed the country below. A very magical morning. How I want this midwinter to last!

To see the whole album, hop to my Facebook photos.

Wintering out, Writing in

Winter seems to have arrived with incredible suddeness this year. So I'm feeling if I don't slow down and really taste it, the season will be gone again in the blink of an eye. And this icy Christmas week seems a frost-wrapped gift, a time that's quite-dream-like to me.


So this morning we rose early, fuelled up with porridge and scooted up to Bradgate Park, one of the loveliest places in Leicester, to catch the dawn.

And a slow burn it was, stretched out over two hours, washing colours from Arctic blue to rose to liquid gold on the water. Here's some glimpses:


It's been bone-achingly cold in air blown straight in from the Arctic. And that's kind of thrilling too for someone who's been undertaking various expeditions to Arctic landscapes in the last few years. An opportunity to layer up in all those thermals and fleeces.

Over by the water, a flotilla of small white birds in amongst the ducks - maybe Arctic refugees themselves.




Of course, it's nowhere near as freezing as Iceland was because the Arctic also has fierce winds that give their winters a real sting. When you see frozen waterfalls everywhere, then you know it's cold! But this will do very well for an old-fashioned English winter.


And I still get giddy faced with a frozen puddle or ice flowers on the grass. In the park, the river was largely frozen over, with great swirls of white on its glassy surface.


I wish I could also conjure up the crunching of frost too, the splintering of ice - or the strange mewling of the deer as they crossed the track in front of us. The shrieking of crows stark in the frozen air.





That sun with its long reach and misted light is already dipping as the solstice day approaches. So tantalisingly short.

I'm hoping to get some hibernating time this week to catch up on writing too. Especially a sequence I'm writing about Shackleton's voyage to Antarctica.

Certainly - I couldn't ask for more inspiring conditions for a Polar Poet! Time to pull on another cardigan and get out the notebooks.

Crossing the Poles

Another Arctic morning - very thematic for this Polar Poet who spends her time talking about the ice-bound aurora borealis. Last night nearly 30 people defied a 'Severe Weather Warning' to attend my talk 'Physics & Poetry of the Northern Lights' hosted by the Leicester Physics Centre as part of their Public Lecture series. I was impressed but maybe we're getting acclimatised to these spells of deep winter now.

A very responsive audience stayed on for a wide-ranging discussion about indigenous arctic legends, Siberian tribes, science/arts collaborations, global warming and something called 'archaeo-astronomy' - my favourite new word. The inter-disciplinary aspects of my talk seemed to appeal to this group of assorted lecturers/ students from different University of Leicester departments, local astronomers and several small children. I enjoyed the chance to chat to such enthusiastic and well-informed people.

We also discussed whether our recent 'cold snap' might be evidence of a slowing-down in the sun's activity, as suggested in recent research that linked low solar minimums to Europe's Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. But my man in the Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group assures me that though the sun has been slow to 'awaken from its deep slumber', sun-spot activity has now quickened considerably. We may yet see the beautiful aurora this far south come the solar maximum of 2013. Watch this space ...

And the questions also led me to reflect on the science/arts collaboration that has me performing poems in a Physics & Astronomy lecture theatre. Darren Wright of the Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group spoke of how scientists like himself were interested in finding different ways of communicating with the wider community. His group have sponsored a number of artists like myself working on projects related to their auroral field of study. And from the events I've done at science festivals and venues like the Science Museum I can see there are some exciting approaches to engaging both adults and children in scientific discourse.

As a writer, the challenge of finding a language to communicate complex scientific ideas in poetry and performance has proved very stimulating. It's stretched my literary voice and my skills as a storyteller and I love presenting this material to very diverse audiences from primary schoolchildren to astronomers. And the narrative journey of the Northern Lights has led me from the Arctic Circle out into space - a place I want to write about more in the future. From physics to poetry, aurora to story - the cross-overs continue to fascinate me.

Snow-Witched

Snow brings out my inner child. The thrill of waking up to a snow day hasn't faded after all these years. Maybe it helps that I'm not a driver.

At 8 am on Saturday morning I prised my partner out of bed to catch this Narnia-moment at our local park.

I loved the way the sky colour kept changing as the sun pushed through the trees sluggishly. This is my Blue scene - light that reminds me of the Arctic.




Another thing that reminded me of Iceland was the way my fingers froze whenever I peeled them out of my gloves. And the sweetness of plunging them back after the frostbite!


Look at all the blacks and whites and the extraordinary baroque curves of this bench. Or the skeletal forms of the trees on the skyline.

I find this kind of landscape utterly unique. Time seems to stand still. Details are etched in vivid monochrome. Sound is muffled but the eye sees everything with an ice-lit clarity.







And here's that fallen sun burnishing the ice on the canal. The trees, arching impossibly in a Gothic gesture, make one of those accidental poems in the viewfinder.

How can I not feel that I've stumbled into the territory of the White Witch? I'm happy to be under her spell, having no impulse to look for the lamp-post and the way home. In the end it was only the prospect of hot porridge and honey that dragged me back.

Sea-dog Shanties

Send a writer to the sea-side and they come home with shells and a bundle of scribbled notes. My birthday treat this year was a weekend in Norfolk. Here's some of my ramblings:


Friday eve, Hunstanton


The sea is dragging its chains tonight
out-of-tune hounds baying in the fog
lunging at broken walls


detonating a salvo of sound-bombs
a trip-wired mine-field barbed with salt
ghostly no-man's land


shaking ruffled skirts along the shore
a ragged chorus-line staggering
into a memory of the can-can

Saturday Morning


The sea is a doubtful rumour this morning. The world beyond the cliffs vanished into fog. The muffled quiet of the strand is unbroken by wandering beach-combers and dogs. Even the rotting of its cast-offs is muted – more scent than stench today. It is a dream-scape in which time drops away: soft footfalls thudding into sand, a flock of birds cheeping tiny as insects. A long-ago tide heaped this border of razor-shells – pink claws of crab, limp star-fish, bloated wrack – dark clods of sea-peat from another epoch. I scavenge a few scooped shells the colour of amethyst, coral, porcelain blue – and a tiger-striped feather. As the winter sun cuts a disc in the gloom, we trudge back to the pier before we too are emptied.


We stayed at a wonderful B&B barely 2 minutes from the sea - Cori House. And Hunstanton's multi-coloured cliffs and endless beaches were no less enchanting in November's fog. Terrific swoops of starlings at tea-time too.

Physics & Poetry in a Test-tube

Here's a thing that's weird and wonderful. In just under a fortnight, I'm doing a talk for the Leicester Physics Centre. Me - who was rubbish at science at school! Who thought it was all test-tubes and Bunsen burners, alarming chemicals and diagrams of electrical circuits. Who just didn't get it.

The talk is 'Physics and Poetry of the Northern Lights' and arises out of my book 'Firebridge to Skyshore' and related performances. I've been lucky enough to be involved in this really interesting collaboration with auroral scientists from the University of Leicester. And they've invited me to give this Public Lecture on Tuesday 30th November (see Events above).

And no-one can be more surprised than me to find myself talking on a regular basis about ions and electrons, explaining diagrams of magnetospheres and solar plasma, and beyond that, translating it all into metre and metaphor. I think of poetry as singing with words so my poem about solar wind is called 'Solar Arias'. In my talk I will be unravelling the science of the aurora borealis from a layperson's point of view. But I will also be taking the leap from aurora to story. For it was ancient legends and voices of the arctic that first drew me in.

I never guessed that my childhood love of stories about icy wildernesses would take me literally to the Arctic to see the Northern Lights but also imaginatively into the realms of outer space. 'If you could put your feet upon pure light/ Walk the trembling Roadway ...' this is where it would take you. I will be relating these extraordinary journeys, real and imagined, in my talk. And I look forward to the company I'll find along the way.

The talk is FREE so just drop in for 6.30. And make sure you wrap up well for some aurora-watching ...

Changing the Clocks

As I dip my toe back into the blogosphere after so many months, I have to ask some questions. How do you juggle the job that pays the bills with the creative work? How do you get any kind of balance? Where does the time go?

Maybe you're lucky and they're one and the same. But lately I've been teetering all one way. For me, the teaching work is technically 4-5 days a week. And I'm supposed to keep Fridays clear for the writing and performing work. I've gotten used to the rhythm of the year and accept that at certain times - start of term, mock exam weeks etc. - teaching just sweeps all before it like a bore-tide. Except this year, the September rollers have just crashed on into November. How did that happen?


Teaching doesn't just pay the bills of course - it keeps me grounded and stimulates my thinking and learning. I love studying new books on the syllabus with the students - this year it's 'A Streetcar Named Desire'. I like those conversations and the shared purpose of it.

And despite the onslaught, I was lucky enough to have a few literary events this autumn that kept me engaged as a writer. Seeing my poems turned into beautiful art objects in Terri Bradshaw's wonderful exhibition in October. Hosting a National Poetry Day event with Leicester Writers' Club as part of the Everybody's Reading Festival in Leicester the same week. And best of all, an exciting Polar Poets gig as part of the Manchester Science Festival at half-term. You can read about that on my sister-blog.

However - it's high time I caught up with making some plans for the rest of the year. So if you're one of those people who's been wondering if I'd dropped off the face of the earth, the good news is I've been hacking my way through that avalanche of overdue emails. Radio silence is about to be broken!

But above all, November is probably my most fertile time for writing and immersing myself in new projects. So I need to get that balance back. As darkness falls and mist and frost push up against the windows, that outer hibernation gets some inner processes firing up. I'm restless to be in that place again. The hush of early mornings in the study before the bell beckons ...