As I sit in front of my computer writing this blog post, my chair faces the window with the best sea view in my house. Since moving to Hastings, I’ve been able to look out at the sea every day, and every day it’s different. Some days you can see the white crests of choppy waves; some days the sky is cloudy and the see a deep, churning green; some days the sun is so bright on the water that it sparkles. Today it’s pale, calm, shrouded at the horizon where it meets the pale blue sky.
Yesterday we went out foraging for alexanders in the country park. After my brush with hemlock this weekend, I wrote to an expert forager asking whether anything idiot-proof could be foraged in Hastings in winter. He patiently pointed me towards alexanders, something I’ve been meaning to forage for awhile – an intruder on England’s coast, imported as a pot herb from imperial Rome and replaced by celery after the 18th century. It also happens to look a tiny bit like hemlock water dropwort BUT don’t worry guys I sent the forager pictures and he said I definitely got a haul of alexanders! They made an amazing winter soup, with a bright, grapefruit-like flavour, and neither my partner nor I are dead yet.
I’ve been trying to forage more lately, both as a way to make Universal Credit lyfe work for me and to get me out of my house, away from my screen. Here I could discuss at length the ways in which the screen has intruded and colonised increasing swathes of our lives this year, but it’s all a bit boring, isn’t it? This particular archon very much enjoys being the centre of your attention, interposing itself between colleagues, friends, even lovers; it feeds on your slack, screen-dazed eyes. Best to reorient towards the real, the tangible – the sea, and not its image.
I’m working on a zine about screens, but I’m trying to do as much work as possible on it downstairs at the coffee table, away from my screen. Drawing in pen – I wish I could draw as well as my partner, who is more confident in such things – and layering images together around the static crackle of a cut-out screen. And yet. Does a zine like this feed the archon? Does it even matter, if it does?
This weekend I’ll take my kids back to the country park to forage for alexanders. We’ll walk to East Hill, and look at the sea – Beachy Head in one direction, and Dungeness in the other, and between an expanse of miles and miles of waves. Whenever we go to East Hill the water seems to be brighter and bluer than normal, perhaps because there’s so much more of it than what I can see from my window.
Sonya Blanck writings 