High on daydreams, stiffening in an awkward curl on the cheap bus to Bristol, my calves pushed against the next seat’s back because I do not like sitting on chairs properly, I briefly hovered behind a truck containing “leading ruminant nutrition”. Ruminants are multi-stomached animals, and contemplative people. What we feed them is important.

Polyennic

I was scrolling through LinkedIn, because that feels like a legitimate thing to do while being paid to sit in an office, through a post that briefly referenced “polyennic (ADHD) people”. I rewound a little. There’s a term for ADHD I don’t know? But surely I know the ADHD things. I admired the word for a moment - it’s pretty and Greek, a stylish adjective not a creepy noun. It was coined a few years ago by someone who doesn’t appear to be an authority, and it hasn’t gained much traction as an alternative to the awful acronym. But I tried it on for a moment anyway.

Nempnett Thrubwell

We stepped in matching rhythmic lollops, bathed in birdsong, garlic greenery and unusual warmth, down a dappled Bristol canal path. Henry told me amusing local place names that sounded like characters - Nempnett Thrubwell, Clay Bottom, Snuff Mills. We visited Clay and Snuff and decided they were a pair of good old lads, maybe the founding members of a jazz combo. Maybe Nempnett Thrubwell is their band. Or perhaps it is as defined in In Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff, “the feeling experienced when driving off for the first time on a brand new motorbike”.

Henry also told me that putting a pickled egg into a bag of smashed crisps and shaking it up was a common classic in British pub culture. Sometimes I google things Henry says to be sure.

Orthostat

Long barrow, capstone, dolmen. New old words. Next-level mist, impenetrable and dangerous, as though the world beyond had been erased. Jerome talked me through the site layout - where you might make your entrance, where bodies likely lie. His gentle voice was tipped with enthusiasm as our lightly hungover hands touched stone in the damp air.

I cross the field, descend steep overgrown steps sheltered by trees, cross in front of a small hut and curved concrete walls, and enter the battery’s tunnel, padding gently between forest debris and fabric and rusted trash. The world shrinks. Daylight is condensed into cold stillness, and water drips a beat on a floor grate. I follow the wide brick and concrete corridor, lit at either end by broken gateways, and turn into one of the black chambers that branch from it. I can see nothing in this room but a thin pillar of light piercing its centre, and I want to know whether, given enough time, a pinhole camera can capture anything it illuminates. I know from previous trips with powerful torches that there are strange objects assembled in the far corner - a 1960s style cooker, a car door, logs, a huge metal box. I tap the torch on my phone into action to avoid hurting myself on any of the scattered randomness that litters the floor. It doesn’t light much.

In the nearest corner and deep in the blackness, I locate a nook that might make a suitable resting place for a beer can camera. As I move to position it, I hear a shuffling noise that I can’t locate. It repeats, very slowly, usually in pairs - sha-sha. I check back in the corridor but there is nothing making noise there except the water’s drip. I return to the darkness, wondering if there is a person or creature walking over the roof of the building, shifting greenery. I hold my breath.

Sha-sha. Sha-sha. Sha-sha.

I point the phone torch above me, revealing two huge peacock butterflies attached to the concrete. One is still, its wide red wings closed together, pointing one round fake eye at me. Is it dead? Asleep? On the other, closer to my face on the low ceiling, the wings open wide. Then they close back in. And then out again, audibly crunching like dried leaves, with an unnatural slowness. Sha-sha, sha-sha. Something tightens in my stomach. It is a creaking movement, mechanical like a zombie, which feels puppeteered beyond the creature’s consciousness. And it is so impossibly loud. I whisper-sing “I don’t like this, I don’t like this” as I rip the gaffa tape from the side of the beer can, place it in its alcove, and point the now-exposed dot of a hole in the vague direction of the creepy stuff in the opposite corner. And then I speed out of there.

I thought butterflies died in the winter, and that only caterpillars survived. This, apparently, is not always the case. This is not the first time I’ve seen them here, but I assumed the one I saw before was dead. Some google searches later, I find out that not only do peacock butterflies hibernate winter long, they produce sonic and ultrasonic sounds when faced with potential predators while they do. I have been warned. I may not return to that room for a while.

In the Rame Peninsula, we live on the edge. Or on many edges. We rest between the sea and earth, Cornwall and England, rich and poor. We entertain moments where we are more one than the other, neither, or both. The lines shift constantly, with the moon and the tourist season, the weather’s whims, and our turn, and turn around the sun.

I like to watch these movements, their overlapping inhalations and exhalations. The tide courses into Millbrook and plucks sailboats out of the puckered mud, offering them a brief whisper of escape. It rushes out and exposes the rocks of Whitsand Bay, revealing pools to inspect and soft sand to muddle with footprints. The summer’s visitors flood money into our pockets, cars across our cliff edges, hot bodies over our quiet places. It ends and we breathe a sigh of relief, put on coats and let our dogs back on the beach.

We move, too. We are born, grow, and die. We leave to look for excitement, education, adventure, money, love, or leisure. We return to find home, community, a cup of tea on a quiet bench overlooking the waves, the rustle of leaves pierced by a dubstepping skylark, a dance and a beer and a song around a fire. I leave a lot. I often return thinking of Penlee — dappled tree-strained light on a twisted path where the punch of leaf mulch wrestles with a salty scent in the air, the march towards an expanse of wild waves and tight-stacked rocks, and joining them with a shudder to chase darting, mutating shoals between dark weeds.

In nature, edges are where you find the most cultural overlap and biodiversity. Abundance is forged from the dialogue in these vibrant seams — an exchange of environment, chemical, language, pattern, knowledge — rousing them to thrive.

Without this movement, what grows? Coastal areas around the country suffer a decline in young people in part because of a lack of transport links, and Rame is no exception. Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia — a spectrum of bigotries to keep a few feeling “pure” threatens to stifle beautiful differences Cornwall could celebrate. If a place doesn’t welcome new people and ideas, or if it clings too hard to the nostalgia of a state that no longer exists, then it becomes as stagnant as a cut-off rockpool.

Yet, healthy boundaries, as any therapist will tell you, are essential. How do we protect our unforgotten corner from genuine dangers slipping through in these fragile undulations? So many houses lie empty, reserved for occasional jaunts or personal gain by those who don’t live here, so they can’t be filled with those who do, or want to. Pubs, shops and services have died off as the year-round population shrinks, making year-round jobs scarce, forcing more people away. Folks “develop” areas that were once public or affordable into expensive inaccessibility. Our views need to belong to everyone. Our wild spaces need protection from environmental ruin. We all do.

And then there are all the world’s ills. So many sadnesses and fears, all threatening to seep in. It can be overwhelming. It becomes tempting, and sometimes essential, to cling to home and hope, close it out, bury our heads, an insular peninsula. But we can’t do that for long. We are in motion, after all.

We are the current guardians of this glorious mass of intersecting edges. Of all the forces that push and pull them, we are the most immediately pressed to keep them vibrant and safe. We have votes, bodies, intent, ideas, and the power to bring change. We have kindness, and each other’s backs. We have conversation that reaches distances from next door to the global. We need to use them all, to be both the boundary and the conduit.

This morning I dawdle, refreshed beneath a bristling canopy at Mount Edgcumbe, scouring trunks and patches for mushrooms, trying as I often do to figure out my place in it all. I am preparing to leave, comforted by surety that these trees and the ancient rocks will welcome me back. For a time I’ll be caught in currents and catching winds, relishing the ride, missing this unique place in the county, country, and world. But for today, I’m here. Like many, I expect I will flow in and out of Rame, as it does with me, as its many movements do within it, until the last rise and set of my days.

We push through brambles that want to lash us, shifting them with ball-fisted sleeve-ends, bits of sound equipment, and wellington boots. Hot in our boiler suits and backpacks, we scale a dense green incline on a slim path of rocks and syrupy mud that threatens to slide us into each other or the hedges. We pass the concrete shelter, the dead tree with the huge knot where beefsteak mushrooms sometimes grow, the rusted structure that looks like a winch. The air is mulchy sweet and quiet but for rustled leaves, birdsong, and distant water and traffic, and our breath and heavy steps. We find the entrance with relief.

The damp and mossy forest landscape of Cornwall’s Rame Peninsula is liberally peppered with relics. Barbed wire twisted trunks, concrete steps to nowhere, bunker palaces, rusted remains of the fittings for heavy machinery, urine-smelling pill boxes. Huge concrete fortifications sweat out the salt of the sand that made them, nestled in fern and ivy, watched over by deer. Venture from the footpath, and you’ll find treasure - something old and abandoned that was placed there to protect nearby Plymouth, just over the river border in Devon, from attacks by sea that never came.

I have been wondering at these structures since I can remember. As a child I would visit my grandparents at Fort Picklecombe, a mid-19th century Palmerston fort repurposed into luxury flats with avocado bathrooms, where my sister and I would often play in dark basement catacombs. In nearby beaches and forests, personal myths were made of the weird buildings and rusted fences we’d run into. I still wander the coastline and seek them out. So do a lot of us who rent studio space in the Napoleonic barracks building at Maker Heights - curious artists and musicians who find inspiration in exploration. The relics you find are littered with clues of years of use and re-use - not just military hardware and signage, but vintage crisp packets, dumped household appliances, graffiti, beer cans, tent pegs. Snails clamour in huge numbers around pipe entrances, and spiders’ webs fill crevices in walls.

Among the structures we know are giant steel cylinders that were once WW2 oil tanks. Some are above ground, missing walls or roofs, sprayed with graffiti. Others are subterranean, pitch black and flooded with water, accessible only to those who don’t mind a little risk and have a good torch. When you call into one from the entrance or exposed pipes above, the longest echo calls back, full and ghostly like a cathedral choir.

On this day, Ben and I are deep in the forest recording the impulse response of this extraordinary reverberation. At this point, this is the only underground tank we know (we will later realise there are more). We have borrowed an ambisonic microphone and put it on a tripod. Black rubbish bags are hair-banded round its legs. We have balloons and a zoom mic and LED torches. We are grinning ear to ear to be playing inside the huge roundhouse of rust to which we keep returning all year, each time with new toys and something different to capture.

11 February, 2026

The art piece that is tentatively titled Remains (WIP) has no single fixed format, but it begins with sound. The noises are initiated by me but mutated by the space they’re recorded in. Whatever it eventually becomes, the whole work will be shaped by the echoes, shadows, and reflections that haunt the abandoned military relics of South East Cornwall.

Today, Ben and I are sharing the first iteration of this work at Screen Cornwall’s immersive tech event Imagination Unleashed. We have been assigned one of the small, warm dressing rooms at Truro’s Hall for Cornwall, away from the bulk of the action. Our set-up comprises of four speakers, giving visitors a surround sound experience of the dripping sounds of the oil tank, and a microphone placed at the centre of the room. By making noise into this they can experience their own voices warped by a slightly diminished recreation of the 25+ second reverb that we have modelled with our balloon test underneath the forest, and feel part of the soundscape.

Along with this, interchangeable with the atmosphere track, we are sharing a sound piece that I’ve been working on. Remains is not intended to be just a simulation, but an artwork that speaks to many layers of reflection and absence. This multitrack audio element is being composed from sounds recorded in interaction with the tank and the enduring echoes of poems and tunes that I have written, read and sung in there, stripped of the initial sounds made by me. I am removed, but my shadows remain.

A Shadow | Of a Shadow | Of a Shadow
Things fade | In multiplicity
10 million years | 8 billion pounds | 1 child
An echo | Of an echo

The following is an excerpt from this work in progress, reduced to stereo:

Visitors trail by, popping their heads round the heavy dressing room door. We are a little surprised to see so many of them. We’ve assumed that most people will be wooed more by the VR headsets and immersive dome than by our tiny corner of the event. This is Imagination Unleashed’s Industry Day, and we are not industry. We are a pair of oddballs who spent some of our budget on boiler suits and didn’t not run around a forest pretending we were ghostbusters and Beastie Boys.

We invite them in a few at a time. Their responses are varied and unique, sometimes personal. Many chat, needing all the information before they’ll engage, or wanting to know more about what it is or how it’s done. One man loiters because the atmosphere reminds him of the calm of a Thai temple. A woman speaks into the microphone about the scene that doing so summons for her “I’m in a cave, and its cold…” Another notices the enormity of the space experienced in a tiny room. After I show a man how a chord can be constructed, one note at a time while each stays hanging in the air, he sings beautiful progressions that dance between all manner of diminisheds and major sevenths and fifths and oh, I don’t want him to leave. It becomes clear that many people are susceptible to the awe that drew me and Ben under the hillside to play.

Collaboration

I came to this project bearing burn marks from another. My previous collaborator and I had fallen out, leaving me flushed with a hot, humiliated sadness that I wasn’t keen to put myself through again. But research for an immersive project that would adapt my art practice from gathered physical materials to gathered sound had been funded, and although I don’t know anything about audio tech, I wanted to give Screen Cornwall something in return. I sent a message to technician, musician, and photographer, Ben Morgan. We’d only met a few times, but I knew that he and I shared a love of weird outdoor acoustic spaces, and that would have to be enough. Hey, any chance you’d like to try and quickly cobble together a completely new immersive audio piece with me?

Ben doesn’t just know his shit when it comes to audio, he also knows the deep indescribable pull of the spooky Cornish landscape and the urge to interact with it (his photography says it all). Over the course of 2025, he and I must have gone to the oil tank site six or seven times, becoming low-key obsessed with it. When we didn’t, we would meet up and talk about the project, sometimes check out another site, or attend a workshop like Bryony Gillard’s wonderful sonic exploration of Ford Park Cemetery. In the tank, we tried different musical instruments and vocal sounds, wading with wellies and torches through what Ben dubbed the “liquid tetanus” to bang a drum (gorgeous) or play an accordian (unbearable) alongside their own immense echoes. We improvised with striking metal, splashing stomps and voice. We found ways to operate in a space where conversation was often impossible. If you call an instruction it is instantly reflected into an incomprehensible mush, but you can just about understand a rising “here?”, a descending “no” or a flash of a torch.

Various strands of work were tried and abandoned. A musical composition we were writing to perform in the space ended up feeling wrong, and even if it hadn’t, Pauline Oliveros has already done that better. Brilliant cameraman Elffin Elleschild captured me performing in the space, but in editing the footage I realised I should have chosen different shots. Discovering what the project wasn’t about gradually helped us see what it might be.

Remains works with, and precisely because of, the odd ways that each of our brains operate in relation to the landscape, to project work, and each other. I am chaotic and yet somehow in charge, and Ben is methodical and has given me permission to nag him. My long rambling voicenotes about technology and hauntology and landscape and the interaction between eras are replied with ideas and examples and neatly composed spreadsheets with working links, and we run together in a building flurry of excitement until a week later we realise we’ve gone off task completely and shelve half of what we’ve ended up to use in another project. The cycle starts again.

As much because of this as of the potential outputs of the project, I can’t wait to find out what it is going to be next, and where it’s going to lead us, beyond the inevitable journeys back into the forest, looking for more ghosts.

TW: non-detailed references to sexual abuse

You must understand that I don’t count the sea as a metaphor for everything I run into. This one is Hamlet’s doing, not mine.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.

I’m delighted that Hamlet is in fashion again. The play that once touched my tortured teenage soul, then later exasperated me while watching performances “good god, he’s talking it through again, why doesn’t he just kill him?!”, gets reframed so many times through so many lenses that there is one for every moment, every stage of life. I loved the Lion King as much as I love Hamnet. When will the Muppets finally give it a go?

There are seas of troubles in our (also lamentably non-Muppet-cast) hyperconnected world that are immense: both seemingly elsewhere, and yet incalculably ever present. While the world burns, fascism rises, and reality blurs with computer generated imitation, it sometimes feels like we have to choose to focus on disasters in turn - a matter of “where do I direct my hopelessness this week?”. And this week, for me, it’s been Epstein. The breadth of influence evidenced in the Epstein files, the focus on the impact on powerful figures and the lack of it, the men whose identities are being protected while their victims are exposed, and now, the potential that Trump will escape reckoning in exchange for pardoning one of the architects of mass abuse.

These individual awfulnesses are, I suppose, among the scattered imprints of one of those things Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”1, huge concepts like climate change and black holes that can only be perceived in fragments of evidence. They join other marks of this great entity, those I’ve known all my life. A family member saying “well what did she expect, going to a house party with a bunch of sportsmen?”. A friend, assaulted by a stranger in her home, who never saw a conviction. A time, of the many times, I’ve been stroked or groped or grabbed, or told to smile, or to give the old man a kiss because it’s his birthday. Don’t be a spoilsport, this is just the way it is.

How do we fight something that is everywhere? And how, Hamlet, does taking arms, by opposing, seem like a sufficient plan to end a sea? You can’t fight liquid. But can you mope around like a Danish prince not doing anything useful? I’m not going to pretend I know the answer, but I know that for all my anger, I feel like I am not doing enough, for this or any human calamity. I thought I’d write a little about why that might be to help me think it through.

Taking arms demands, first of all, coping with the weight of acknowledging such objects in the first place. Reading an article like Carole Cadwalladr’s excellent piece on the paedophilic culture the Epstein case reveals requires a recovery period in itself. The anger and sadness are real and we can’t pretend otherwise. I remember friends who’d been involved in environmental campaigning groups eventually leaving for their own good because they became depressed by the constant reminder, through discussions and materials, of our species’ failures. The fight for your world is intertwined with the fight for your own sanity - with recognising your capacity, finding engagement and action meaningful, seeing the potential for change. If we don’t acknowledge our pain, how do we heal it? If we start from a position of hopelessness, or if we concentrate more on what we can’t change than the potential of participating, how long can we last?2

And however we take arms will look flawed, especially as individuals are affected differently. To torture a metaphor, some people are occasionally splashed by the sea, and others live on the tidal plain - we might wonder who we are to speak for lives more affected than our own. We all know some annoying dude who tries to make himself a symbol for “not all men” by speaking for women and turning the attention to his own Good Samaritan struggle. It’d be easy to get put off taking action by the examples of those who are, to some or many, “doing it wrong”, and the desire not to be them. But we still need those cringey men to talk to other men, and I guess we all need to get ready to take on some cringe behaviour ourselves, if we’re going to be heard.

Action is difficult, and effortsome, and it often feels unfair. Appealing to men (and sometimes women) to acknowledge the humanity, let alone equity, of women and girls, is energy-sapping work that we shouldn’t have to do. There is a wave of defensive fallacies ready to be unleashed by drawing attention to problematic practices and systems. And capitalism demands that you are too busy earning and purchasing to engage with the problem. The workload of administration required to even schedule, let alone engage in, activities that might be considered political or activist, teeters precariously atop a pile of shit that needs to be done, blown by a breeze of all the things that makes that hard.

Like I said, I don’t have the answer, but I might know two things that can help with all the above, at least:

1. Go small. Check in with one woman friend. Or engage with one article. Or talk to one man about something that girls and women face that they maybe don’t realise. We never know when something might make an impact. Small accumulates. I once told an ex about a party I’d just been to that I’d spent protecting a friend from a predatory man, where she’d not dared to tell even our loveliest male friends because she thought they’d brush it off, because we know they do that in their own conversations. He was shocked, and that changed the way he spoke to his friends about behaviour and attitudes that previously went unchallenged.

2. Go communal. Collective action distributes the workload, but it also distributes the hope, and the information, and eases the cringe, and quietens the loneliness of holding pain. And it’s effective, sometimes - from changing laws to changing minds. When it comes to this particular tentacle of the omnicrisis, we might need to dig out groups who really care about women’s rights from those who use it to spuriously mask their hatred for trans people or immigrants. I’m a huge fan of the Good Law project, who to my knowledge tick the “right side of history” boxes on all fronts.

I am ignorant and my thoughts are, as always, tangled and incomplete. The potentials for conversation and action are the only things that stop this feeling too unbearable to think about, so comment if you know what else should be here. Whether we swim, sail, or build a wall to block the sea of this catastrophic situation, drowning is not an option.

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I want to write about coastal communities, sandblasted but never smooth. Limpets soldered to the cracked rock face til they scatter, bored through, rings of yesterday. The gristle that lines the insides of my shoes, and the hot beat of summer on pale skin, forest pathways with simmering seaweed scent behind the muddy organics.

And, maybe, the hours spent looking out towards the resonant blue green grey black. How it undulates and echoes in endless lines towards you. How it slides beneath you when you’re out there, raising and dropping you unevenly, hypnotic in every direction like a fire, eternally reforming. You bounce and steady, rise and fall in arhythmic rhythm, unevenly weighted from valley to crest. I still miss it sometimes.

But I’ve learned to love the land, too. And art and people and rocks and Cornwall and joy. I want to write about it all. I might throw in some old stuff too. Hello again.

21 March 2024 | Boiler, Whitsand Bay

The sky is still grey, as it seems to have been all year, but the wind has calmed. My sadness is heavy and without focus - it wants neither company nor comfort. It arrived three days ago alongside an old fatigue, and has dug deeper with each day, numbing mindful transmitters as it buries itself in me. I carry it down the steep pitted cliff path, which has in places been bored down to a trough of a single foot’s width by this torrential season. Below, a thin line of white froth separates honey sand from a pale turquoise-grey sea. There are only one set of human footprints, a dog’s, and various gulls’.

It is not until I land on the beach that I am reminded of my tiny place in it - the rocks that tower, and the sea that stretches on to the end of everything. Its noise churns endlessly and beautifully but drowns no thoughts. The air is warmish, close, and I catch myself wishing I had brought a towel so I could sink into the peaceful pool that gathers around the rusty ship’s boiler that gives this beach its name. I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have, anyway.

I am here to visit the gallery, which is what I call the lump of ship that lives further up the beach. For years I’ve been coming here and decorating it with exhibitions of tideline debris - feathers, stones, driftwood, shells, nuts, egg casings, claws, charcoal, seaweed, string, bones and more. A ritual, and a habit. It is among the places I crave if I am ever cooped up inside for long. But when I get to it, I find that the neat shelves I curate have been spun around, tipped and half buried in heavy stones by the winter’s storms, and are lost to me. I walk on.

Along the beach some cliffside has subsided, leaving stains of red earth in rockpools and debris at the top of the beach. Beside an interesting-looking sea-worn stump I find a dolphin carcass, its rows of brilliant white teeth shining from a long lump of black and maroon flesh. It has been picked at recently, judging by fresh blood spattered on a nearby rock. A little further on, the stream that flows down from the land makes me think about Alan Grierson, “Scottish Alan” or “Mad Scottish Alan”, who lived on the cliffs and drank from their springs, and who you’d often find playing football with himself on the sand. He died last year, an old man.

I start to gather treasures, mostly cuttlefish bones, of which there is a bumper crop on the lower tideline. The odd bit of driftwood, especially those in unusual colours - green from elfcup fungus or red from - I don’t know where from. Tannins? The fallen earth, perhaps? I take them back to what was the gallery and start to see the potential in its newly exposed side. It has holes that could house some of the huge driftwood at the top of the beach, and a flat area to sit on, and its rust and patina are as beautiful as ever.

I work, and with work comes relief. Not happiness, perhaps, but purpose. I select and reject. I find two brilliant pinecones, but I don’t want pinecones today. Red lumps of wood go here, a mottled stick bridges a gap there. When sunshine starts to peek through dissolving cloud for the first time in what feels like weeks, I give it a withering look. I came here to talk to the sea, to bring it my sadness, not to be cheered up. But it wins me over, this brief glimpse of summer blue, and I have to admit to pleasure in wordless connection with the coast.

Occasional people and dogs walk past on the shoreline. It feels more acceptable for a solo dogless woman to be walking here than it sometimes does on land land, especially if she’s going back and forth with huge bits of wood, strings of flora and a bag of rubbish. I know when I’m done, and leave. A gull eyes me from its rock face nest as I tie a huge plastic tank I’ve found but can’t carry home to the railings by the steps. I mount the cliff path with more ease than I expected, and return to another world.

Salt is cubic, sharp-edged, associated with blood and sweat. It is a life-giving drip. A death-drawing spiker of pressure. It is pain but purification to an open wound. It has been used in rituals ancient and modern, poured protectively and thrown superstitiously over shoulders. Salt is the punishment for disobedience - Job’s wife turned to a pillar, Lyonesse flooded by seawater, an extension to flogged men’s torture. And it is the cause for it - its taxation leading the Cornish to smuggle and Ghandi to lead satyagraha against my greedy English forebears. Salt demands fairness.

The hardest part of making some art is deciding what to call it, perhaps for the same reasons it’s taken me until the age of 44 to change my name. Every possible meaning, association and pronunciation of a word comes hurtling in and dances with the others. In a brain that instinctively portmanteaus, spoonerises, and seizes on puns, picking words is an invitation to an avalanche. And how can you choose just one out of so so many? This year, I finally did it, and became Salt.

I feel like Salt has a particular relevance for a woman reaching middle age and drawing stronger boundaries. Must I come across as salty to achieve this? So be it. As I was recently reminded by someone against whose lechery I exercised these salty limits, Salt also has a sensuousness. It is flavoursome and bloody, detected with the tongue. It has been used as slang for sex, for female sexual partners, and for coarse salty humour. I like that it has space for anger, lust and wit.

Can I be both salt of the sea, and “salt of the earth”? Can I preserve, and bite, and learn to dissolve?

Most practically, it is a single-syllable noun that begins with S, which are the criteria with which I started my most recent search for a new surname. The one handed down from my father hadn’t felt right for years, and I realised that marrying out of it was unlikely, and not the prospect it was cut out to be. Why not take the word out of men’s hands.

I added to my middle names, too. While you’re on the Deed Poll forms, why wouldn’t you. Laurie, like my first name, Patricia, is a family ghost who lived with us in framed photographs and memories that weren’t mine. Martin is a migratory bird who leaves South East Cornwall and returns as I do, over and over, through the cycles of its life. Jane was already in my name. She’s my mum - I don’t know why put herself in there but I’ve decided she can stay.

Changing name is a little awkward, even embarrassing. Sometimes I have to re-introduce myself as “I am… but I used to be…”. I told someone my name the other day and they said “what a lucky thing to be called, so close to the sea” and I explained for the first time that my love for the coast is not nominative determinism, but, er… determined nomination? It feels clumsy and unsubtle to have named myself over something so literally and physically related to my sailing past and ongoing sea worship, a material I foreground in art-making and spread liberally over dinner. I even worry that when I say my name people might hear “Trish Assault”. But I guess that’s kind of punk.

These discomforts will pass. I already feel more at home in a new name. But then, I have always found great comfort in the new. It’s time to wear it in, and let it dissolve into the foggy waters of consciousness. I will type it into a thousand forms and try to spot which time it feels like it’s always been there.

Yours,
Tricia Salt

Introduction

This is an entry in what I hope will become a regular thing. We with ADHD can’t trust the regular thing - it is slippery and most likely to slide into a sporadic thing, or even a dead thing, without reason or desire. So I offer no promises, but an enthusiastic invitation to enjoy it while it is here, for each post might be the last.

I am captivated by the coast. I have already made quite a bit of work about the mutating borders between land and sea, and their intrinsic cyles. I may share that here, too. Recently, I have become interested by what this land/seascape tells us about ourselves. I want to consider relationships between liquid and life, colonialism and flotsam and jetsam, fluidity and permanence, tide and breath and menstruation, and Britishness and Cornishness and humanness and entanglement with all that is not. I am also a retired boat-dweller still reconciling the still life of land with the endlessly hypnotic movement of sea. I am held between the two.

So my intention is to capture the odd encounter with the endlessly overlapping line we call the shore, and jot down impressions and ideas. If that sounds remotely interesting, do subscribe to my subscribblings.

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6 March 2024 | Plymouth Hoe

I pull my arms close, fists in pockets. The wind intrudes in shards. We wonder when winter will stop waxing and waining and finally relent.

Earlier, from the (Crème de la) Cremyll ferry, I caught a glimpse of a sailboat that had come a cropper on its mooring. Only its mast and bowsprit poked out of the water like bare twigs in mud. While many of us have been paled and battered by the short days and storms and endless rain, some have drowned.

We march our backpacks down the coast road alongside traffic, looking for a sheltered spot where I can sketch and Ralph, who I’m visiting, can meditate. In all this grey you could almost miss the sprigging signs of spring. We are in Plymouth, after all - the concrete jungle across the Tamar - and the sky today is a single sheet, creased and monotone. But the signs are there, unfurling from muddy corners and lawned banks. Ralph leads a detour to introduce me to a rigorously clipped elder whose first coiled yellow-green leaves are beginning to poke from twiggy nooks. We admire it with reverent fingers.

Eventually we settle at a spot beneath a large tree on the route down to the Lion’s Den, in the lee of descending footpaths. I plonk myself between a broken bottle and a knot of roots strewn with skeleton leaves, behind a signpost that has long ago lost its sign. As I draw, a group of human bodies enter the water near the lido far ahead and swim to a meeting point mid-bay. They chat as five bobbing ball-heads, joyful and animated. I am embarrassed, as I always am, by their tenacity - I daren’t go in the water until May. I throw crayon and pen over pencil, perhaps hoping that my worthiness compares to theirs since I practice my craft so nobly.

The dead shorefront buildings over there are stacked against the rock face in filthy whites, grey brick and faded blue paint. It’s claimed they’ll be refurbished one day as cafés and watersports facilities, to escape the fate of so many of their decaying city centre siblings. I wonder. It’s hard to imagine the city that could be, when you’ve spent so long wading in what it is - crumbling shells of pre-Blitz theatres and post-Blitz nightclubs, lines of boards and charity shops in what used to be a high street, construction sites that look more bulldozed than built. Layers of haunting over haunting. This long seaside space offers some breathing space from that, at least.

The gentle buzz of vehicle and wave and the distant croaks and shrieks of seagulls are suddenly overcome by loud approaching voices, and the clinking of bottles in plastic bags. To enjoy Plymouth properly you need to embrace its grubbiness. Our focuses broken, fingers too tight cold to draw any more, we make way for their arrival and head to the pub.

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