Q&A: about my new book

~ Julia Kendal ~ Leave a comment

A short version: I’ve published my first poetry collection. It’s called Unborn, it explores themes of family, fertility and identity, and you can buy it here.

A longer version: This is a book about bearing life. The poems are an exploration of family and identity, faith and loss, during the hidden years trying to conceive. They speak of grief for what never was and hope not yet arrived. It’s a tender topic and personal piece of work. It’s also a common but still comparatively taboo subject. I could rely on the statistics (one in seven couples) but I’m more compelled by the stories which touch each of our lives – whether it’s your own experience, or that of a family member, dear friend, treasured colleague… If it feels like this book might help you or someone you know to feel a bit less lonely or a bit more seen in tough times, I’d love it if you shared it with them.

Why did you write this book? 

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On the autumn equinox

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Blackberries grow along a log. One berry is already ripe, the others still red.

It’s come a day later than I expected. A welcome reprieve. This month has been one of abrupt pivots. After a dour summer, two weeks of heatwave give way to days of rain. The water butt is refilled but the damp soil has no need of it. The temperature drops below 10℃ overnight for the first time in months. And after today, the nights inch ever deeper into time. 

I swap the postcard on the mantlepiece; summer for autumn. Pull the water kefir grains out of the fridge door. For a few weeks, they were one thing too many to keep alive. Now, a little sugar and some fresh water should be all that it takes to wake up. On a roll, I grab a bag of flour and another glass jar. Another go at a sourdough starter. As I wipe the counter clean, I think of rye flour too. But perhaps that’s a bit too much fermented life for this season. I’ll review my motivation in a few days’ time. 

I change my jumper twice for sitting outside. Settle on a winter woolly for an autumn breeze. It’s warm when the sun shines, but the wind is confirmedly cool as the clouds pass across. 

There are uncertainties, unexpected. I am surprised by my surprise. There has rarely been a time when life has just run. A season is made of many seasons. The garden reminds me of this. Summer lingers in the reddening tomatoes. Autumn settles in with a blackberry hue. Winter hints in the browning leaf edges.  Endings, beginnings, middles coexist. 

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Three stories: Rootbound, Unearthed, Earthed 

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Purple salvia flowers with a bee landed on one of them

In the last couple of weeks, the heat has finally returned to our little patch of Hampshire earth. Some of the plants (clematis, salvia, nasturtiums) have reached the stage where you feel you can see their growth daily. And with the sun’s return, I too seem to be waking up.

Since November, I have had a list above my desk labelled ‘for winter’. It includes things like ‘mustard yellow woolly socks’, ‘vitamin D tablets’, ‘fire pit’. It quotes a favoured line from a Jenny King poem, ‘The midday peace is warm and edible’*. And it reminds me to keep reading. 

There have been a lot of books through winter (a season I understand intellectually but rage against to my bones). These are three of them. Three books, three women, three contexts; the stories they weave join dots in my mind and are manifold. They are all part memoir, but they are also much more. Tracking the history of land, of roots, of connection. Of learning and of changing. They have been good for me. You may like them too. 

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Shame vegetables lurking at the bottom of the fridge

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Photograph of beans, mushrooms, courgette and red pepper

Venture into the world of sustainable living, and you’ll quickly hit upon the idea of seasonal and local food. There is much that can be good about low-impact food. A confidence about how it has been produced. Freshness. Investing in smaller businesses and a food system that works for people and planet. We don’t have an exclusively plant-based diet, but our food ethos attempts to be, in the beautiful words of Yasmin Khan, ‘seasonal, abundant, plant-focused, and communal’*. And so a weekly vegetable box delivery forms the backbone of our meal planning. 

But here is my confession: 

I do not want to eat a seasonal british diet. 

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The weekend the swifts came

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Swifts flying in the sky above a tree

Despite three years of a biology degree, everything I know about bird identification I learned from my husband. There was a time when birdsong came and went with ignorant appreciation. I enjoyed the symphony without being able to name a single instrument. That’s ok; there’s beauty enough in the simple wonder. But over the past few years – and particularly those with the vernacular of ‘lockdown’ unexpectedly inserted – I have been slowly, accidentally, picking up some of the nuances to be able to name the visitors to my view as I tap away on the keys. 

To the point where this year, it was me who pointed to the sky and said: “Is that the first swifts?”

Two sets of eyes scanned the skyline.

It was. 

Black arrows cut back and forth across blue. They’d likely travelled from the African continent to be here, and signalled this happy news: warmer weather was here. 

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What’s next?

~ Julia Kendal ~ Leave a comment
Photograph of path through fields and a hill in the distance at sunset

A reflection from late autumn finally posted in the chill of early January. Call it late, call it a symptom of these new year days and pandemic years, when time seems to slip and slide and leave you grasping.

I’m not sure if this moment is full on autumn, or the first bite of winter. We left town for the hills one Sunday. Clocks claimed it was mid-afternoon but the oncoming dark made it hard to place, hard to shake the sense of enclosing night. Given the hour, I say ‘hills’ but really it was ‘hill’. One hill. Height enough to let go every sigh and find the corners of ourselves that the countryside seems to guard in our absence. Our feet found one hill, but maybe it really was ‘hills’. One folds into another, a ridge that you could follow on your way to the Cotswolds, or turn the other way to skirt the edge of London. We stay where we are. On one hill. Eyes resting on another, and finding the pocketed fields below.  

We left. Left the warmth, encased ourselves in winter coats (should have been washed before this first wearing?), scarves, hats that didn’t quite keep out the gnaw of the wind on one side. An ear bore the brunt of this foray. Pass indifferent flocks, turn right at the trees and enjoy their shelter before heading up again. A slope that felt gentle but, on turning round, had opened up the sunset sky. Stop. Breathe. Exchange humble notes on this messy and beautiful world. 

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Accidental rebels in a London park

~ Julia Kendal ~ 1 Comment

The hour was golden. The deer, dappled bambi types, stood unperturbed by the water. The swifts, closer than ever before, banqueting in the sky surrounding us. Not a single other human around.

Because, it turned out, the park had shut thirty minutes earlier.

We would learn this in ten minutes’ time, as we ambled between two lines of trees in the general direction of home. The park ranger was kind as he pulled up, said he’d meet us at the gate to set us – accidental rebels and interlopers – free. 

But that was still minutes away.

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Home comforts through a locked down life

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Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

Well, these have been some months. An uncharted and unsettling world, experienced from the enduring familiarity of home. In June last year we finally left the flat. Walked down the street. Saw the hand-drawn declarations of support for the NHS with our own eyes. Learned to stick together and keep our distance. We have been fortune to see the sea; spring-cleaning for the soul. We have been able to spend time with our families without the glare of screens. 

Still, a year on, most of life has remained within these walls. I thought I would turn to our bookshelves to travel, explore. I tried Robert MacFarlane’s ‘Mountains of the Mind’. Wonderful, sweeping, but too vast and distant for my current reality. I started novels of heartbreak, but found myself reluctant to pick them up after a day of work and news overload. I have learned that in this current life, I seek to stay safe, cocooned. I return to favourites (Tolkien, Atwood, Barbery). And I read about food. 

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Make do and mend, but not alone

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Photograph of plant pots with orange nasturtiums flowers and white bacopa plant in a black upcycled speaker.

My garden is falling apart. The bike basket – the one with a broken attachment which I removed before planting flowering heather in it – is now more absence than wicker. There are old speakers, which a house move consigned to obsolescence so I spent a happy half an hour removing the electronics and planting the box with nasturtiums, and then with sprawling water hyssop. Well, the side has fallen off, now propped back up as a pretence to civilised living. This has been our garden for a few years, and time is taking its toll. 

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Lockdown life: How to have a day off without leaving home

~ Julia Kendal ~ 1 Comment

Lockdown life might be shifting a bit in the UK, but many people will still be doing most or all of life at home. We have been reflecting on how to differentiate between work and home life when it all takes place in one place. This builds on the thinking we’ve been doing in recent years about what healthier life rhythms look like. It comes after long periods of being too busy, filling evenings and weekends and running ourselves into the ground until a holiday, which would take us up to neutral but never quite into the positive. We have come to believe strongly in the notion of a day off. Not just a day without undertaking paid employment. A proper day off from all forms of work, including emails, messages, tasks around the house and errands to run outside, It will come as no surprise that often those days involved: good food, coffee shops, gardening, and of course, escape from the city to the coast. 

Some of these elements are not possible now in lockdown life; others take place differently. But with work and home all occupying the same four walls, it feels more important than ever to have a proper day off. And these principles – which will apply beyond lockdown life – are helping us to do so. Many of them we learned from other people. Some of them we do pretty well, others remain more of a challenge. We are, as always, a work in progress. 

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