Archiving the Ordinary: Memory as Language + Landscape

A re-introduction / welcome + the first photoessay in the tiny archive.

February 2nd seems as good a time as any for a fresh start. This place has grown dusty and neglected since I last posted in June - an essay about meeting magpies wherever I went - and I have spent a lot of time anywhere but here. The latter half of 2024 was a chaotic mix of both sharp and anticipatory grief, alongside the continuous rumble of our blissfully ordinary family life. The ordinary is something I’m more grateful for than ever.

I have been working hard at being playful with my writing craft, having nourishing creative conversations on and offline, and producing snippets of work I feel proud of. My intention for this space has also changed and developed over the past few months, moving away from a platform for sporadically sharing my creative non-fiction writing as I begin to take the process more seriously (and submissions are mostly looking for unpublished work).

With that in mind, I will be archiving the handful of old posts I have. I can feel the push and pull of this decision because they have had a good reception here and meaningful engagement, but I am also learning that the external validation cannot be a driving factor for me in creating work.

But there wouldn’t be a need for all this navel-gazing preamble if there weren’t something else. I’ve written about the tangent this space is taking on my updated About Me page, but in a nutshell: my attention has snagged on the notion of archival, meaning-making and memory collection in this garden-variety life, and I am craving a place to explore it.

There is a sensation, as one year transitions into another or January becomes February becomes March, that time is gathering pace at a rate it is impossible to keep up with. And there’s a reason for that: novelty and proportion. As children, so many things are new every day. And in the totality of life, one year makes up a pretty significant chunk. The more years we have under our belts, the more life becomes a series of repeated experiences.

As each passing year converts […] experience into automatic routine, the days and weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse. -William James

I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I want this chapter of my life, and all those that will hopefully follow, consigned to a greyscale blur. In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman campaigns for the practice of seeking novelty in the mundane.

Plunge more deeply into the life you already have […] and any period of life would be remembered has having lasted twice as long.

I want to remember.

So what can you expect going forward? Well, the plan is threefold:

• Taking Inventory: A weekly photoessay with the connective tissue of words telling the story of the past seven days.

• Paying Attention: Long-form writing sparked by a glimpse of a moment, a tiny kernel of experience through the lens of memory collection.

• Cutting + Sticking: A place to gather the things that have been capturing my attention each month that feel worth sharing.

I’m not expecting this to be everyone’s (anyone’s?) cup of tea, but it feels necessary to me. If there is one thing I’m learning it’s that there is not time for everything, there never will be, but when an idea won’t quieten then it deserves some space to grow.

Right. Enough waffle.

Taking Inventory #1

I started my week with a 150 mile round trip eastwards. I set off early because the car park at this particular hospital is what I imagine purgatory to be like, driving endlessly in circles having just missed out on a space. After making my deal with the NHS parking demons, I bought a pretty bad coffee from the cafeteria and used the spare ninety minutes I had to eat my homemade stem ginger cookie (sometimes I food prep, and when I do I feel gloriously smug) and start mapping out the bones of, well, this post actually. The student I was assessing worked in Elective Care - a place where people have their blood taken and their heart monitored in the days before a planned operation - and kept referring to me as her “little examinator”. I’m thinking of having that added to my ID badge.

Back at my desk, I sat down to figure out how else I’m going to document the day-to-day. With my new sticker book (a fancy hardback called The Antiquarian) I decorated my bog standard A5 day-to-view diary. The Daily Archive is where I plan to jot down the details of the day, the really dull stuff - where I went, what I did, how many stories I was blackmailed into reading the children at bedtime - so that it can get out of my head but not take up space anywhere else. No thoughts or feelings, just the facts. I have some other methods I’m working on too which I’ll share at some point.

I taught the final session of my current group’s antenatal course on Tuesday evening. Sometimes when I’m packing my bag - complete with knitted boob, a pack of nappies, an amnihook and a ventouse - to trek back out in the dark after a long day at work, I can wonder what I’m doing. Why I’ve put this extra responsibility on my plate. And then I get some feedback like this (above, left) and I remember that maybe I’ve made a tiny difference to someone’s experience.

I ended up as part of a strange little walking group this week. I visited an adolescent mental health unit in the flat fenlands to carry out an assessment, and the student I was observing had promised one of the teens a walk if they managed to eat some lunch. It was a bracing day but I was grateful for the fresh air as I metabolised the situation, acutely aware that one day my seven-year-old will be an adolescent trying to navigate a world that can make you think you need to shrink. I followed the pair at a distance, not wanting to intrude, clutching my clipboard and breathing deeply. We reached the overgrown train track and turned back toward the hospital.

Spot the curly cat tail? Jam Sandwich helped me along with moving my body after spending two hours hunched over my laptop writing a tiny essay (an essayette!) about the sky, Sagittarius and a teapot with a star cloud of steam.

On Thursday I drove to the coast to visit a small community hospital rehabilitating people after suffering a stroke. The care I saw there filled my heart with hope. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity of being five minutes from the North Sea so took my lunch to the coastal path and turned my face toward the January sun. The sound of the waves, the smell of the salt. It was the perfect antidote to an intense few days.

When I worked shifts in the hospital I never had that weekend feeling. My days off fell whenever and wherever. Good in some ways, lonely in others. Now I work a regular 9-5, and particularly during very busy seasons, the weekends hold so much more weight. I walked along Exhibition Road to the Royal Geographical Society for an ‘In Conversation With’ event on Friday evening. Pandora Sykes was interviewing Oliver Burkeman (this is an OB heavy post). I had the most perfect seat, a little alcove all to myself flanked by thin pillars and with a direct line of sight to the stage. It felt good to venture back to the city and do something that made me feel like myself.

We spent Saturday afternoon around the table painting and writing and creating a zine called The Catastic Cat Parade (that last one being the brainchild of the seven-year-old). Spiderman painted a sunrise. And today, Sunday, we will head out into the bright February day and begin our search for a change of scenery.

Spring is on its way. The light will get brighter, more persistent. This week I am planning to keep writing, keep moving, keep noticing all of the ordinary.

xo