Writing

Sunday morning and Liam squelched back down the lane at the end of a solo dog walk looking like a sodden assassin, sealed head to foot in black waterproofs with his beanie and two hoods pulled low over his eyes. Even Bruno - who loves all things water - shivered by the back door, clearly fed up of rain being blown into his ears by the gusty wind.

I am in disgrace at the farm. Again. Despite my best efforts to be just a little bit useful during these cold and soggy winter months, I keep getting it wrong. As it turns out, the most helpful thing that I can do as a volunteer labourer is to labour, in silence.

It feels to me as if this Covid year has brought us face to face with our identities. While we have been locked down and regulated by tiers, our movements governed by fear and social responsibility, our longings have revealed what matters most in our lives and therefore who we are. I am conscious that we have all learnt what we most cherish by its absence.

This strikingly visual noun phrase from Alice Oswald’s poem ‘Dart’ kept me company on my walk this morning. Nearly forty-eight hours into Storm Christoph, the river ran huge and fast and the ground oozed sponge-saturated beneath my wellies.

My sister tells me that I am a fixer. And she is right. I am the daughter of a fixer and I am pretty sure that one of the nucleotides in the spiral helix of my DNA is named ‘Fixing’.

As the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education — https://www.dur.ac.uk/creativitycommission/ — makes clear, ‘teaching for creativity’ is, and should be, a vital part of what we do in the classroom.