In the morning in the Forum bookshop I sit up in the pulpit of the old Methodist chapel, looking out across a congregation of books and picturing this space filled with people dancing to the “silent book disco” I’ve just been told about. But there’s no one dancing here now, so I finish signing books and talking to the bookseller, and set off on my bike for the high ground between England and Scotland, the road climbing quickly to a ridge of knuckled stone and the weather closing in around me.
I am cycling – as well as jumping on the odd train – to as many bookshops as I can get to in a week. Having conducted my last book tour entirely online, it feels good to be outside again: meeting people and holding books and putting miles beneath my wheels. It’s been a while since I’ve been out in the world like this, and I’m interested to know what the place is like. The roads are quiet all the way to Carlisle. There are Ukrainian flags hanging from windows, and builder’s vans outside every other house, and the occasional stink of a lawnmower. The hedgerows are getting ready to come out.
The hyphen continues to serve a dual purpose: it both connects and separates. In justified text, it divides into appropriate syllables a word that lands on a line break, a task that machines have not yet mastered; and it is instrumental in the formation of compounds, where it is famously subject to erosion. Yesteryear’s “ball-point pen” became the “ballpoint,” “wild-flowers” evolved into “wildflowers,” and “teen-age” found acceptance as “teenage” in most outlets (but not in this one).
‘You have to feed the earth the way you feed people,’ my grandfather used to say. To me, it was such a beautiful statement, full of nature’s wisdom. We took from the earth, so we had to give back to it. Summers here were short and often cool and rainy, but in his orchard strawberries started turning red in June and tomatoes ripened all the way into September. And our apple and cherry trees bloomed and bore fruit year after year, fragrant in the spring and delicious in the fall. To me, this was the circle of life, and our excrement was as inseparable from it as we humans were inseparable from nature. It wasn’t ugly filth but potent fertiliser we carried within us.
Even our language constructs suggested that. In Russian, the word for fertiliser is udobrenie, a derivative of dobró, meaning good and rich. So the common toilet jokes revolved around that concept too. When my little cousins were being potty trained, we called the moment they had to go as giving out dobró or bogatstvo – the riches. I knew that other people, who lived in big apartment buildings, didn’t have septic tanks, but I was sure that their riches also went back into the soil somehow. If not, what would they eat? The earth couldn’t produce forever without being fed – it would grow barren. I thought the whole world lived the same way.
Each time, I dutifully followed Leave No Trace principles, which maintain that except in especially sensitive ecosystems like deserts or river corridors, the best practice for disposing of human waste in the wilderness is to bury it in a cat hole that is six inches deep and at least 200 feet from any water. Generations of outdoor enthusiasts have been taught that doing so avoids polluting water, minimizes the risk of spreading disease, and maximizes the rate of fecal decomposition.
Yet as the number of people using public lands has exploded in recent decades, scientists and land managers are pushing back against this time-honored wisdom. With so many more people playing—and pooping—outside, they say, it’s time to update our backcountry poop etiquette for the 21st century.
Before the Nanki train lines were blasted from the mountains, and the lonely National Route 42 was carved out alongside the coast, these highland paths were in active use. People young and old would walk and haul their goods, stopping at a teahouse at the top of a pass for some yomogi mochi, or mugwort rice cakes, or maybe a few dango rice balls slathered with soy sauce and grilled over charcoal.
We’ve glimpsed deep, eternal springs of grace. We’ve seen a sign that the world will be made new. We can participate in that work of renewal. We can bring joy to others. But, to do so, I have to get to know it first. I have to take Easter’s dare to dive deep into hope.
Of course I am not suggesting that the publisher of Julian Barnes’s new novel are issuing a warning to the naïve or unwary reader who only expects or hopes for a good story. In truth only a reader coming new to his work might look only for that. There is always a story in his novels, sometimes half-buried, but you read them because perhaps more than any of his contemporaries belonging to the fine vintage laid down almost half a century ago he satisfies Austen’s description of the art and craft of fiction.
Poguemahone is a love song to the underbelly of London in the early 1970s with Brendan Behan newly dead, and fondly remembered for ‘pissing in the fish tank’.
Everyone is watching and rewatching The Exorcist and listening to ‘Tubular Bells’ and life is edgy and urban with band members and actors dropping into Nano’s club under Piccadilly Circus and no one has time to go to bed or work.
Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an earful
And I get tearful when I’ve downed a drink or two.