Love, and other stuff -

- including poetry, little children, and the Lake District.

One of the only sensible things my psychiatrist said to me was “You should take a holiday in February”. It was the month when depression would bite hard, and last year it bit to the bone. Because that psychiatrist had pointed to the winter cold and darkness, and because every year they were proved right, this December I started to plan a trip somewhere sunny.

And, in the first week of February, I ended up in the Lakes. It’s where my heart wants to be. It makes me smile, and feel safe, and happy, and I needed that more than the sun – plus a nice pub with a fire and a pint and several dogs.

As it happens, I got the sun as well, and there is nowhere more beautiful in the whole world than Cumbria in sunshine, and that is a fact.

I had three nights in the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel – a county house hotel which looks and smells like an Agatha Christie novel and has a loyal clientele which includes me and probably several members of the gentry who have fallen on hard times. It has a special place in my writing heart, not just because of the climbers’ bar, and the folk night, and the woodchip and pine-panelled corridors, and the deep sofa and log fire, and the deep ghylls with their streams of moss pouring from every crag and stunted tree - but also because it was where I first realised that place of Monkey in my last book, Towards a General Theory of Love.

And love took me back to the Lakes this week. Or at least, I wrote about love – and animals – with the youngest children in a Cumbrian primary.

Writing with little children is its own creature. Little children are completely unforgiving. They cannot be ordered about or distracted or manipulated. They will not be reasoned with, and dialogue is useless. They can only be engaged and interested and comforted and entertained and delighted. Every single time I work with a class of children under the age of eight, I am immediately asked whether I’m a boy or a girl. It’s not bad manners. It’s curiosity, and it has to be met with respect.

There is no let-up in a class of five year olds. No moment where you can set them to work and take a breather. And every exercise has to be different, and to follow swiftly on the next. We start with striking the poet’s pose, which five year-olds are very good at – staring into the mid-distance whilst thinking wise thoughts, stroking our imaginary beards and muttering “interesting”. And we shared idea about what poetry is (a song without music, said one little boy), and who writes it, and how.

And then we set to it, sharing our favourite things – places, and sweeties, and animals, and colours. Everyone loves thinking about favourites, so crowd participation is not a problem. I write some down, and after a few minutes we insert “I love you like” – and then – surprise! – we have a beautiful poem, which you can see below. We don’t need to use words like metaphor, or simile, but we do talk about our senses, and what they are, and how we only know about the world because we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch it. With those elderly seven-year old poets of Year 2, I’m able to squeeze some sensory details from them to add to their love poem – but in Year One, I have a little girl nibbling my knee, and a boy who wants to hug me, so instead we move swiftly to coloured pencils and illustrating our poems.

Then it’s time to sit cross-legged for a story poem – in this case, It’s “Oi Duck Billed Platypus”, the latest book in the “Frog on a Log?” series by Kes Gray and Jim Field.

We think about what rhyme is, and about how poetry can be fun and silly, as well as serious and sad, and we pick our noses – or at least, around 25% of the children do at any given moment.

Earlier in the week, the school had been visited by a mobile petting zoo – luckily, I didn’t have a split-second to consider the ethics – and we considered all the animals they met, and what habitats they might live in. Then we invented rhymes – and because poetry is a place where you can make things up, we write down that the meerkat stands on a beermat, and the snake slithers on a birthday cake, and the owl lands on a leopard-print towel. And we all strike the poet-pose and stroke our beards and mutter “interesting”, but now some of us cannot sit still for a moment longer, and my knee is sodden, so it’s time to end with our conclusion that ALL of us can write poetry, and most of them rush off for dinner, and some of them hang around to show me their drawings.

This happens three times, and then school’s out, and I’m under Skiddaw, topped with snow, and there’s two hours left for walking before the light fades, so I drive into Borrowdale, and walk down the long track and the path to Black Moss Pot, the lichen almost glowing on the walls, the sapphire light of the river, and every tree makes me smile and the moss is so deep I can’t feel the rock beneath it, and there’s an owl and then another, in the dark.

For our paying subscribers, we’ll demonstrate our love to you with a February Writing Hour – the date will be announced this weekend!