Finding my place

photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

While this blog was still inside my head, it was going to be about places shaping what I write. A portrait of the seaside town I live in.

Gonzo, my creative brain, said: Tell them about his ear-whiskers!

Then Sniffy Neg, my inner critic, said: Piffle. Nobody else sees places as people.

Bet they do. Somebody else got me thinking this way. Long ago, when I lived in London. I read Peter Ackroyd’s novels (Chatterton, Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee and others). He showed me London has a spirit, is its own being. Which made absolute sense to me. I thought: I should get to know places better.

There’s that first intuition of welcome or otherwise. Wandering around the honeypots and hidden spots. Picking secrets from local news, history, myths and dialect. Noticing the tiny miracles that happen while I'm there, my blunders and sorrows. If Gonzo gets involved, places become personal to me; a mashup of real and imagined.

Allow me to introduce one of my exes, a nearby seaside town. She’s a found aunty, gathering up lost souls. She’s as young as she fancies, shabbiest chic, with glitter and grime in her many ley lines. She’ll give you a big piss-stinky hug, palm your best interests into her handbag, and make you drunk. She turns day to night and night into a burlesque, dancing through her beautiful graveyards with the ghosts of former lovers. At dawn, she’ll promise that you’re special, then leave you to the gulls until the pubs open.

Sniffy: Cheesus. Why not use a street map like proper adults do?

Because, without a sense of place, I feel like a flimsy cut-out in a cardboard set. As it turns out, exploring is primal. My inner monkey susses out the environment, while my subconscious searches for belonging and identity. Anyway, finding my truth of places makes me happy, and the places don’t seem to mind.

Some are harder to parse. Another of my exes is an old shapeshifter. This river town can be a knight in bloody armour, religious martyrs, a radical, pigeon man, or witches. Always the same flinty gaze, an unspoken dare to rebel. They’re a maze of alleyways which whisper magic and skip time. They’ll let you glimpse their bonfire heart, but few earn it. What they offer is the freedom of their indifference. They know we’ll be gone in a blink, while their ancient bones will go on burning.

Sniffy: Are you done? I need to get my toes uncurled.

Hang on. Look along our top bookshelf at all the person-places both real and imagined: Istanbul and Colombo, Oxford canals, The House and Cloud. Just this week I’ve read brilliant poems inspired by genius loci on Bluesky, an essay about listening to river spirits. Many people feel places as deeply as I do.

That’s my point here. Thank you for listening.

Sniffy: sniffs

Gonzo: I love his ear-whiskers but he's ever so shy. Let's talk about his beach crows sometime.