Why a blank page is never the problem

Bramble & Briar #84

Wafting its scent across the garden and up to the back door, the sarcococca comes into bloom and imprints its presence on the new year

Happy New Year! Happy new year. Have I seen you yet this year? I can’t even remember who I’ve wished a happy new year to – some people are getting a double dose, some, quite possibly, none at all. Surely no one takes offence? Happy new year to you, anyway.

The new year is beginning to emerge from the excited kerfuffle of the holidays, the weather beginning to return to something approaching more typical for the season, frost and snow in retreat, the gift of successive dry days. January looks back at me with that old, cold, vacant stare; the familiar blank page challenge – well... here we are, then. Let’s see what you got. I have no idea what I got. I usually manage to dig something up out of somewhere.

I long ago realised the blank page is all mouth and no trousers. Throw any old rubbish down on it and it slinks off, any power it once held evaporating like dew in the morning sun. Then all you have to deal with is the inner critic, and that’s quite another matter. But at least by this point you have a little traction, and the wind at your back.

2025 is beginning to bed in. Like a plant, settling into its new home in the border. Like the rose I thrust into a hastily scraped out hole in the herb bed before Christmas, pushing aside the tulip bulbs I’d planted there just a few days previously, easing heavy crumbs of moist soil back in and down and around the bare roots, before watering it in. Did I remember to water it in? I don’t recall, but the rain that followed will have done the job for me. All the same, I should visit it later today, and bring a small offerring of compost. Welcome to your new home, I’ll say. Thought I’d give you the chance to get yourself a little sorted before popping over.

I watch the dogs making a bed for themselves on the sofa, and it reminds me of a plant settling in. Nell in particular is fastiduous, gathering up throws and cushions and arranging them busily into intricate and voluminous structures before being content to collapse into the nest she’s made. Evie is more haphazard and easier to please, frequently found nestled down with the pad from one of the dog beds on her head. In either case, circling, as anyone knows who’s had the privilege of watching a dog make themselves comfortable, will be involved, the animal winding itself downwards into the security of the hollow they’ve constructed from soft furnishings, a pampered animal’s domestic equivalent of the fox hole. It’s too cold for much activity in the top layer of the soil just now, but I know that soon the rose will be doing something similar underground, albeit with less circuitous intent; plant roots are inquisitive and determined, and only the most impenetrable of barriers will cause them to turn back on themselves. But that instinct to flatten yourself into the ground, to pull yourself down and make sure of your anchorage before leaping up, biting at the sky and being ready for anything the world might think of throwing your way – that, it occurs to me, is as common to roses and spaniels as it is to you or me.

I know that just now, I am flattening myself to the ground.