I wish we were migrating herd animals moving south for winter

All day it’s been raining – intermittent downpours, constant drizzle. A few fragmented thoughts this week.

I wish we were still migrating animals, heading south for winter with our herd, travelling far and never overgrazing the same spot for too long. Herbivorous herd animals dig at the soil, graze, browse. They wholly alter the land through their behaviour, ensuring new types of flowering vegetation can grow, diversifying the flora and fauna in the ecosystem, and – when wild and left to behave according to their nature – move on before they destroy the precious top soil. They search for new spots where they haven’t taken too much. They find waterholes which haven’t dried up. Places of great abundance. In a balanced world, they leave before their medicine has become poison. Other herbivores will arrive, and benefit from the previous presence of other creatures. They will graze differently, contributing to the biodiversity of the ecosystem. On the whole, we humans have long abandoned our nomadism and tend to throw down our anchors and accumulate things and overwork the earth until there is nothing. Our ancestors once moved – seeking greener pastures, fruit trees, cooler or warmer climes, space and safety away from adversaries and natural disasters. I love it where I am but after four years, almost, I feel it in my bones: it may be time to go.

We find ourselves moving into a bit of a liminal place, winding down, wanting to leave and planning to (short-term? long-term?) but not full-in. We have community here, roots, a life – we also have all these things elsewhere. We love this place, we enjoy our lives here, but also we have this tendency to move, and a feeling that many of the things we love about this place are drying up.

In the last decade, Edinburgh has changed dramatically. Rents have hiked. Independent cafes and restaurants have closed (including beloved vegan eateries), increasingly replaced by chains. A decade ago, this city was far more affordable than London. My rent in a shared flat was £250. Creative businesses flourished. Quirky teahouses doubled as antique shops. Impromptu theatres or anarchist cafes popped up in abandoned buildings. Circus folk practised walking tight ropes in the park; by night they danced with fire. City centre streets were functional: bookshops, cafes, pubs, post offices. Now they increasingly cater to an unsustainable and poorly managed tourism industry – with more and more shops selling tartan tat or Harry Potter merchandise and blasting out techno bagpipes. I don’t feel I’m seeing this through binary spectacles: the city still has brilliant bookshops and coffee shops but the more creative, makeshift and independent and the grassroots activism feels increasingly divorced from the beautiful part of the city. The cost of living crisis is insane here. I don’t know how everyone is surviving. The minimum wage is untenable. Rent caps are soon to disappear. A coffee costs around £4. Creatives are being forced further away from the medieval city and nature that beckoned them, settling for suburbs and commuter towns further away. This used to be a 15-minute city where people could afford long spontaneous days with friends, afternoon coffees that become dinners. Now, pushed for time and forced to make every moment productive, more and more people are having to schedule socialising as people do in bigger hubs. We’ve noticed an upsurge in violence and theft among young people – so have local schools. Britain, more generally, has been changing. I have still not processed Brexit, which meant a severing of ties with the EU, and an end to free movement across an entire continent. Visas are attainable only by the very affluent. We could stay and be part of the change but we’re tired and cold and no one is revolting so I’m guessing everyone else is too tired and cold, too.

I also feel a pull towards something different. This past year we’ve been on the road a lot: France, England, Spain, Hungary, Romania, the US, Turkey. Some of it has been for work, some to see family and friends; at least one trip was a holiday. Having lived in several countries and cities, I know everywhere has problems, different problems, but there comes a point where you have to consider which are your non-negotiables. Much of Europe is significantly better value still; two weeks ago in Granada I paid 4 euros for a tostada, 2 euros for a good coffee and 20 euros for a 2-hour train journey bought on-the-spot. France, Italy and many other countries have functional farmer’s markets. They don’t sell novelty items like squirrel meat or elderberry vodka jam but fresh, everyday produce: the best seasonal vegetables and fruit, bread, olive oil, among other things. The council still employ and adequately pay street cleaners who wash the streets everyday. Their bureaucracy, I know, is a Kafkian nightmare, but at least they have nice affordable things. And decent weather: 10-15 degrees Celcius is perfectly comfortable in winter. Dry children’s parks. Big pavements. Pedestrian friendly, car-free streets. Late night cafes and restaurants. Affordable spa cultures. Testament to how corrupt local councils in Britain can be, in the late 20th century, Barnsley and several other Northern towns were allocated funds to build bath houses for the miners, but the council members allegedly pocketed the money. Sometimes movement isn’t about chasing comfort but life. There is a children’s book which perfectly articulates how I feel: Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea. I have always related to two characters, whose aspirations are polar opposite. Maya is an English orphan who wants little more than adventure, which she finds in the Brazilian Amazon. Clovis is a poor child actor and part of a touring theatre troupe who dreams of stodgy puddings: sticky toffee pudding, apple crumble and custard, spotted dick – emblematic of his far-away native England. I pivot between both states, wanting the cosiness of home and the novelty of being on the road. Through home and routine, we find rest, security, and rootedness. Life also expands when our days are marked by novelty and learning. The years seem fuller. Of course, we don’t need to physically change our location to mix things up, but sometimes it’s the easiest solution, when our everyday routines are relentless, like when we have a 9-5 or a young child. Relentless routines, I have found, can feel novel with a change of scenery.

The pull to move is not simply escapism. We don’t want to knock everything down and start afresh. After a lovely weekend, a good friend just flew back down south. Already I feel sad. I wish I could herd up all the people I care about, and all the things I love about the city, and find a commune together somewhere beautiful: somewhere without cars, but with good infrastructure. Somewhere with living, vibrant food. Wildlife. Enchantment. Good weather. But also, as a herd, I wish we were not tied to a place. When the food is dead we move onwards, looking for something more alive. Actually, better: we never let the food become dead. When the top soil is wearing down and our presence is too heavy, we move along. We leave before we have overstayed our welcome. When the trees stop bearing fruits. And when the cold comes, we move south. And then when wild fires start blazing and the droughts hit we return north. I don’t want to run away but migrate with our herd. When we move around, like other grazing herbivores, we diversify places with our presence and behaviour, but move along before the relentlessness sets in, before we become too automatic, before we amass too many things; we improve the situation elsewhere, cumulatively with what we’ve learnt from the place before: enjoy the fruits from the tree but don’t take too many lest there be none left for the birds or all the other animals and then we lose those things and also the pollinators and everything else that made this place so beautiful. Spread ideas and find new ideas out beyond the humdrum, brushing up against other people.

Modern life restricts this (innate?) need to move. Freedom of movement has been challenged in recent years, but everywhere, migrants still relocate seeking a better quality of life, more space, safety, prosperity, a place where their skills are needed. They flee famine, war, political instability, and poverty; sometimes they just seek freedom. And this movement isn’t necessarily forever. Migrating herds might once again find themselves in old haunts, returning to find their water hole replenished, a drought-blemished land newly verdant. We have left places and returned. We might be back again.

What I’ve been reading lately:

The Lost Rainforests of Britain by Guy Shrubsole

This was beautifully written, informative and magical. I love that Shrubsole sought out LOTR illustrator Alan Garner and that he dove into the problems with pastoralism. A lot of nature writing follows a tired formula: the writer experienced difficulties and overcame them immersed in the beauty of the natural world. This doesn’t, but is more focused on ecological problems and possible solutions. I also appreciated his language around re-wilding being a kind of decolonising of the land vs townies stepping in to ruin the pristine English countryside. I grew up beside a portion of temperate rainforest which Robert Macfarlane named one of the top five wild spots in the UK and now understand why it felt more jungly than any jungle I have ever visited.

It Lasts Forever Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken

More vibe than story, this felt like a long prose poem. Admittedly, few of the insights are unique – I have seen them all before inAMC’s long-running zombie franchise, The Walking Dead, which I love. But this was written so concisely and drenched in feeling and relatably existential. I found it propulsive reading and keep recommending it.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I wouldn’t normally include a book I didn’t enjoy, but I’m really surprised that this won the Booker Prize. Imagine every clichéd meme about space compiled together in book form. Everything felt overwrought. The dialogue was painful. It was cringy how these educated scientists and astronauts were mouthpieces for wonderment about basic science and juvenile musings on space, politics and environmentalism. It felt pseudo-intellectual – manipulative sentimentalism at best. I had similar thoughts about Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. It’s okay for such books to exist but I don’t understand the literary acclaim granted to them. It didn’t help that this was also boring, with bland descriptions of places seen from Google Earth. I’m inclined to agree with what Toby Litt wrote for the Guardian: ‘Bad writing is mainly boring writing … you may read it to the end, but you will suffer as you do.’ I suffered reading this. I’d rather go read The Guest Cat or another book far more emotionally engaging and insightful, or scroll through those inspirational memes about space.

Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair

I’ve been slowly reading this poetry collection this past year. I came to it after Sinclair’s extraordinary memoir How to Say Babylon. Reading an entire collection I am seldom captivated by each poem but some here really stood out and will stick with me, like “The Art of Unselfing”.

The Burial of Rats by Bram Stoker

Thrilling, atmospheric and deeply chilling for a 19th-century short story, I will forever now think of Paris’ suburbs as the Kingdom of Dust.

The Third Perspective: Brave Expression in the Age of Intolerance by Africa Brooke

Africa’s popularity began with her viral essay, ‘Why I’m Leaving the Cult of Wokeness.’ I like a lot of what she talks about: the need for nuance, the problems of victimhood as cultural capital, self-censorship and only being able to publicly share newspeak-esque beliefs. It echoes a lot of what Jon Ronson talks about in his So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: ‘We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.’ What I didn’t expect was for Brooke’s book to be delivered as self-help but I guess it makes sense, she is a coach; I hope this will help people leave their echo chambers and tribes and see other people and ourselves in less black and white terms, as humans rather than ideologies.

Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales

Last week a friend read this and loved it then thoughtfully gift-wrapped it for me. I can see why. A mother of a 1-year-old travels the west coast, following the migration of whales, from Baja California to Alaska. This was the sort of quiet armchair adventure I needed on these wintery days.

Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West by Christopher Knowlton

I’m reading this for research and didn’t expect to be so enthralled by the history of cattle ranching in the western states. I knew cattle and capital come from the same etymological root. Knowlton makes a good case for cattle ranching being foundational to the myth of the American dream, the national belief in limitless meritocracy and the kind of entrepreneurship that would lead people to Silicon Valley.

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson

This is the book I have read – and probably will re-read – the most this year. It is a brilliant tightly crafted rhyming tale, funny and memorable, and I’m already a Julia Donaldson fan (I have also recently enjoyed Room on the Broom and The Snail and the Whale). I will never tire of the last page: ‘All was quiet in the deep dark wood. The mouse found a nut and the nut was good.’

Next up this year: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler, Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, Soft Core by Brittany Newell, The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux, Kinship with All Life by J. Allen Boone, Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates, So Thrilled for You by Holly Bourne, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix, Eat Me by Bill Schutt, Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm, All Fours by Miranda July and a pile of books related to research for my big, ongoing project.