Category Archives: Writing

Winter is a season of routines. The days pass in almost the same way, especially out here: all we do is work, eat, walk, exercise, go to the pub, sleep. But this winter neither of us has been desperate for a holiday. I feel more and more – and I think S. does too – that whether you do the same or new things every day, see the same people or different people, stay put or move about nonstop, it doesn’t matter. Life is near and fresh. There are no ruts in nature, even in the barest places.

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The days are getting longer. A strange peace has come over me lately – the kind of composure I used to imagine I’d grow into when I was younger and had no control over my life. I used to picture my future self looking back at his agitated past and cringing. What was being young but an interminable wait to get older and wiser? I was callow and knew it, because I was often reminded of it by my elders. I wanted to get older so I too could benefit from hard-won experience. I suspected that these feelings were themselves experiences I might benefit from, but resented the humiliation of youth, of having to live through a series of frightening tests that only the older self can resolve. And now that I’m growing into my future self, I do indeed look back and thank God I’ve grown older, but with mixed feelings… Composure, yes, but also things I never imagined, slightly frightening in themselves – awareness of the ageing body, the prospect of mental decline, the dawning realization that your time on Earth will come to an end, and that you may even come to feel it was too short.

The wisdom of certain everyday phrases (which writers sniff at). We speak of being in the moment and of pregnant moments. We speak of the fullness of time, of a time that’s ripe.

Beautiful phrase: the fullness of time. What does it mean? In everyday language, when something happens in the fullness of time it happens at a time that has finally come, a time of fulfilment of some event. Something comes into its own, something time has ripened. For Paul it had to do with the first and second coming of Christ and the fulfilment of God’s plan at decisive moments in history. But what if it were taken to refer not to a past or future event, but to time itself? What if the fullness of time referred not to a time that’s ripe for something but to a time that’s ripe with itself, that fulfils itself in the moment?

If the moment is the revelation of the fullness of time, it can’t be part of everyday clock time. It can’t simply be one of a series of separate nows, but rather the felt instant that opens your present out to the future and gives your past meaning; that shows you the breadth and depth and height of time, only to withdraw. How to hold this moment as it emerges, as it lets you emerge with it? It’s bigger than you, once reached can’t be commanded. How to find it? How to remain in it? Endure it?

The moment behind beneath and beyond everyday time. It waits to give you back your past, like an event long prepared without your knowledge, like an act of fate in the fullness of time. It needs you: your shabby past, your timid present, your whirl of thoughts, your hoard of words. It waits for you to step into the light of the day, where it can find you and let you come into your own.

North, to the Lancashire uplands to spend Christmas with S.’s family. N. picks up Rookie in a carboard box, along with a box of cat food. The next morning we get a taxi before sunrise, then three trains. The passengers get chattier as the landscape gets hillier. I manage to sleep a little. It’s dark and rainy when we get to the final station, where S.’s father is waiting for us in the car.
It seems as though every available space has been paved over and built up except for the great dark moors that loom over the cities and villages – many of which are themselves manmade, the results of deforestation by ancient people… Nothing but motorways, roundabouts, malls, petrol stations, business parks, offices, terraced houses… all so grey hard and cramped. I can’t help but think of those lines by Hopkins. Is there anywhere that isn’t seared with trade, smeared with toil, degraded by capital? Is there any escape?
S.’s family is large and fun, and we eat, drink and laugh all night.
It’s the home of the industrial revolution after all, S. tells me when we’ve gone to bed and I’ve revealed my thoughts about the journey. You know how you get when you travel. Don’t judge it just yet, you’ll see.
The next morning is brighter and gives us a fine view of hills on both sides of the house dotted with spray-painted sheep and crowned with mist. I go outside to smoke, feeling pleasantly small. There’s a different quality to the silence here when there’s no traffic on the road. Something to do with the topography maybe. I can hear a stream now. A horse whinnies somewhere, calling for a response as horses do, and it’s as if being itself has briefly been given voice.
S. borrows the car and drives us to Pendle Hill. We walk along the ridge through ribbons of fog to an ancient burial site she wants to see. Not a soul about, at last. As we climb the rocky path, dodging sheep droppings and sodden moss, we relax, stop chatting and fall into a rhythm. Our minds relax and expand as the horizon widens. We stop to look out over a spread of fields, hills, reservoirs and houses all around. This is more like it, I tell S., you need a horizon to think. I love the dun colours, the reddish iron-rich streams, the sheep that bound away when we get too close, the total indifference of the place. It moves us both, and it’s worth a day of rumbling through damp, littered suburbs in crowded, dirty trains.

Back in Kirkwood we wake up to a warm bright morning. In the afternoon it rains and in the evening you can see your breath. For the first time I can take pleasure in autumn, in the slow waning of the year.

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The Greeks called the straight line of time from past to future chronos. But for them time was twofold: its other element was kairos, the opportune moment. Chronos was clock time that carries on regardless of us, kairos the personal experience of time. In classical rhetoric, kairos meant finding the right words at the right time.

For the early Christians, kairos had to do with the fullness of time realized in the Incarnation, the moment of conversion and the coming apocalypse. It was the intersection of history and eternity, the time when God acts in the world.

Now on my walks I always stop by the church. I like the routine. I like the heavy wooden door, the cold stone slabs on the floor. There are children’s drawings on the peeling walls, dull notices, faded black and white pictures of the parish. I sit on a pew for a few minutes to catch my breath, look at the altar, the wooden rafters like the ribs of an old ship, the stained-glass window showing Christ with two fingers raised to symbolize the hypostatic union. (How many people argued, fought, lived and died for that idea!) Sometimes I leaf through a hymnbook or bible… Relics, I sometimes think. Yet still here in the ruins, on the same ground as the rest of us.

Eternal God, which makes the moment seem like a grain of sand… Where’s the divine kairos now, when God no longer acts in the world, when the God of men has died? Where’s the intersection of time and eternity? When’s the right time, what’s the right word? I can’t call it him, I can’t call it you. But doesn’t the moment hint at it? Doesn’t it whisper to us of it? Sometimes I think it whispers something too terrible to hear, something I secretly want no part of, that might overturn my whole life.

But you’ve felt it, haven’t you? Its surpassing and sustaining power, which gave you room to breathe, as long as you were shielded by time, held in the moment. How carefully it has to be approached. But maybe approached is the wrong word. Questioned, perhaps, prepared for, undergone.