Wednesday 25 February 2009

why mourning for pennyroyal?

Sometimes when I can't sleep, or i'm distressed, I write. It's a kind of cheap therapy thing for me I suppose. It's a sporadic habit. Sometimes I write reams of stuff, filling up notebooks, othertimes just a few lines or a poetry scrap.....and then months and months of no writing

I don't keep too much of it--it's often embarrassingly whiney -- so when I come across something i wrote a while ago, I bin it, think something along the lines of " What was I like " and vow that I'm too grown up to do the whingey,angsty diary thing again.

Sometimes though, very occasionally, something i find something I wrote (usually long ago) that seems surprising or insightful, or in some way valuable enough to keep. Those things go back into whatever drawer or box they came from for me to find again another time.

Anyway Mourning for Pennyroyal was a piece of writing from a few years back. I don't know if it was a keeper or not. I know the subject was land loss. Loss of the land the community composting scheme was on, loss of the kids basketball court, loss of another piece of land that used to have a pennyroyal patch.

So maybe even it was an embarrassingly whingey bit, it was serving a purpose. Mourning for the pennyroyal, bitching for the basketball court, documenting the amount of heathland lost under industrial units. Little losses of community and wildish land.

So this is the whingey, angsty diary bit.