Weekly September Snippets

Opening our senses, how art can make us see history differently and what's happening this month

It happened quietly and suddenly, this slipping of summer into autumn. The final holiday week began with a Monday sail and ferry (always, always ‘The Fairy’) to Hurst Castle in Hampshire for a sisters’ birthday. The day spooled out, long and hot, layered with the volume seven cousins make when they range from one to twelve years old, nearly one a year (we timed that well). Small, tanned-limbed children jumping from boats, sea swimming, stone skimming, rock climbing, fighting, dividing up picnics. Fish and chips dinner and rough cricket on the green. There seemed to be an unspoken sense of making the day last as long as it could, as though we knew it may be the last of summer. Which, it turned out, it more or less was.

One of my sisters took this of me looking wistful (tho tbf I think I was actually in the middle of refereeing a sibling squabble)

On the way home everyone was tired in that very specific way only a long day spent on an English pebble beach in very hot sun can create. We went to bed with sun and salt skin, bone-tired, and when we woke up the world outside had tipped into autumn.

I wasn’t totally sure of this until Thursday when, on a walk, I realised the air smelled different. It is the smell, I think, that sometimes makes me sure of the season. Sure you know the sun is setting earlier each day. Spiked conkers hang from chestnut trees like baubles and feet tread over acorns dropped from oaks as their leaves turn to gold. The soil feels tired and ready for rest. But it is the smell - a little musty, like damp, but sweeter and milder - that makes me sure.

On the way back to my parent’s house I looked up and saw this tree tunnel and knew Autumn was here. It made me think of this perfect poem by Mary Oliver. She was September born. She knew.

September Snippets

My English degree qualified me for almost nothing, although it did accidentally teach me a skill which proved quite useful when I was a barrister: the picking apart and turning over of a narrative to see if there is another story lying beneath it.

So I like art which tells another story behind the one we’ve accepted, such as books like Hallie Rubenhold’s, ‘The Five’, which tells the life stories of Jack the Ripper’s victims, or Anna Funder’s ‘Wifedom’ about Eileen O’Shaughnessy (which contains the claim that years before she met her husband, George Orwell, she wrote a satirical poem imagining a futuristic dystopian system of bureaucratic control and re-shaping of truth and called it ‘End of the Century, 1984'. I know...).

I thought of all this when I was invited to a retrospective of artist Chris Killip’s 1982 photographs entitled ‘Ask-in-Furness’ at the newly redeveloped Cooke’s Studios, in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, which runs from 19th September to 1st November. Killip lived within this North West coastal village for a year, documenting the huge social and political changes happening during the de-industrialisation of the community. Killip’s pictures have been shown internationally but this is the first time the complete series have been exhibited and many of these photographs have never been seen before. I found a short film on his work here.

(previously unseen) 2 members of the Askam Town Band, 1982. Image © Chris

I love what Killip said about his photographs: ‘History is what’s written, my pictures are what happened. It’s like a people’s history - the people who history happened to’.

Maybe this is also the point of narrative non-fiction books, written not by historians or biographers but storytellers (albeit well-researched ones). I think the reason I am interested in writing the true stories of ordinary people is for the same reason: their stories show how history happens to people. They enable us to see the shades of grey of real humanity in between the black and white of historical fact.

Seeing how history happens, and watching the season change, made me think a lot about keeping our senses open. So we can see, hear and smell the world in front of us, rather than accept what we are told about it. This makes me think of the work of soundscape recordist Bernie Krause who taped the sounds of nature in Sugarloaf Ridge state park near San Francisco for thirty years, a project which started as personal contemplation and became a real-time gathering of nature decline. Opening our senses not only gives us a different perspective on the world; I think it also lets us better know how our instincts are telling us to respond to it.

When I saw and felt and smelled autumn arrive I recognised the itch of wanting to get to work. I have a lot of hard and personal change coming up this year, but I know that to bring it about I need to finalise, so I can begin. To close, so I can re-open. I wonder if this autumnal feeling of industry comes not just from the start of a new school year - either lived or an echo - but from something deeper that our senses tell us. September is the month I associate with a childhood marked by The Alresford Show, where the best of the harvest and livestock would be put on parade. I would steal sandwiches backstage from my father’s corporate hospitality tent and watch my farmer grandfather stride about in his tweed suit with a stick, apparently knowing everyone. September is the month when Michaelmas falls: the Christian celebration based (as so many of them are) on an ancient Celtic calendar which marked the date that, as crops had been harvested and surplus sold, farmers were due to pay their rents to landowner. Despite the number of barns inevitably still full of grain, landlords and farmers still keep this date still.

Her hearse was carried on this painted wagon and I can’t really imagine a more perfect final journey really

At a funeral this week I sat in a church full of people and deep grief and thought of death, and cycles, and how this is the season of endings and beginnings. I thought of Poppy Okotcha’s book, ‘A Wilder Way’, which explains her realisation that the most important seasons in permaculture are when it seems nothing is happening. She starts her book in quiet Autumn, not showy Spring, deliberately. This is when plant matter rots down, seeds are vernalised, the earth rebuilt. Without this period of death, there can be no life in spring. I think this is what I felt when I saw the autumn tunnel on the way back from the walk. Maybe we all instinctively feel this about September, especially when we are far away from the blanket noise of a city (which incidentally a new report found has such an invidious affect on us that it actually kills us quicker) so we might see and smell and feel the change better. Maybe this is why September will always feel like a month of New Starts and maybe too why so many organisations theme campaigns around this month. Organic September. Second Hand September. Sourdough September. It’s all going on. There’s a starter for ten below.

All this is to say, this change in season has reminded me to open my senses as wide as they will go. To believe what I see, hear, smell, touch and feel and hold it with the same weight as that which I am told.

If you too feel 1st September carries some kind of meaning to it that makes it weightier than the start of other months, listen to this tug. Maybe, as in permaculture, this is because it is the true start of the year. If so, you might be interested in some of the nature-based events which are happening this month. I’ll flag up specific ones as they go. Who knows, they could be the beginning of something extraordinary.

I wish, for example, that I could go to this free Voices of Water event at the Tate Modern this Saturday 6th September from 2:30 to 5:30pm. The subject of granting legal rights to nature is something I’ve been watching for and following for a while - from Paul Powelsland taking his jury oath by swearing on his local river to the legal argument for granting nature personhood, mooted by Phillipe Sands so perfectly in the FT here. This event looks at the role artists, community initiatives and custodians in the growing movement advocating for Rights for Nature can play in securing rights of rivers, oceans and bodies of water. It feels like a sign that something once considered prosperous might actually happen.

Instead on Saturday I’m going to be looking after two small boys and watching out for the Blood Moon as it goes through a total lunar eclipse, when the Earth aligns directly between the sun and the moon, blocking the sun’s light and casting a shadow over it. Some say that unlike a solar eclipse, which marks new beginnings, a lunar eclipse brings closure, insight, and the opportunity to surrender and release and trust your path will unfold as it should. It is a chance for a moment of transformation: for release and renewal and embracing change. And no matter what you believe, we all of us sometimes need to take a moment for that.

Organic September - #OrganicSeptember #LoveOrganic @soilassociation

Alongside the virtual campaign to highlight all things organic agriculture, The Soil Association are also putting on events to mark Organic September. They’re hosting an On-Farm Experience Day on Wednesday 10th September at Yeo Valley on Holt Farm in Somerset and the first ever Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival from Thursday 18th to Saturday 20th September also at Yeo Valley. Here’s a list of the cracking line up.

Also - for all those who put up their hands and ask me where they can buy food which supports nature friendly farming - the Soil Association has a map of independent retailers which is as good a way as any to answer this question.

Second Hand September - #SecondHandSeptember @OxfamGB

Launched by Oxfam in 2019, last year’s Second Hand September Oxfam / Vinted runway show that was chosen as one of the first to kick off London Fashion Week. It caused all the hype by getting Bay Garnett to style a host of celebrities who walked for the show. It was loud and fun and, as was made clear during the short speech which opened it, significant in that it was the first time a show featuring second hand clothes had opened London Fashion Week’s official programming. This year they’re back on the catwalk, date tbc. As part of Second Hand September, M&S have collaborated with Ebay to pay customers for donating their unwanted M&S clothes which are then donated.

Soughdough September - #WeAreRealBread #SourdoughSelfie

The Real Bread Campaign, a project of the charity Sustain, are hosting various events all month connecting people with how to make and bake sourdough, including a milling tour and bread tasting in Dorset on Sunday 14th September and a full-day sourdough masterclass with Dan Lepard on Friday 26th September in London.

Or if you fancy just doing it yourself at home, here’s a recipe that claims to be foolproof (I’ll let you know….) and another from All You Kneed (because I’m always sucker for a bad pun) here.

There’s a lot going on this month. I’ll keep weaving in any here anything I think you might like. But through all of it I’m going to try and remember that when life feels fallow, it can actually be a time of rebuilding. And I just need to wait, and trust, and watch for the seeds of new beginnings to start to grow.

Sarah x