Connective Tissue II

It’s June 22nd. The solstice was last night. The temperature is slowly rising. Inside 27°C, outside 28°C. My body is damp, my head heavy. I used to love the heat, the hotter the better. Walking through the streets of New York in July or August always felt like an adventure, never knowing what heat-filled interventions would cross my pathway, as perspiration ran in rivulets down the centre of my back, cheeks pink and flushed.

At some point over the years a threshold was crossed, and the heat has become unbearable. Selfishly I long for the air-conditioned rooms of New York, the icy blasts of coolness freezing the moisture on my skin. Haddenham (where I live) has few trees, the streets are hot, and the brick houses seem to wilt under the brightness of the sun. I make a left outside my front gate and follow a broken line of wychert walls. Wychert, also spelled witchert literally means white earth, a natural blend of white chalk and clay mixed with straw. Used in the construction of walls and buildings, parts of Buckinghamshire have maintained this way of building for hundreds of years. Wychert: the connective tissue of the village linking the old with the new, the past with the present.

The first time I visited the village was the day I moved here. It was the beginning of lockdown, the occupants of the village were masked, wandering around in pairs, eyes suspiciously seeking out those who didn’t belong. It felt like I had stepped back in time. I had never seen so many thatched roofs in one place, so many gnomes and toadstools on garden lawns. I have never quite become acclimatised to this Englishness. June is the month of the annual scarecrow competition. Wandering around in the fading hot light of dusk, strange dark figures loom up under the pale waxing gibbous moon, which only serves to deepen the surreal surroundings. Everything is in the ascendant arc: the sun at its peak, the moon filling toward full, even my body’s discomfort is a kind of surfeit.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” writes Mary Oliver (2016). She warned against looking without noticing. In an age of distraction, it feels ever more important. And so I find myself seeking out the tissue that links space to space and the interventions that disrupt the quaintness of this Domesday village.