Summer rolls on and everyone around me complains about the rain. The rain that seems too much in England and Germany, the rain that is missing from all the places where the world currently burns. It is my second summer season in a row where people complain about the rain. I’ve long felt that European summer mirrors the season that just played out in New Zealand. For days on end last November, it rained. The rain holding trampers, the Kiwi word for hiker, hostage in a hostel in the centre of the North Island because the river they were about to go down was carrying too much water. Later in the season, the airport in Auckland flooded, Auckland flooded, along with large parts of the Hawkes Bay and Tairawhiti regions.
“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”
― Anais Nin
As August stretches on, I think back a lot to this time last year, when I was busy preparing for New Zealand and had no idea how it would feel or who I would meet. But I am also thinking ahead and slowly putting ideas in motion for next year, when I plan to go back to research what I hope will be a book. If anyone will ever commission, never mind buy or read, said book is a different matter entirely but I cannot know unless I try.
I need to write, I want to write. The need is like an itch under my skin, like something wanting to come out. I have felt this way before and ignored it. It felt too hard at the time and then life took over, numbing me and that feeling, leaving me hollow. But then last year in New Zealand, I felt it return. I was strolling through a bookstore in Wellington, looking for inspiration or some guidance, because when I feel lost, more often than not, I go in search of a book. What I found were essays by Ann Patchett. Book in hand, I got on a bus to Lyall Bay, a suburb by the beach, and immediately started reading. I had started the day sad and forlorn but Ann’s words filled me. Reading her essays brought a clarity and urge to write that I had frankly forgotten I could feel. But once that feeling was there, it didn’t leave. Now it is constantly with me, flaring up occasionally to become almost overwhelming, making me stop in my tracks, to catch my breath. It is a strange, indescribable and wonderful feeling, like something sweeping through me. I never entirely know what it is or what it’s telling me but I don’t want it to leave.
“This story—which begins and begins—starts again here.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays
I remember the first time I told someone that I wanted to write, that it was the thing I wanted to do with my life. Last year I returned to the view and the bench I first said those words on. I had a notebook with me and words swirling through my head. Initially I only wanted to go back once I’d written a book or at least something more substantial but delaying a visit until some uncertain day in future time began to seem pointless. I was writing, wasn’t I? I was doing what I said I wanted and I had found a way to support that dream financially and so I had achieved all that I had said I wished that night. And so I returned and it felt good. Wind and weather had nearly covered the bench with sand but otherwise the view was almost the same and I felt a calm I had previously only dreamt of.
The next day, after a morning kayaking along the Coromandel coast to that famous beach from Narnia, I got talking to the kayak guide who drove me back to the little ferry over to where I was staying. And in that curious way that I am incapable of small talk, we got talking about New Zealand, his children, an ex-girlfriend of his and how I’d lived here before. The fact that I know curiously much about every aspect of New Zealand life is always a good starting point for chats. Or rather it seems to confuse people and so they often enquire further into why I know how the school system works when the average tourist can barely pronounce place names correctly. And as we wound our way past lush, green fields and the odd cow, he asked if I’d ever thought about writing a book.
“...the world never turned out the way you wanted it to. It simply turned. And you hung on.”
― Sarah Winman, Still Life
I had the idea for this project, much less intimidating a word than “book”, one candlelit evening in January and it felt like a light had been switched on. The path I knew I was standing on but couldn’t see, suddenly illuminated. I want to make use of this strange skill, of being able to draw stories out of people, of being someone they feel they can trust. I want to tell stories of people and places, of transformation and changing attitudes because I believe that we are all infinitely interesting.
I want to tell the story of the driver in the central North Island whose sister in law is now the headmistress of the school I used to attend and who told me about the changes in weather he’d observed. Changes caused by climate change, he said. When he was young, it snowed in winter and when it rained, it rained gently, now there are winters with hardly any snow and when it rains, like it did so much last November, it rains like the world is coming to an end.
Or of the driver in Christchurch who told me he began researching fungi during the lockdowns to escape political debates, heated opinions and the uncertain future of his job. „They‘re much smarter than us,“ he said „they know how to work together.“
On a kayak tour in the Abel Tasman, the guide, the guy in my kayak, a professor of mindfulness from Oxford and I began talking about happiness, life fulfillment, the outdoors and male suicide rates. Not your average chat in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
“And I will be forever changed by the people I have met and their bravery, their courage and their light.”
― Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot
I wish now that I had recorded every single one of these conversations or asked more questions or written down more in my notebook. But in my head, I already have a list of people to chase up, people I can ask for more leads to talk to a more diverse crowd of people and a stubborn hope for chance encounters on the top of mountains or in small cafés. There are still more questions than answers though. How exactly a book like this would look for example. Would it be a book of essays or rather one continuous text? Will there be an overarching questions, binding it all together and if so, what is the question? Most of all, however, I wonder if anyone is going to care. But when I told friends, nervously and cautiously, they were enthusiastic and supportive, one of them describing it as a small flame I get to hold and nurture. I don’t yet know what this will be or where this will lead but if I get to use that flame to find the next steps along the path, then that is something.
Ever since I started reading your Substack I’ve been hoping you would write a book! I love your writing and would love to see it long form.
Ready to pre-order whatever it is you‘re writing and whenever you‘ll publish it.