I like to think I am invisible here, and in the silence of the morning, the stillness and the peace, it would be easy to believe that I am. That I am nothing more than a whisper; a visitor who makes no mark and leaves no trace.

But this cannot be. Even if invisibility is what we sometimes yearn for, it can never be.

Ten metres away are two common seals slipping their heads out of the water, watching me from afar, the abrupt huff of their breaths skimming over the surface of the sea and telling me: we are here, we are watching. And the fulmars, flying overhead, interrupt their journey back to their nests in order to swoop low and inspect me—they are using precious energy to understand whether I am a threat. And beneath me, on the gleaming white sand, I see a crab with its pincers facing skyward, and with each small rock of my board the crab jabs its pincers up—it, too, saying: I am here, I am watching you. And then (the magic!) a shoal of fish, gleaming black then blue then silver, swims in the space suspended between the crab and I, and they are shimmering in the sunlight which, for a moment, has muscled through the clouds, but this same sunlight casts my shadow through the water, and the shoal, in the hammer-blow of shadow, suddenly splits in two, a panicked cleaving.

We send ripples into this world whether we mean to or not.

A scientific paper published a few weeks ago found that in the Amazon, when a predator is spotted, small birds begin to call. To us, their calls might seem like just more noise in the canopy’s cacophony—something to appreciate, a peaceful soundtrack to the buzz of our chattering minds—but the call is anything but peaceful to the other creatures of the forest: it is saying danger. And when those small birds call danger, a whole community takes notice. Other birds share the warning, and so too do monkeys, and after the warning is spread and shared, the whole canopy becomes silent and still. Watching. Waiting for the threat to pass. One hundred lives holding their breaths.

Another new paper shows that urban birds, the ones we share our cities with (blackbirds, starlings, crows, sparrows, magpies, ducks…) are more fearful of particular people; they do not fear all humans equally. Surprisingly, it is women who they fear more than men. My PhD team found the opposite to be true in jackdaws: they are more wary of men than of women. We do not know why for either case, but here the why is not the point; the point is that the nonhuman world is paying so much more attention than we realise. In fact, jackdaws remember individual human faces, as do American crows—and crows pass information about people to the next generation. A man walking down the street might not notice a crow sat on a rooftop watching him, but that crow might have seen that man before, when she was young and her father was with her, and her father might have a history with that man, might have taught her: that man is not kind. And now, years later, she might fly away if that oblivious and once-unkind man so much as glances towards her.

If we think we are invisible, we are simply not paying enough attention.

What I am getting at here is that we are not separate from what we call ‘the natural world’. We are within it. With every decision that we make, every movement, every step, we send ripples into it and touch one, one hundred, one thousand other beings in both significant and infinitesimally tiny ways. And in return we are touched by a trillion ripples, some so large they might knock us over, some so small they are just the brush of gossamer thread against our skin.

Think of yourself in a forest. Perhaps you are walking down a footpath, daydreaming. A bird calls out and you hear it but do not really register it, and you certainly do not know that the bird is talking about you. The call is relayed for half a mile in all directions, twenty animals shouting about your presence—but you walk on, oblivious, while one hundred creatures still themselves, watch and wait for danger to pass. And perhaps because all those creatures have paused their activities, one hundred insects get to carry on living where before they would have been eaten—and look, your walk has saved one hundred lives! But some of those insects are predatory, and they consume one thousand smaller beings that otherwise would not have been eaten—and on and on it goes, one ripple turning into ten, one hundred, one thousand, spreading ever-outward from you, vibrating the gossamer threads that connect us all, thrumming through the world, through space and time, without you having the slightest idea at all.

Sometimes it is a comfort, I think, to imagine we are invisible. It lets us off the hook, lets us disengage, lets us underestimate the impact that every one of our actions, no matter how small, may have on the world—on humans and nonhumans alike. But to imagine ourselves as invisible, to think that what we do does not matter in this world, is also to deny ourselves our power.

Many (most) of the ripples that we send into the world are unintentional, and their impacts cannot be known. Of course this is the case: we cannot spend our lives trying to predict or quantify every potential outcome of our actions, especially when those outcomes may impact individuals many orders removed from ourselves. This life is incomprehensibly complex, after all, and even our most powerful computers, our most intricate mathematical models, cannot predict what will happen as a result of the next breath we take, the next step we take, the next door we open or close. But that is not the point. The point is that we do have control over some of the ripples we send out into the world. The words we speak, the foods we eat, the beings we help, the kindness we offer, the thoughts we choose to share, the small decisions we make that add up to a way of living, a way of existing in this world. Each of these small decisions ripple out and out and out, and who knows where they go, or what they turn into, but they have an impact. They make a change. And that is power, isn’t it?

To imagine ourselves invisible is to deny our power, to deny our place in the great web of being, to deny the impact each of our small lives have.

There are many in this world who would like us to believe we are powerless, invisible.

We are anything but.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I lie very still on my paddleboard, close my eyes. The seals, eventually, leave. The fulmars do not stop swooping low to inspect me. The fish may or may not have found one another again: I do not know. All I know is that I am here, an inextricable part of it all, making ripples even when I tread as softly as I can, and in return being touched by a trillion other unknowable, unpredictable, untraceable ripples.

This seems like the perfect post in which to share two debut books I enjoyed recently, one a memoir and one a novel. Books seem to me (and I am biased, of course, as a writer and reader and someone whose life revolves around words) as one of the ultimate acts of intentional ripple-making. We send our words into the world and we do not know where they will go, who they will touch, how they will be received and what they may or may not change, but we send them nevertheless, and in that act there is great hope and great power. And oh how grateful I am that the ripple of these words found me—both ’s debut memoir Unfixed and ’s debut novel Truth Like Water.

Unfixed, at its core, is a story of love and belonging and finding sense in chaos, and threading through the narrative, weaving the story together, are three bodies: a body of water, a body not behaving as it should, and a body lost beneath the waves. It is a phenomenal memoir, at once heavy and light and utterly captivating, and I came away with that delicious feeling that something within me had shifted slightly.

After finishing Unfixed, I read Truth Like Water. This was one of those beautiful and entirely unplanned pairings that sometimes happens with books, where they complement one another so well that mirrors and portals open between the two.

In Truth Like Water we explore, through the eyes of a young woman trying to make sense of her mother’s drowning, how truth can behave as a liquid thing, slipping into the shape of whichever vessel carries it. The novel is set in a coastal Welsh town where the estuary, the centre of the story, captured me completely. The silty mudflats, the horses standing stoic in the sea, the landscape reflecting that nothing is ever quite as it seems… it is a gripping and gorgeous debut, and I cannot wait to see what Carys writes next.

Thank you both for sending your words to ripple out into the world.

If you enjoy my work, you might like to pre-order my debut novel, These Glass Bodies.

‘An absorbing, unmissable and moving debut novel of love, disconnected people and our fragile relationship with the natural world’

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If you’d like to become a founding member, you’ll receive an original watercolour painting. Currently I’m working on sea-swimming selkie women, but the odd whale is springing into life, too.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will know that a few years ago, I spent six months working on a tropical island ruled by monkeys. I’ve been thinking about those monkeys a lot lately. I do every Spring. I think it’s because of this: Spring has an undercurrent of tension, of the world walking a tightrope, of violence and kindness and babies and bodies all just a breath away from one another. And this is how the island of monkeys felt all the time.

Rhesus macaques have a violent society. The males are higher ranking than the females, and the females inherit their social rank from their mother. While the lowest-ranking individuals have it the worst (they cannot eat until others have eaten, they are often attacked, they must be very careful about where they walk and who they make eye contact with), everyone, every single individual, is kept in place by violence or the threat of violence. The island throbs with the tension of it, the monkeys carry the scars of it, and the humans working there must, every now and then, defend themselves against it by wielding sticks and lunging and shouting (in part because a monkey bite is very painful, but also because their blood and saliva carries a disease that is fatal to humans).

There was a lot of tenderness in the monkeys’ lives1 but it was not this that my eye was drawn towards; terror is, after all, a magnet—it pulls the eye towards it and it does not easily let go. This makes sense, we are biologically attuned to terror. It can be lifesaving to be so. But, because of this, it can be easy to miss that which lays beneath: the moments that, if you let them, would light you up like a sun.

I am thinking of a Sunday. There were only two of us on the island; two humans and over one hundred monkeys. And it was very hot and humid—the air felt ripe—and also it was strangely quiet, I think because of the heat. Many of the monkeys were resting, mostly in the shade of the forest. In fact I think they all were, because in my memory I could not see a single monkey, only the empty beach (a few iguanas basking in the sun2, some hermit crabs trundling along the shoreline), the empty scrubland, and then the muggy darkness of the forest.

My job that Sunday was to find a particular monkey. She hadn’t wanted to sit and engage with our experiment yet3, so we were going to see if she would today. But on my way towards the forest to look for her, I saw, in a dead tree on the outskirts of the woods, a shape. It was the shape of a monkey, but it was all wrong. By which I mean it was completely limp, and it was sort of folded over one of the boughs of the tree.

I went over, and the closer I got the more perplexing this sight became.

There was the limp monkey folded over a branch, and some sort of rope hanging from her, and something swinging beneath. And also there was blood. Quite a lot of blood.

Perhaps you’ve guessed already, in which case you are faster than me—I had to get very close before I saw that the swinging thing was a tiny baby and the rope was an umbilical cord, and it was only then that I understood what had happened. A female, who I knew quite well (I’d spent a lot of time with her, hours and hours, and understood something of her nature, which was that she was shy and liked to stay away from drama), was unconscious in this tree, had fainted during birth, and her new-born son was swinging beneath her. He was wet and he was not moving and his eyes were closed.

As I have said, the bodily fluids of these monkeys are potentially deadly, and so I did not get any closer to the mother and her son. I could see she was breathing, although I was not sure that the baby was, and I was contemplating my next steps—who to call, how to figure out if the baby was alive—when that tiny little boy fluttered his lilac eyelids open.

Oh, he was so small, and so fragile, and his eyes were so wide and black, so huge in his tiny little face, and he was so vulnerable, hanging there like that, and it broke my heart! And it was really hard not to step closer. But I didn’t. And then the mother woke up. She opened her eyes and it took her a moment to get her bearings and while she did I walked backwards, very slowly (I did not want to scare her), and as I walked away she regained her footing on the bough of the tree and she pulled that new-born boy up to her chest. I watched as she hugged him into her, as she put her lips to his head and began to clean him, and I heard her make a small, soft noise as she did this.

They stayed like that for a long time, this new mother and the tiny, tiny boy in her arms. And in the forest, every now and then, I could hear a fight break out as the other monkeys went about their monkey business, but there in the tree was this mother and her son, quiet and calm and all lit up in sunlight.

I watched them for a long time. It was one of the most tender things I have ever witnessed. And there was violence all around, just a few steps away, but it was still beautiful—perhaps even more so because of that.

So that is why I think of the monkeys in Spring. Because living with them, and living through Spring, bring up all the same juxtapositions of this life. Brutality, beauty; terror, tenderness. A monkey born into a world of violence, the gentle coo of his mother as she holds him to her chest. A baby rabbit swallowed whole, another safe and warm in a burrow. One seal a meal for a thousand insect larvae, another seal, a few metres away, bathing happily in this shy Spring sun.

I don’t think there is a neat way to finish this piece; there is no tying it up in a bow, no message of good winning over bad, or kindness winning over violence, or light outdoing dark, because I do not believe those things to be true (I would like them to be, but I do not know that they are). But what I will say is this: I think it is important to let tenderness in. Terror is louder and starker and almost always more obvious, but tenderness is what fills the soul and so we must look for it and we must look at it and we must try to let it in.

And then, there is this:

After finishing this piece, I go for a walk. In the field behind my house, a ewe lies on her side and is unable to get up. When I go to her, I see that she’s trying to push out a lamb but the lamb is stuck. I call the farmer and watch as he tugs at the lamb, who is coming out back-first, and it takes so much more strength than I’d expected to get that lamb free, and he tells me, as he pulls it out, that he’d been told the ewe wasn’t pregnant, that this lamb is unexpected—and also, that it is dead.

I won’t describe what it looked like, because it had been dead for about a week, and I will not describe what it smelled like, only that it made the farmer gag and I have never seen a farmer gag. But the ewe, with the lamb out of her, was immediately more alert, immediately more comfortable, and the farmer took her home with him so he could give her antibiotics (he said she would be okay), and then, with nothing else to do, I carried on with my walk.

I saw three lambs skipping across a field together.

I saw a new-born calf and one of the first bumblebees of the season.

I saw a starling fly to her nest with a beak full of wool.

2

Some iguana photos (sometimes they had scraps with the monkeys over food; they are brave):

3

The monkeys interacted with the experiment entirely voluntarily, this was important to me. I will write more about it when our paper is published.

---

If you enjoy my work, you might like to pre-order my debut novel, These Glass Bodies.

‘An absorbing, unmissable and moving debut novel of love, disconnected people and our fragile relationship with the natural world’

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If you’d like to become a founding member, you’ll receive an original watercolour painting. Currently I’m working on sea-swimming selkie women, but the odd whale is springing into life, too.

For my very first independent research project, as an undergraduate student, I was assigned the topic of ‘spatial patterns in animals’. This is the study of how individual animals organise themselves in geographic space. Since seeing wild killer whales off the coast of Vancouver Island the summer before, I had become enraptured (some might say obsessed) with them (I still am enraptured (obsessed) with them) and so I excitedly told my project supervisor that I’d like to work on killer whale spatial organisation. As in, I wanted to find out if killer whales swim in predictable spatial patterns. To this, he raised his eyebrows and said ‘okay’ in such a way that I understood this might be a lofty ambition. But, as all good supervisors do, he let me explore my idea, and let me come to my own understanding of its limitations.

His sceptical ‘okay’ was, of course, right on the money. There weren’t many aerial photos of killer whales available back then, and it was these that I needed in order to analyse their spatial patterns. So, I went back to the drawing board. And I don’t remember quite how the idea came, but I set my mind on looking at the spatial patterns of barnacles. Which, alas, does not sound quite as alluring as looking at killer whale spatial patterns, but, actually, I was pretty excited about the idea.

There were three reasons for this excitement.

Firstly, I’d always thought that barnacles form curious patterns on rocks (and I am speaking about acorn barnacles, here, which are ubiquitous on the British coast). But when I looked into whether we knew much about these patterns, it turned out the answer was no. And mysteries have always excited me.

Secondly, barnacles have weird lifecycles. They start life as tiny, free-swimming larvae which are released from their parent in Spring and swept out to sea. These miniscule larvae ride on ocean currents until they reach whichever coast the tide tumbles them onto. And on this coast, which can be hundreds of miles from where their parent released them, they must crawl across rocks and choose a spot in which to settle, a spot in which they will live the entirety of the rest of their lives. There is no option to move; once they are settled, they metamorphose into an adult, build their calcareous shells, and stay forever. So, a lot rests on a barnacle’s decision about where to set up home, and I don’t know, maybe I’m in the minority here, but I think there’s something fascinating about that. The stakes of it all.

And, finally, looking at barnacle spatial organisation meant I got to do fieldwork. There was no budget for fieldwork, hence why I couldn’t buy a drone and spend months taking aerial photos of killer whales, but, thankfully, asking my parents to take me to Anglesey and roping them into helping me photograph barnacles was free1. I love fieldwork, and I had a lot of fun. You’d have to ask my parents what they thought about it all (although I’m pretty sure they were happy to have an excuse to go to Anglesey, and we didn’t spend all day looking at barnacles).

I won’t go into the details of the analysis, except to say that I spent three months looking at the photographs we’d taken and painstakingly recording the exact coordinates and size of each barnacle in each photograph. Which added up to thousands and thousands of barnacles. Some days this was peaceful, meditative. Some days this was a chore, but a doable one. Some days it felt like an eccentric (and self-inflicted) form of torture. But the mystery drove me on.

The work turned into my first research paper, published in Population Ecology a decade ago. What we found is this: when barnacle larvae wash into their new coastal home, they look for other barnacles, and they snuggle up as close as they can to them (as much as a barnacle can snuggle; I imagine this to be a rather awkward and unyielding affair). They don’t need to do this. Adults can reproduce from a distance of over two centimetres apart, and yet they bunch up at the scale of millimetres. They most likely do this because being in such a close-knit group affords them various protections: from bad weather, from predators, and from having to invest too much in building thick shells (because their neighbours’ shells help to shelter them).

And maybe this is a hard sell, I don’t know, but I just love this. From miniscule larvae, rudderless in the open ocean and swept to wherever the currents take them, barnacles crawl across rocks in search of others and there, tucking much closer to the group than their basic needs suggest they should, they build their permanent home.

Basically, the patterns barnacles form are the result of needing community, and it is a much closer community than we previously thought it would be.

Every time humans have gone into space, they have spoken of the Overview Effect. This is the sense of awe and wonder that astronauts get when they see the earth from afar—its beauty, its fragility, the fact that it, this tiny blue spot floating in desolate darkness, is home to every single creature they know, all of us floating here, in the darkness, together. The Artemis astronauts, on last week’s lunar mission, spoke of the same feelings.

This scratches at something in me. I am, of course, so glad that those astronauts are feeling the Overview Effect, but I can’t help thinking: do we really need to fling ourselves around the moon to feel this? Surely we don’t need to see the entirety of the earth to understand its beauty and fragility, to put ourselves in perspective and realise we are all interconnected, to feel inspired to protect and nurture this struggling planet of ours—surely, surely, all we need to do is look, and learn about the things we are looking at, right here, right down at our feet and up in our skies.

The Artemis Programme is estimated to cost $100 billion. Imagine what else we could do with that money. Instead of inspiring a sense of fragility and interconnectedness in the handful of humans who have the opportunity to go to space, we could inspire millions of people to feel the Overview Effect right here on earth. But we don’t have to wait for hefty financial investment into environmental education (investment I fear will never come)—I mean, sure, it would help, but we can all do our bit towards nurturing the Overview Effect at a scale that is within everyone’s reach. All it takes is sharing wonder with anyone who will listen. Sharing the beauty of a feather or a flower or a barnacle-encrusted rock. A rock that, if you squint, looks a little bit like the surface of the moon. A rock that harbours one hundred alien lives who were once floating in the wild open ocean, and who were thrust here, onto this piece of land, and who found community here, and safety, and a little spot to call home.

A quick note to say that for the next little while I will be sending a newsletter fortnightly rather than weekly. I’m currently working on my second novel and I’m at the (delicious, frustrating, all-consuming) point of being so far inside the world of that book that climbing out in order to write anything else is becoming a challenge! So, for a short while, I’ll be focussing on the novel, and appearing in your inbox every other Sunday rather than every week.

Thanks, as always, for being here!

Rebecca x

If you enjoy my work, you might like to pre-order my debut novel, These Glass Bodies.

‘An absorbing, unmissable and moving debut novel of love, disconnected people and our fragile relationship with the natural world’

Pre-order my debut novel

You can also support my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber, or leaving a tip. All my posts are free, and paid subscribers (thank you thank you!) allow me to keep it this way.

Subscribe now

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If you’d like to become a founding member, you’ll receive an original watercolour painting. Currently I’m working on sea-swimming selkie women, but the odd whale is springing into life, too.

On this blue and hazy-horizoned morning, wind gusting the heat from my cheeks, geese honking across the sky, I hear the skylark’s fragile, full-bodied melody for the first time this year. Everything else quietens. It’s just me, the song. And, of course, the singer. A male, somewhere high, defending his territory: this particular stretch of sky and this particular stretch of land. Waiting for a female to come and say, yes, I choose you, I choose your sky, your land, your song.

Music is a borderless language. Just as humans are born with a sense of rhythm and a proclivity for song, songbirds hatch with the blueprint of what they will one day sing. And all of us, when we are new to the world (brand new: in the womb, in the egg), turn our ear to the sound of song, let it build musical maps in the networks of our neurons, let it guide us towards a more melodic sort of life.

Mammalian, avian; larynx, syrinx—it does not matter, the music calls us home.

Raven (30.3.26, ~2pm)

A pair of ravens on a fence on the clifftop, the rioting Atlantic below. One of the pair is timid, the other is curious. The timid one flies as soon as I make eye contact but the curious one stays, watches me, and as I get closer it swoops off its perch and circles high before slicing back down, right past my head. Our eyes meet, a foot apart. Two questioning gazes. The feather of wing-blown air grazing my cheek. And then back it flies to its timid mate.

This is another universal: personality. The shy, the bold. Not so long ago, when western science thought of animals as automatons, the idea of animal personality was considered unscientific. But we now know that personality is everywhere. There are shy, tentative individuals and bold, brave individuals across the tree of life: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates. And not just the ‘clever’ invertebrates like octopuses, but also the ones we might not expect—snails and woodlice (roly-polies) and spiders1.

I am the shy spider, I am the tentative snail, and while I love the curious raven, my heart is with the one watching from the distance, the one who demands its own space.

Eurasian oystercatcher (30.3.26, ~3pm)

A ruckus! A madness! Low tide, and the oystercatchers have come to feed. They are such peculiar birds: round-bellied and yet somehow all angles. The bay becomes their playground—just as frantic and loud and rife with politics. Two birds begin to argue over a Good Bit of Beach. Wings out, shouting. One wins, stays; one saunters off to find a Better Bit of Beach.

Further down the shore, a pair have taken a break from their foraging in order to court. They walk in parallel on their long pink stilts, heads forward, orange beaks down, squawking. Who an oystercatcher chooses to partner up with has important consequences. Pairs stay together for years, sometimes decades. If the ‘marriage’ breaks down, the oystercatcher who was abandoned loses social status, and has a higher risk of dying. The one who did the abandoning, on the other hand, tends to move on to better things2. So, best to choose a partner who won’t leave (or be the one who does the leaving). Oh, it’s a complicated business, being an oystercatcher. Relationships aren’t easy. But they are another universality, aren’t they—the joys, the complexities, the stresses of needing one another, of relying on one another.

We once thought ourselves exceptional here, too; thought that only we formed complex relationships. But of course, we were wrong. The more we look, the more we understand that pair-bonds, friendships, alliances, complicated hierarchies, complicated politics, are all over the animal kingdom.

Year by year we chip away at the false god we have made of ourselves.

Black guillemot (30.3.26, ~4pm)

It is difficult to get a sense of scale when looking at the ocean, and so I have no idea how huge the swell is until I see the small black speck of a guillemot on the side of one of those wild Atlantic waves. The wave turns to mountain, the ocean to a Himalayan vista, the guillemot to a climber on a slope that rises, rises, steepens, steepens, until the bird summits, the most unlikely of adventurers, this little one-pound, hollow-boned body. And yet there it is, that little body, summiting a sixteen-foot swell.

These small adventurers survive what seems impossible. They battle through wild Atlantic storms, summit swells that could swallow them whole, navigate gales that would knock a human being over. Another universal. Each of us an unlikely adventurer, surviving, summiting our own swells.

Great black-backed gull (30.3.26, ~4 30pm)

On the beach, the first black-backed gull I have ever seen dead. Enormous, beautiful, but ragged with the salt and wet and churn of the ocean. Its eyes are gone, probably a snack for another gull, or a hoodie, or a raven. Death makes meals of us all, returns us to that which keeps other hearts beating. Worm, raven, crab, root, beetle, eagle, otter, the body becomes an offering to those that need its nutrients. No borders anymore. No lines, no skin, no shell. All of us becoming one.

Recording credits - Skylark: David Darrell-Lambert, XC1082398; raven: Lars Edenius, XC1082755; oystercatcher: David Darrell-Lambert, XC1089409; guillemot: Anthony McGeehan, XC1023555; black-backed gull: Roland Arnison, XC1087699. All sourced from xeno-canto.

On the topic of our avian cousins and how much we share with them, I’d like to tell you about the guga hunt.

Every summer, a group of men go to the remote Scottish island of Sula Sgeir and butcher gannet chicks (guga) in the name of tradition. They catch these chicks (who are almost fully-grown but who cannot yet fly) with a noose on the end of a pole, and then kill them by bashing their heads.

Once, the guga hunt was necessary for survival. It is not anymore, but the hunt is legally permitted because it is traditional.

We need to start respecting and protecting non-human lives above outdated traditions. If you’d like to add your voice to the thousands of people already standing up against the guga hunt, you can sign the petition here.

Every voice counts. Please consider signing and sharing.

If you enjoy my work, you might like to pre-order my debut novel, These Glass Bodies.

‘An absorbing, unmissable and moving debut novel of love, disconnected people and our fragile relationship with the natural world’

Pre-order my debut novel

You can also support my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber, or leaving a tip. All my posts are free, and paid subscribers (thank you thank you!) allow me to keep it this way.

Subscribe now

Tip jar

If you’d like to become a founding member, you’ll receive an original watercolour painting. Currently I’m working on sea-swimming selkie women, but the odd whale is springing into life, too.

At dawn, our weather station reports a base wind speed of 50mph with gusts of 60. Which is by no means the strongest winds we’ve had (last winter, we had gusts of almost 100mph thundering through the garden), but still, a base wind of over 40mph needs some preparation if I am to walk the dog (who has never gone a day without two walks and, judging by the stare he gives me as I assess the weather station, is not about to break the streak). Mainly, I need to think about my route, which today (sadly) will not involve the beach—the northwesterly will be whipping the sand into a frenzy and it will hurtle into my face and eyes, needle and sting, and when I get home I will be dry-eyed and raw-cheeked and will shed sand around the house like a gritty breadcrumb trail.

So, a short walk to the coast and then straight back.

But another sort of preparation is needed—and this is probably quite particular to me. In this sort of weather, I find that I need to prime myself for the sensation of it. Stepping into strong winds is like slipping into the wild Atlantic sea and I am not one of those people who can sprint right into the ocean (am forever jealous of these people; the ladies—and occasional men—running midwinter into churning waves with nothing more than a swimming costume and a grin). No, my body does not do well with sudden sensory surprise. I have to move slowly, breathe deeply, imagine the sensation before it comes so that the shock is not quite so immediate.

So, before I push the front door open and step outside, I imagine it: the feel of a body being bullied by hurtling air, the whooshing of wind against my hood, the heat whisked away from nose, cheeks, ears, toes, the energy needed to stay upright.

We are gushed eastward as we step outside, the wind flapping like a harbour full of sails inside my hood, a weightlessness to my steps, a sense that gravity has submitted to this other force, a force that rivers and whisks and leaves no space for stillness or solidity, but the sensation does not last long—soon, we turn side-on to the wind, and then we are walking into it. Thick. Molasses and syrup. Mud and swamp. I tense my core, my quads, push push push forwards and every now and then, when a gust comes, I stand completely still so that I am less likely to be swept over. Magnus, on four legs, does not have such a problem. If I am a boulder holding steadfast in the rivering wind, he becomes part of the current, all his fur rippling and waving like the fields of long grass on either side of us, at one with the weather in a way my stubborn human body cannot quite manage.

When we get to the junction where we should turn for home, I glance at the sand dunes in the other direction. Beyond them, over the sea, an ink-dark squall is moving in, marching across the ocean, threatening to invade our borders. But it is still a way off, and the sun is reaching its arm down to the sand, and the grass on the dunes is dancing about and yes, it will be painful, the sand will come like blades, but also the wind will be skiing up the slopes of the dunes and sliding over the lip and on the tops I will feel like I am stepping into a waterfall, a vortex, the sky, and also the sun is there, a golden hand, and Magnus is already on his way so what choice do I have? I jog after him to the music of the harbour in my hood and together we run up the sunlit dunes and let the wind buckle us right over the top, and we do it again, again, again despite the blast of sand against our faces; we do it because there is nothing quite like the distillation of sensation: it is shock-cold seawater, it is ice on the tongue, it is waves that break on your back, it is a sauna so hot that the throat feels the fire, it is wind that changes your form for a moment, takes you away on its currents, twists you up inside itself. Magnus goes skippy, chases his own tail, rolls on his back and lets a loud, guttural woof sing up towards the sky and I am grinning, laughing, because sometimes this is really what a body needs, isn’t it—to be pushed outside of itself, or perhaps back into itself—and I would not have known if I had not come, if Magnus did not insist on his twice-daily adventures; no, I’d be sat with my coffee and my notebook, maybe the radio on, maybe the drone of the news, the drone of all those voices who try to sound calm but have a little itch of stress, a little itch of disbelief that oh, yes, there is something else, another awful thing, and another and another and—no, sometimes we just have to give ourselves up to something wild and engulfing, let it dance us into someplace else.

On the way home, the wind shoves at our sides and the two of us walk with a strange half-sideways gait, like a crab who has not quite found her feet. We pass the herring gull whose body has lain in a grassy bank, undisturbed, unscavenged, for weeks. I tended her while she died. Gave her water-soaked kibble and a little bit of meat and hoped she would perk back up, that she was just exhausted after the intense winter storms, but instead she sunk her gorgeous yellow beak to the grass and closed her eyes. And now, after weeks of remaining peculiarly whole, she is finally coming undone: the wind is stripping her soft stomach bare and her downy feathers are flying up, up, up before descending all around like confetti. There is something both awful and joyful about this: a wild funeral, a wild ending.

When I shoulder the front door open, step into the corridor (Magnus running in ahead, flumping his tired body down) the air feels empty, like the world has forgotten how to hold me up, or I have forgotten how to let the world hold me up, and the silence is unsettling, all those sailboats suddenly quiet as if they have been lost to the sea. And in the reliable way of things that distil sensation—whether it is strong wind or cold sea or pounding heat or exercise that narrows everything down to pumping heart and heaving breath—I notice that something in me has shifted, something has come alive, and the day feels different somehow, like anything could happen. I don’t turn on the radio or read the news or begin my work, no, not yet; I just sit in a patch of sunlight on the floor, Magnus sleeping at my feet, and write this, intent on the wonderfully impossible task of trying to bottle a morsel of this windy morning’s peculiar magic.

If you enjoy my work, you might like to pre-order my debut novel, These Glass Bodies.

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I’ve never been much of a gardener—never felt I had the time nor the geographic permanence. But now I am a more settled creature, with a slower pace of life that allows for digging and pottering and noticing the ripening of the season, and I spend hours out here in the garden, sculpting beds, tending to the hostas my Mum gave me, to the fuchsia that we grew from a cutting last year, spreading wildflower seeds, planting poppies, speaking to the sparrows, the black-headed gulls, the ravens that grumble overhead.

During my first stint in the garden this spring, the orcadian wind still blowing hard but her breath a little kinder now, I found fifty snails, or thereabouts, gathered on the side of a plastic plant pot. The pot needed to be cut: a rootbound hosta lived within and for the life of me I couldn’t free it without scissors. And so, before I mutilated the pot to free the hosta, I unstuck the snails one by one and collected them in a little pile next to me. They were all different sizes, some big as a grape, some small as an eyelash, each fragile and astonishingly beautiful when examined up close.

When I was done, I collected this hoard of peculiar treasure in my palms and took the snails to a cool and sheltered spot beneath the willow. The sensation of their delicate bodies in my palms took me back, for a moment, to the forests of Gotland. As a research assistant ten years ago, I spent my days walking through dappled spring woodland in search of flycatcher nests. I remember holding an egg from one of those nests in my palm. I’d recently learnt about bird embryo communication—the way unhatched chicks speak to their mother through the thin barrier of the shell, the way they speak to one another too: unhatched beings in quiet communication—and what can I describe it as other than infinite wonder, what I felt with that egg in my palm. And then, in the garden, I felt it again: these thin-shelled beings in my hands, the small and infinitely complex mystery of their lives.

Inside, over a cup of tea, I tried to find research papers on snail communication, wanted to know whether they might be gossiping between their own thin-shelled worlds. There wasn’t a great deal of information about the species in my garden, but I did find out that they pick up information from one another’s slime trails (a snail passing over the slime trail of a stressed snail will also become stressed). But really, from a behavioural perspective, it seems we don’t know all that much about them. It would be an easy and unwise error to think this is because there is nothing to know.

These sorts of unexpected journeys—from the freeing of hosta roots, to snail-gathering, to Swedish forests, chick embryos, snail slime communication—are a particular delight of the warmer seasons, I find. In winter, in an environment where almost everything has been designed to be efficient, ergonomic (the fork handle, the toothbrush, the keyboard, the pen, the mug, the sofa, the floor), where we are surrounded by smooth and predictable things that hold little mystery and raise few questions, such journeys are harder to stumble upon. By spring, I am touch-starved, ready to bury my hands in the surprise of the earth.

I think we all know this innately, but research shows that touching complex, unpredictable, natural objects lights up our brains’ reward centres, brings them alive. Our bodies love to hold things that are not easily known. Spirals, snails, slime and swirl, soil, sand, rough bark, silk petal, the surprise of a grub in a handful of dirt, the sharp and the soft of a feather. We are built for exploration, for enquiry, for unexpected journeys that spring from our senses interacting with the complexity of the world.

Sometimes I worry we are forgetting this, that we are sleepwalking into a world where efficiency is king, slowly desiccating the sumptuousness of sensory experience with the aim of becoming nothing more than minds in jars watching the world get to work without us. LLMs writing our books, robots doing the gardening, cars driving themselves, AI painting our pictures. No need to waste time going out and putting your hands in the soil, no need to feel the silk of a petal or hold a snail in your palm. You can look at the snail on a screen, in VR, through the robot’s eyes, and AI will describe its shell to you perfectly—the angles of its spiral, its colour, its weight, how it would feel to hold—and AI will also tell you when to eat and when to speak and when to breathe and who to love and how to love; yes, there will be no need to waste time touching or seeing or pottering or laughing or tasting or dreaming or living.

But then I think of the way people spend their time when it is unconstrained—in childhood, in retirement, on holiday—and I think that, actually, we’ll be okay. Because when a human is given freedom, this is what we do: we potter, we garden, we watch birds, we paint, we read, we write, we get messy, we eat good food, we turn our faces to the sun and our hands to the earth. We come back to ourselves, back to being embodied animals who let time and sensation ripen around us, who let our senses lead us on unexpected journeys, who let our senses sing. We might forget this for a while, get swept up in the hype of a sleek and efficient world, but we’ll come back to ourselves.

And there is already a shift, isn’t there? A hum of discontent with efficiency, with smooth plastic surfaces, with tech stealing our pleasures, our joys. A shift to turning back to that which satisfies our curious animal souls.

Anyway, that’s enough from me.

The sun is out and I’m going back to the garden.

If you enjoy my work, you might like to pre-order my debut novel, These Glass Bodies, here (note some non-UK shipping options are not yet available).

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If you’d like to become a founding member, you’ll receive an original watercolour painting. Currently I’m working on sea-swimming selkie women, but the odd whale is springing into life, too.

I am so excited to share that my debut novel, These Glass Bodies, will be published in hardback, audiobook and e-book in spring 2027, and is available for pre-order here (if ordering from outside the UK, options for ordering are currently limited but more will be available soon).

Tender and exquisitely crafted, These Glass Bodies is an absorbing, unsettling debut novel of love, disconnected people and our fragile relationship with the natural world.

It is the warmest spring anyone can remember. Anna lives with her father near the ocean in Scotland. She spends her time hand-rearing nestlings from the wild and has never felt more at peace than in Invergrian, with her birds and her woods and her work.

Rory, eleven years old, hasn’t spoken a word for five years, not since his mother Pip left him and his father Angus. But when he stumbles upon Anna’s house of birds, he can’t believe his luck. He’s long believed birds to be magic, and Anna seems happy to teach him how to help them, not questioning his silence. Seeing his son so happy with the birds and with the beautiful and enigmatic Anna, Angus too finds the fog he has been immersed in finally start to lift.

But as the spring burns on, amid the quiet work of saving the nestlings, alarm bells start ringing. Water becomes scarce. The elderly in the town become fearful. Exhausted birds start falling out of the sky. And Anna discovers a body washed up on the shore.

The novel grew from the seed of a single question someone asked me in the spring of 2018, during the first field season of my PhD. I’d been explaining to them, at the bar of a pub in Falmouth, that part of my research involved monitoring wild jackdaw nests, collecting the bodies of chicks that died, and ferrying these bodies to the lab freezer so I could extract their DNA and undertake genomic analyses.

The person at the bar replied: but why didn’t you try to save them all?

It was easy to respond to this question at the time, to say: well, having more chicks than they can usually feed is an evolutionary strategy the parents employ to make sure they can raise as many chicks as possible, and, as a result, around half of all jackdaw chicks naturally starve in the nest. This means that hundreds of chicks die per jackdaw colony, and many thousands in a single county, so how could anyone save all of them? And if they did, where would those hand-reared birds be released? There would be too many, they would outcompete other species, or starve because there is not enough food, ecosystems would be disrupted… and so on.

But still, the question lingered in the back of my mind. The question of what kind of person would try to save them all, of what kind of person would try to stop the suffering of every living thing, and how that person could possibly carry the weight of it all. And over time, this question became entwined with others. Like, in the face of human-induced climate change, what responsibility do we have to our fellow creatures—whose suffering we are now directly causing—and how do we carry this?

And so, over three intense months last winter, after a long incubation, I wrote These Glass Bodies. During this time I was also on the waiting list for an autism diagnosis, which is important in many ways to this novel, too.

The Bookseller announced the novel this week, and my brilliant editor Sophie said:

‘This is one of those rare novels I want to press into the hands of everyone I know. A stunning, unique debut, set on the coast in Scotland, it is at once a love story, a tale of disconnected people finding one another and an unsettling exploration of our fragile relationship with the natural world. It also features the most tender, beautiful rendering of neurodivergent characters I’ve come across. It captured my heart completely.’

The biggest thank you to my agent, Laura, at Greene & Heaton, and to Sophie at Manilla Press, both of whom are so wonderful to work with and have made all of this possible.

I cannot wait to share These Glass Bodies with you.

Rebecca x

PS: the cover is currently being designed and I can’t wait to share this with you, too!

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But autism has been a major discussion in the US and the UK lately, and I’ve started to notice that there’s something missing from our narratives. Something we’re not speaking about enough. Something that, as an undiagnosed autistic kid, teen, and young adult (I was diagnosed at 31), I wish I’d known.

That is, the joy of being autistic.

It’s hard to know where to start writing about this, though. I could start by telling you that autistic brains process information very differently to neurotypical brains. At rest, we have around 40% more activity buzzing around inside our minds. We don’t ‘switch off’ in the same way as most, and we notice a lot more in our environments: see more, hear more, smell more, taste more. We cannot help this: we are just neuronally wired to take in more information. This makes the world feel very intense. In the wrong environment, this is a disability. In the right environment, it’s a superpower.

Or maybe I could tell you that, at odds with the stereotype that autistic people aren’t empathetic, many of us are actually hyper-empathetic. We feel the emotions of other people (and often nonhumans, too) extremely deeply. We feel our own emotions very deeply, too. But because of this, we can get overwhelmed with feeling. This can cause shutdowns (closing in on ourselves) and/or meltdowns (often called tantrums in toddlers, or moodiness in teens). There is often also a delay in figuring out how we feel: it can take us days instead of seconds to cry about something, or we might not cry, we might write a poem or a song or paint or draw. Sometimes it takes us many years to process how we felt about something. The intensity of these feelings, and the time it takes to process them, can sometimes be a curse, but it can also be a profound gift.

Or maybe I could tell you that for many autistic people, our inner worlds are extremely vivid1. We can experience imaginary worlds with the same intensity as we experience reality. Vision, smells, textures, sounds. I spent my childhood making up stories, living within them. On the edge of the playground, while everyone else played tag, I was in the rainforest meeting chimps. On holiday, while my peers played whatever they were playing, I was riding my horse (my bike) through the American wilderness (the campsite). These worlds engulfed me, and I wanted them to. I felt so alive within them: could hear the conversations I was imagining, smell the wilderness, see everything in minute and vivid detail.

Or maybe I could tell you that while we struggle in some areas, we are often very talented in others. Currently, the diagnosis pathway for autism and ADHD (which I also likely have) focus on deficits: what we cannot do when we are plonked into a neurotypical world and expected to behave as if our brains are not biologically, neuronally, cognitively different. My diagnostic report is a long and depressing list of everything I struggle with. As a child, Rebecca struggled with joining in with her peers. As a teen, she spent most of her time at school daydreaming. Her school attendance was the lowest in her year-group. She is not very good at small talk. She can become too fixated on her passions. But the script could be flipped, right? Instead of a deficit model, we could have a medical system that sees autistic people as different rather than less-than; perhaps even a system that highlights our strengths as well as our struggles. These strengths differ by individual (because every autistic person, as with every person, has different strengths and struggles) but might include intense imagination, hyper-empathy, the magnitude and intensity of our emotions, the few but incredibly meaningful friendships we form, the way we can happily spend a lot of time alone, our love for deep conversations, our passion (and often talent) for our interests, our ability to focus intensely on our passions (which is often framed as a flaw2), our ability to think outside the box, et cetera.

It is, of course, important to talk about the downsides of being autistic too. Most of which, I have found, are downsides of being autistic in a neurotypical world, not downsides of autism itself. I’m not qualified to talk about the challenges of high-support-needs autism, but the sort of autism I have, known as ‘high-masking autism’—because we learn to ‘mask’ our autism and act in a neurotypical way—often co-occurs with extreme social and sensory anxiety.

As a kid, I was situationally mute, meaning that in certain situations (mostly in school) I could not speak due to extreme anxiety (my autism assessor said that any child described as painfully shy really should be assessed for autism; it is often a sign of neurodiversity). And, in high school, this extreme anxiety led me to develop a chronic pain condition—24/7 chronic pain that I still have today. Undiagnosed autistic teens are significantly more likely than neurotypical teens to develop chronic pain because, in high school, our nervous systems—usually already pushed to their limits—go into overdrive. There is too much going on: too many complex social rules, too much noise and fluorescent light (both of which can be physically painful for us), too many expectations, so many ways to mess up, to get told off, to accidentally let-on that we don’t understand the rules of the game and open ourselves up to judgement, bullying, discipline. Our bodies and our minds begin screaming.

Late-diagnosed autistic women are thirteen times more likely to kill themselves than the rest of the population. A terrible statistic. And also not so surprising. Being autistic in a neurotypical world can be really, really hard. And if you’ve lived most of your life not knowing you’re autistic, and just thinking you’re a bit shit at doing the things everyone else can do because, after every-day events, they don’t have to recover in bed for three days/shutdown/go mute/get a migraine/get heart palpitations/feel like they might be sick/be sick/have to go and hide in a toilet cubicle because they literally cannot function anymore, you begin to think of yourself as a flawed human being: broken, alien, wrong. When really, it’s your environment. When really, it’s the fact that you have been pushed into a world that is entirely the wrong shape for you.

This is why diagnosis is crucial. Early diagnosis, in particular. The earlier a person is diagnosed and suitably supported, the less likely they are to develop chronic pain and mental health disorders, and the less likely they are to kill themselves.

And early diagnosis of girls is something we really need to focus on. For every four young boys diagnosed with autism, one young girl is, but we know that in reality there are nearly as many autistic girls as boys. Girls are being missed because they do not present in stereotypical ways. They are shy, they are daydreamers, they are passionate about nature or fashion or fiction rather than trains or maths or stamps (a generalisation, of course), and they also learn to mask much earlier than boys. But boys can be missed too; if they present non-typically (e.g., are hypersensitive, shy, daydreamers) they are also likely to fall through the gaps.

But it is the sex bias in autism diagnosis that brings me to my final point.

There is a lot of discussion at the moment about how getting an autism diagnosis late in life is a bit of a fad, that most of these people—a large proportion of whom are women—probably aren’t actually autistic.

This is, to put it frankly, bullshit.

Most self-diagnosed autistic people who pursue diagnosis are indeed autistic. And most of us are women because, when we were young, nobody knew what autism looked like in girls and so we were not diagnosed. The politicians and social commentators rolling their eyes at the women being diagnosed now are just engaging in a misogynistic ‘she’s-just-melodramatic/whiny/jumping-on-the-bandwagon’ narrative, which is also, I think, related to what caused us to be missed as kids. The medical system only knew what autism looked like in boys because only boys were studied.

So there’s not an autism overdiagnosis problem. There’s an often subtle (sometimes not-so-subtle) misogyny problem. There’s an underfunding-in-healthcare problem. There’s a problem because schools and workplaces are set up for neurotypicals and we’re only now realising that this doesn’t work—in fact is actively damaging—for a big subgroup of the population. But the problem is definitely not with the women who finally, finally, finally are getting the answers they need about who they are and why they struggle and how to live a better, healthier, happier life.

Diagnosis in my thirties has changed my life completely. It has allowed me to let go of all the neurotypical expectations I had for myself and build a lifestyle that actually suits me. It’s allowed me to understand that I’m not broken, I’m just different. And maybe most importantly, it’s allowed me to re-find the joy of being autistic, of being myself, of being a sensitive deep-thinker who needs time and space and quiet and nature and art and music, a joy that I last knew a long time ago—before I tried to squeeze myself into a shape that I was never supposed to be.

If you’re interested in learning more, the following podcast episodes are brilliant:

• Autism: The Quiet Ones with Dr Joanna Grace (at SENDcast)

• Autism in Girls Podcast with Sarah-Jane Critchley (at SENDcast)

• Dr Khurram Sadiq: Explaining AuDHD (autism + ADHD), plus loads of other episodes by Ellie and Paige Harwood at WTF is AuDHD

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Epstein funded many of these scientists. Gave millions of dollars to Harvard, hundreds of thousands to MIT. Many accepted money from him even after his 2008 conviction of soliciting a child prostitute. Went to dinners where there were many young women. Heard about Epstein’s dream of building a ranch where he could impregnate a harem. Apparently, did not let this stop them socialising with him, or accepting his money, or even becoming friends with him. The former president of Harvard asked Epstein for advice on conducting an affair. A famous theoretical physicist emailed Epstein to share the good news that a woman on a university committee would cause no trouble—she was not some young #MeToo bitch.

I wish I could say I am surprised.

I am not surprised.

Did you know that Hubble would not have discovered the universe without the work of a woman? I did not; I learnt this just last week. The woman in question was one of ‘Pickering’s Harem’.

Edward Pickering was an astronomer and physicist who, around the 1900s, had a ‘harem’—a group of women working for him—because he found the men working for him inept and said, one day, that his maid could do a better job. And so he hired his maid. And she did do a better job. And so he hired an all-female team, and one of them, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, came up with a method to measure the distance between earth and far-off galaxies, a method which Hubble used in order to show that the universe is much bigger than previously thought.

Hubble’s name is known across the world. Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s is not. She never received the sort of recognition that a man in her position would have done. As far as I’m aware, none of Pickering’s ‘harem’ did.

Harems are not a pattern of the past. It’s common knowledge within academia—perhaps particularly for women in academia—that such harems are, in fact, pretty common. There are quite a few powerful male scientists who mainly hire conventionally attractive young women. It is not unusual for these men to have marks against their names for inappropriate behaviour. But this is generally kept under wraps; you hear it, woman-to-woman, through the whisper network. Just to let you know…

And yet, despite these ‘harems’ giving the façade of equality, women are still hugely underrepresented in the top tiers of academia. 17% of UK STEM professors are female.

There are many barriers to women progressing up the academic career ladder. Most of these barriers are created and/or upheld by the boys’ club. By which I mean the pattern of men1 chasing power and ego and money, protecting one another, and giving one another a leg-up at the expense of others.

As a woman in academia, I often found myself trying to tread an impossible line. On the one hand, I was taught (mostly subtly, sometimes not so) to speak up, be more sure of myself, be more confident; essentially, to be a bit more male. But, it turns out, men generally do not like women who act like them. Peer reviewed studies show this. Women who speak as much and as confidently as men are ostracised by the very men they are trying to gain acceptance from.

I once worked for a man who had previously been accused of bullying. He bullied me, too. Behind my back he sung my praises, but to my face he was awful. A memory that particularly stings is the way he hissed at me, when I asked him to repeat some instructions, working with you is like working with a child. And if I didn’t laugh when he insulted me, I was having a sense of humour failure.

Other female colleagues, all subordinate to him (he was very nice to those above him in the hierarchy) felt similarly belittled by him. He sometimes called us stupid. Disliked anyone who was sensitive, empathetic, quiet. But also disliked any subordinate who was too confident, too sure of themselves.

He taught me, and other women around him, to be small, to be people-pleasers, to try very hard to make him comfortable.

I never made a formal complaint about him for two reasons. One, I wanted an academic career and I was afraid that complaining would mean that other people in the department—almost all men—would be cautious about working with me in the future (I hate this reason, wish I’d been braver, but it is the truth and I think it’s probably a very common reason that people do not speak out). And two, as I’ve said, somebody had already accused him of bullying. Nothing came of it. In fact, I once overheard him and some senior male colleagues, colleagues I’d really respected, laughing about the accusation. Because, obviously, he wasn’t a bully. Obviously, he just loved a bit of banter. Obviously, she just didn’t have a sense of humour.

The boys’ club look out for their own.

At one of my graduation ceremonies, all the male students were praised by the host, an older male academic, for their intellectual development over the course of the degree. I was praised, as I walked onto stage, for becoming more talkative.

I had not spoken much to that man because I am, naturally, a quiet person around many people. But I learnt to laugh and chat and smile when in his company because this was what made him comfortable (despite it being uncomfortable for me), and apparently this was the thing that deserved praise. Not my accomplishments, not my research, not my freshly published paper. No, what was important was that I learnt to make a man more comfortable. Learnt to squeeze into the shape he expected of me.

Which reminds me of something else that happened during that degree. A fellow student was told by her boss, a male scientist in his sixties, that the whole lab would be sad when she left because she was so nice to look at (the lab was, of course, mostly male). Never mind that she was conducting incredibly complex, important research. Never mind about her talent, her capabilities, her work. She had a nice face. That’s why he and the rest of the lab were sad to see her go.

The point I am making by sharing these personal anecdotes is not that I have experienced boys’ clubs and sexism in science. The point is that I am not an exception. Almost every female scientist I know has stories just like these. Some much worse than these.

And, of course, we see sexism play out at a grander scale, too. A small selection of examples: men are invited to speak on scientific panels twice as often as women; the more prestigious a scientific award, the lower the proportion of women who receive it; when hiring panels are asked to judge identical CVs, the ones with female names are judged as less qualified and thus less hireable than those with male names, and women pay a considerably higher career cost when they have kids compared to their male colleagues.

So, no, I am not surprised by the revelations about Epstein’s boys’ club. I have known boys’ clubs. I have seen how they work. And of course, they are not just a problem in academia, but across every field where power and wealth and status can be accrued.

The funny (awful) thing is that while I was working in academia, I didn’t inspect any of this. I tucked it away. It was too hard to think about, too painful, too distracting. But I am thinking about it now. I am thinking about why these revelations about Epstein do not surprise me, and I am thinking about what it is that makes powerful white men treat other groups as if they are inferior, as if they are less than, as if they are other, and what I keep landing on is empathy. Specifically, how these men treat empathy as weakness.

In the 1600s, Descartes, a scientist whose work and philosophies are still important to many scientific fields today, did unmedicated dissections on live animals. He would, for example, pin dogs to a board and cut them open so that their beating hearts could be observed by students.

He conducted these dissections because he believed animals could not feel pain. Sure, they looked like they were in pain, but that, he argued, was just a mechanical response to a stimulus. With the confidence of a Learned White Man, he knew that these ‘beasts’ lacked the capability to feel pain, or any emotion at all, and so it was perfectly okay to slice them open without a second thought (how very convenient).

When the animals screamed out, which of course they did, Descartes’ students would sometimes ask him to stop. He would not. The students were being irrational, emotional; they needed to suppress their animalistic empathy and think with their rational minds, remember that the beast was just an unfeeling machine, regardless of what their own human-animal bodies were telling them about shared origin, shared feeling, shared pain.

Until the 1980s, scientists (again, mostly male scientists) believed newborn humans could not feel pain, and so surgeons would operate on them without painkillers. Open-heart surgery was done on newborn babies without any pain relief; open-heart surgery that involved sawing the breastbone open.

And even now, today, in 2026, women in the same level of pain as men are prescribed weaker pain relief by doctors. In one hospital, a female nurse reported that male clinicians had a code for women who said they were in pain but had no obvious clinical reason. WW. Whiny Woman.

And Black people’s pain is believed even less than white women’s.

All these things: dissections on live animals, unmedicated surgery on newborns, giving weaker pain relief to women and Black people, grow from the same dark roots: the belief that anyone who is not a straight white man is less. Less intelligent, less rational, less able to think, to feel. Any emotional or empathetic response that tells you, the powerful white man, otherwise—such as a feeling that you should, perhaps, not slice into the chest of a conscious newborn—is to be suppressed, to be pushed down and down until you are another unfeeling, rational, efficient cog in the patriarchal machine.

Aristotle created the Scala Naturae (a hierarchy of life) over 2000 years ago, with men and their rational minds at the top, and women and animals underneath—primitive creatures, driven by instinct and emotion, and thus incapable of men’s intelligence and rationality (as if rationality and emotion are mutually exclusive, as if emotions haven’t evolved in order for us to respond with and connect to the world, as if empathy isn’t the very thing that has made us, humanity, as cooperative and sociable as we are, as if this isn’t one of the traits that underpins the many successes of our species). I look at the Scala Naturae now and I think: what has changed? This is still, 2000 years later, what the men in charge of the world think, isn’t it? They still believe that they are above everyone and everything else on this planet.

God, I wish I was surprised by what the Epstein files reveal, but I am not. What those files reveal is only what every person who is outside of the boys’ club already knows. We live in a world ruled by those clubs. A world where anyone who is not a rich straight white man is treated as inferior. Where we, the other, are tools for those rich men. Pawns in their game. Objects. Less than.

We had to fight the rich white man for the rights of non-white humans. We had to fight the rich white man for the rights of non-male humans. We are still fighting for both these rights; racism and sexism are still rife. But bound to these fights, we must fight also for the voiceless: the non-humans. They, too, are victims of this awful, exploitative, extractivist, colonial, patriarchal system. It was convenient for powerful white men to say Black people couldn’t think so they could exploit them; it was convenient for powerful white men to say women could not think so they could exploit them; it is convenient, too, for powerful white men to say animals cannot think, cannot feel pain, so they can exploit them. It is all tied together. It is all the same system. And it is not the same fight but the fights are linked and we must stand together, fight together.

Oh, the irony—my first impulse is to end this piece with sorry. I want to say sorry this is such an angry piece, sorry for bringing this to your inbox, sorry there is not much light at the end. But I won’t, for two reasons. Firstly, because I am done with apologising for my emotions, rage included. And secondly, because there is light. The light is in the billions of empathetic humans on this planet, the countless mothers and fathers teaching their kids—girls and boys—how to be empathetic human beings, the countless white men who see how destructive this system is and want to fight it too. And the light is in every act of empathy, every act of care, every person treated kindly, every offer of warmth and comfort, every child kept safe, every cry of pain—whether human or animal—that is believed without question, without the suppression of the instinctive knowledge of shared origin, shared feeling.

There is light, I really believe that. There is light, and there is rage. Which are as mutually exclusive as intelligence and emotion, as rationality and empathy; that is, not at all.

So, may we all embrace our empathy.

And may we all be furious.

Love, another #MeToo bitch x

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Westray, the most north-westerly Orkney isle, is engulfed by storm. It is 1730, or thereabouts, and the people of the island are hunkering down, folding themselves away, huddling around fires and listening to the rattling of windows, the hiss and thud of weather snarling around the house.

Outside, the sun has fled and the land, the sea, is lit in moonglow—everything husky grey, gunmetal blue. Except the sea; white-toothed, white-clawed. It is a wild beast tonight, arching its back as if in its death throes.

In a cottage in the north, a cottage surrounded by cliff and sea and storm, there is a woman spinning at the fireside. She hears something outside, beneath the howl of the weather. It sounds a little like footsteps, but must just be the wind demanding an audience. But then she hears it again, and tentatively she opens the door, sees her husband running towards her through the storm, hears him shouting: there is a ship on the rocks. Out to the west, there is a ship.

By the time they get to the clifftop, there is a gathering of wind-whipped people bent into right angles just to keep their feet on the ground. Some are crouching, some are kneeling. They are all looking down, down, down to the ship cracking in two against the rocks that cut and jut into the black water.

The sound of the storm fills every empty space, and so the heave and split of wood cannot be heard, only felt: a fracture within, a damp dread.

Every now and then, a person can be seen. Falling from the splitting ship. Clinging, swimming, swallowed up.

There is some discussion on the clifftop, shouted and screamed above the wind. Discussion of ropes to lower men down the cliff, of routes down to shore. But they all know, and have known since they first arrived, that there is nothing to be done. Not in this weather, not in these seas. No, there is nothing to be done but watch or leave.

A person will always wonder what it means to be one who stays, what it means to be one who goes—will carry the knot of their choice forever. Most leave, go back to their firesides, warm their hands and blink away their tears. Only a small group remains. They bear witness, they watch hands reach out of the water and then reach no more. But of course, nothing changes with the weight of their gaze. The ship is engulfed and the people are too, and the sea keeps on dancing, and the sky keeps on howling, and the moon, lighting the night up like a stage, does not so much as blink.

At first light, the clifftop is deserted. Everybody has gone home to warmth and food and bed and the dull ache of disaster. And so nobody is there when the sun rises above the tired sea—calmer now, an illusion of placidity. And nobody is walking the beaches, nor finding what is left on the sand as the moon pulls the lip of the water down and down and down.

But as the sun climbs higher in the sky, and the world warms, and the people wake, they do come. They come to the beach because while a shipwreck is awful, it is also a blessing. There will be wood, precious winter fuel in these bare-skinned isles, and there might be cargo, expensive goods, and nothing will be wasted because here, nothing is.

What the folk find as they walk the beaches is this: wood, and bodies. So much wood. So many bodies.

Except, one man finds something else.

He is at a distance from all the rest, and there, on the lonely sand, he finds a woman, blue-skinned, drowned, with a sodden shawl wrapped around her, and from that shawl comes a thin, high cry. And then: a small hand, dimpled knuckles, fingers reaching out to air, to sky.

The man kneels, unwraps the shawl. Finds a baby. Alive.

The child is rushed to the cottage, the one in the north surrounded by cliff and sea and calm blue sky, and inside the woman warms the baby by the fire, presses his blue-grey skin against her skin, watches him flush pink, feels his soft body come back to life. She whispers to him that everything will be okay, that they will take care of him, that he will live, and live well.

Later that day, an islander finds a fracture of wood washed ashore, a word etched into it. Archangel. The ship has come from Archangel, Russia.

When the news reaches the little cottage in the north, the baby is named Archie Angel.

When he is older, Archie falls in love with a local girl. They stay on the isle, marry, have a family. The Angels. When I go to Lady Kirk’s graveyard, I find the stone with their names etched into it, and while the surname no longer survives (lost when the last Angel married around one hundred years ago), Archie’s descendants can be found throughout Scotland. Descendants of a shipwrecked baby, taken in by a couple who raised him as their own.

I have been thinking of Archie lately. I have been reading about ICE, detention centres, children stolen from their homes and imprisoned, children on flimsy boats crossing the rough, cold waters of the Mediterranean, the English Channel, children who are told to go away, go back, get off our land when (if) they make landfall, children in Gaza whose homes have been bombed to the ground, whose limbs have been ripped from them, children who have been preyed upon by rich men with a lust for power, children who have not been taken in by this world, who have not been cradled at the fireside and pressed against warm skin, children who have been pushed, thrown, into stormy seas.

I have been thinking about how tempting it is to see all that suffering, all that struggle, all that horror, and want to give up, look away, find something easier to attend to than the thin cries of people in pain, because there is no way for any one person to make a dent in any of it.

But what Archie tells me, three hundred years after he was found on a beach just a short walk from my house, is that not everything can be saved or helped or fixed, but that does not mean that something can’t be. The night of the shipwreck, hundreds of people drowned. But one baby lived. And a couple took him in, and raised him, and he found love here, and he brought love here, and he found joy here, and he brought joy here, and there is so much struggle and pain in this world but there is also so much light—so many ways to find light, and to give it, too. Saving what we can save, helping where we can help, fixing what we can fix, doing what we can do—no more, no less.

That is all we can do, and that is enough. That is how we find the golden edges to our days, isn’t it?

There are many variants of this story. I have heard five, and I’m sure there are more. But all of them agree on the shipwreck, the baby found on the shore (the only survivor), the couple who took him in and called him Archie Angel (after Archangel). And many of his descendants live today.

Of course, this retelling is my own embellished version. I have based it on the most commonly told variant of the story.

Some of you might be familiar with George Mackay Brown, an Orcadian poet. He wrote a poem about Archie Angel, called Wreck of the Archangel. Here’s an excerpt:

A man listens. This can’t be! — One thin cry
Between wavecrash and circling wolves of wind,
And there, in the lantern pool
A child’s face, a dwindling, in seaweed tassels

This is #5 of the Kindness Chronicles. You can read the previous four here (the story of a stranger who helped me when I fell down an arctic waterfall), here (where a homicide detective gave me a lift in the Canadian wilderness), here (five small stories of human kindness to nonhuman creatures), and here (about a neighbour on a plane).

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Cover image of shipwreck by Thorvald Simeon Niss (1901)

I was thinking about that post this morning because I was surrounded by corpses. For weeks now, the beach has been blanketed with storm-dumped kelp, a metre thick, and it is a blanket embroidered with bodies. Guillemots, herring gulls, fish, a seal. A disembodied wing juts out of the seaweed like a flag. An oystercatcher’s leg, its red ribbon of muscle, adorns a black-green frond. It is almost impossible to describe the scale of it all. Also the smell of it: not foul or rotting, as you might expect, but earthy, metallic, sulphurous, rich.

And standing there, amongst the corpses, I thought: I will reread that first post, remind myself what it was I said about bodies and bones, see if anything has changed.

This is how I’d ended that piece: On this island where I am surrounded by the dead, my house will become a shrine to the bones I can carry, and the beaches will be a shrine to the bodies I cannot, and the dead – always, whether bird or whale, flesh or bone – will stop me in my tracks and remind me to think of wild things, of endings, of the light and the heavy all at once.

Well, I have certainly become less inclined to ferry skeletons home; there are, after all, only so many bones one home can contain. But also, and more to the point, I find a greater satisfaction in leaving a corpse to its natural end now, in spending time with it for just a moment—imagining the wild life it lived, the wild beings it now harbours (insects, fungi, roots, eggs)—and then moving on with life while it moves on with death.

What I am saying is not that the death of a creature is any less mournful, but that it seems to me more natural than it once did, less of an assault against the living. We do not banish shadow when we seek the light, after all: we accept that they are unchangeably entangled.

I’m not sure when this change in me occurred, but I sometimes wonder if a rhythmic, cyclic understanding of the world comes subliminally here, where there is no escape from the drum of the ocean, from its ebb and flood, its constant movement. On stormy nights, we hear it in our bedroom, the rumble of that bucking, wild atlantic. Just up the road, my neighbour tells me she can feel it through the floorboards, through her legs: the roar of rock being rearranged by ocean, the song of earth, water, moon, orbit, tide. The sea’s flux and flow is felt deep here; lives alongside us, within us. It does not knock and it needs no invitation. It lets itself right in.

In that first post, I mentioned the whale bones I found on the beach. A baleen whale’s gigantic body had come ashore not long before I arrived to the island, and its bones were scattered along the bay. I still find bones from that whale. A rib like a tree-branch greets me each time I snorkel, always a slightly different shape, sea-sculpted, dissolving. And vertebrae the size of human skulls wash in, out, in with the tide, sea-worn and sea-sculpted, too.

Before now, I’d never learnt the cycle of a place. I flitted between counties, countries, continents, never aligned myself to any particular beat. And so it has been a novelty, to walk the same route every day, to feel the same land underfoot, to listen to the same thunderous ocean. A novelty, also, to sit with the juxtaposition of becoming familiar with a place while also becoming aware of the magnitude of its fluidity: a beach that changes topography each day, kelp that is delivered and then gobbled up by the tide, boulders repositioned in the night, bodies turning to bone turning to sand.

Before now, I’d been hunting for variety on a planetary scale, but all along a deeper, richer sort of variety could be found anywhere, everywhere, waiting only for the gift of attention, the gift of time. Rarities in this world. Rarities in a world where we are taught to pluck every fruit before it ripens, eat the flesh before it is ready, and then wonder why we are dissatisfied.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that the more I pay attention, the more time I gift this place, the more I come to understand things about light and dark, ebb and flood, old and new, life and death, and about cycles, and rhythms, that I did not understand before. At least not in any real, embodied way. And so to answer that question I asked myself this morning, of whether anything has changed since I wrote my first piece here—well, of course things have changed. This is what the island whispers to anyone who pays attention: change comes like the tide. A certainty; predictable, cyclic, ancient and yet also, every time, entirely new.

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The creature before me, only five centimetres long and as close to invisible as a creature can get, is a ‘little cuttle’, Sepiola atlantica, a close relative of cuttlefish.

I’ve dreamt of seeing a wild cephalopod (the group that contains cuttlefish, octopuses, squids and nautiluses) for a long time—have been a little obsessed with them since I first started learning about animal minds.

The closest to alien intelligence we might ever know, cephalopods diverged from the common ancestor with vertebrates over half a billion years ago. That ancestor was a worm-like creature, and from that small animal, completely independently of vertebrates, cephalopods have evolved their own complex nervous system—sprawling, scattered, with both a central brain and neurons spread all over the body, up to two thirds of which can be found in their arms (meaning, incredibly, that their arms have their own ‘mini brains’).

Imagine that!

Well, we cannot.

This is part of the magic.

Despite having evolved independently from us for so long, cephalopods show remarkable parallels with human intelligence. For example, you might have heard of the marshmallow test. Designed for humans, this is a test of delayed gratification: how long can a person resist a marshmallow when they know, if they manage to resist it, they will get two instead of one? Many toddlers struggle with this, as do many species of nonhuman primate. But cuttlefish? They can resist a prawn for minutes in order to receive a tastier morsel of food1. Although, adorably, they do turn themselves away from the prawn while waiting, as if to resist the temptation to eat it. Young children do this too, hiding their head in their arms to make sure they don’t eat that tempting marshmallow.

Cephalopods are also master problem solvers. Plenty of peer-reviewed research shows this2, but one of my favourite illustrations is anecdotal. Staff at Sea Star Aquarium, Germany, were confused about why the aquarium’s electricity kept short-circuiting overnight. After camping out to find the cause, they saw Otto the octopus climbing to the top of his tank and shooting a stream of water directly at the light overhead. This not only caused the light to turn off, but all the electricity in the building. He’d been doing this night after night, perhaps because he enjoyed the sensory shift from light to dark, or from electric hum to silence, or, perhaps, the light was irritating him. We do not know, but Otto clearly had a mission and he found a way to get it done.

Cephalopods also have ways of communicating that we are only just learning about. For example, last year researchers found evidence that cuttlefish use ‘sign language’3. By making specific gestures (and associated vibrations) with their tentacles, they communicate with one another. Researchers played a video of a cuttlefish waving its arm, and the cuttlefish in the audience waved back. And when the researchers used an underwater microphone to play an arm-waving vibration, the cuttlefish waved back at this too.

Imagine that! Communicating with a cuttlefish. Unlocking an element of their world we never knew about before. For the longest time, we humans have overlooked these soft-bodied, sea-salted, tentacled kin of ours. What magic comes when we overturn our assumptions and look, really look, at the creatures we share this planet with.

Recently, we’ve even found evidence that they dream4. By recording neural activity while they sleep, we’ve seen that octopus brains enter a sleep phase that looks a lot like our own REM cycle. Their skin patterning changes in this sleep phase too, reflecting patterns seen in octopuses that are awake—socialising, hunting, camouflaging. Hints of what they are dreaming about, perhaps?

Octopuses have also been seen inking in their sleep, as well as engaging in other anti-predator behaviours. This suggests that they may have nightmares, too5.

I’ve always loved trying to shapeshift into an animal’s mind, to imagine another’s reality. In animal science, we call an animal’s way of experiencing the world its umwelt, and there is something both frustrating and delicious in the mystery of it6. What does it feel like to have arms with brains? What does it feel like to have a boneless body? What does it feel like to become almost invisible? To speak in tentacle vibrations, to dream an octopus dream?

We don’t know; we can’t know.

Mystery. Magic.

A few weeks ago, a paper7 came out on cephalopod sentience. It collates all the studies we’ve done on cephalopods to help us understand whether they have feelings—whether they are capable of fear, pain, pleasure, joy—which, in animal science, is how we define sentience8.

I’ve heard the argument that these sorts of papers are useless, because we should just assume that other animals are sentient. If we lived in a different world, a kinder world, I would agree with this argument. But we do not live in that world, we live in a world where many humans believe animals to be beneath us—less complex, less emotional, less aware, less alive—and this belief is used to justify norms that I don’t need to detail here, but that mean there is much more suffering on this earth than there needs to be.

What this new paper concludes is that most cephalopods are highly likely to be sentient. They know pain, they know pleasure. They feel. This is important work. This is work that is saying: look, another group of animals we underestimated; look, another group of animals whose welfare we must consider because they too are living and feeling beings; look, another group of animals who policymakers, regulatory bodies and industries must figure out how to better protect. And, importantly, it is work that cannot be easily denied, because it is robust, empirical, balanced. This means that even those most inconvenienced by its conclusions cannot simply say: cephalopods are sentient? That’s just the narrative of tree-huggers and hippies.

We live in a world where such work is needed, to stand up to those who would like to deny the evidence it presents.

Under these clear Orkney skies, above a ribbon of dispersing ink, I watch the loose impression of that mysterious little cuttle swim away, its glassy edges lost to seabed, to sand, and I try, for a moment, to imagine being inside that strange creature’s mind. It is impossible, of course, because I am still thinking in the way a human thinks, can only ever think this way… but it is a fun exercise nevertheless, and I like to imagine something like this:

What is that animal in the water behind me?

Bad swimmer.

Bad hider.

Can’t breathe underwater.

Can’t squash itself small and hide where it pleases.

Can’t even camouflage itself.

What a clumsy, silly thing.

What an otherworld, alien creature.

Thank you so much for being here. As between two seas is a reader-supported publication, I would be over the moon if you might consider financially supporting this weekly newsletter.

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Later, this place will come alive: a flock of pumping hearts and hot blood and wings and beaks and smiles and laughter. I will watch two kids on a quadbike pull a third along on a sheet of plastic, and I will see a gaggle of children build a snowman adorned with a neckerchief, and there will be dogs diving into snowdrifts like arctic foxes, and the rabbits will be digging in the snow, and the songbirds will be gathering at the feeders, and the ravens will be cackling somewhere high, and a goldfinch will land on the only thistle tall enough to break the back of the snow.

But that is all to come later.

For now, the world is sparse.

For now, there is only unmarked snow (the quiet hush of it) and the white-skinned sea (the quiet roar of it) and the blanket of sky (the quiet thick of it), and not a soul in sight.

Until, someone comes.

Someone slicing up the white.

She2 is a great black-backed gull, Larus marinus. The largest gull in the world. With a wingspan of five and a half feet, she has a crimson mark on her beak that looks like dripping blood, and a back so black and wings so long that as she flies she seems to cut the world in two.

She is a punctuation mark—an exclamation mark—in this blank landscape; there is no ignoring her. She is shouting out into this vast expanse: I am here! I am here!

Last summer, I watched a black-backed gull drown a rabbit and then swallow it whole. The rabbit was screaming for minutes. Black-backs are infamous for such behaviour; they are pirates, scavengers, killers, often top of the food chain (that is, when sea eagles aren’t around), and they commonly pluck ducklings from their mother’s side, and drown small mammals, and bully other scavenging birds so that they can have the first sumptuous taste of a corpse.

Last week I wrote about how some birds will pluck the eyes out of live-stranded cetaceans. The great black-backed gull is one such bird. An undefended eyeball is just too nutritious to resist.

As you can imagine, many people dislike them because of this. Perhaps you are one of those people. Perhaps you were not one of those people, but you are now you know what they do to survive.

You’d be in good company. Ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent once said of black-backed gulls: “It surely seemed to be a king among the gulls, a merciless tyrant over its fellows, the largest and strongest of its tribe. No weaker gull dared to intrude upon its feudal domain.” (Bent, 1921)3

And perhaps I could have buried these details—the drowned rabbit, the corpses, the snatched ducklings, the stolen eyes—and told you instead about how black-backed gulls form strong pair-bonds, cooperatively raise their chicks, and engage in group preening (grooming) sessions4. Maybe you’d like them then; or, at least, maybe you wouldn’t dislike them. But maybe we would lose something important in that telling; maybe we would flatten something, reshape something, force something into a box that is the wrong size for its knotty, expansive bones.

I think much of our understanding of nature has been flattened by dominant cultural narratives. It is the Disneyfication of nature5. Films like The Lion King, Bambi, The Jungle Book, Finding Nemo (to name just a few) are great examples of this: in these we anthropomorphise the natural world, put animals into a human moral framework (just think of the poor hyenas in The Lion King), while also sanitising the brutal indifference of nature (good will eventually win! Awful, terrible things don’t happen without eventually being fixed!).

This Disneyfication worries me, and I’ve been trying to pin down why. I think it’s because of this: not only does it lead to a misunderstanding of how the natural world functions—as a complicated and multifaceted web, full of dissonance and juxtapositions, joy and pain, light and shadow, and, perhaps most importantly, utter indifference to human feeling—but also because it undermines what we really need to be working towards, which is this: respect for and conservation of entire ecosystems, including not only those species who fit a curated and sanitised image of nature, but also the species who do not fit that narrative. Like the powerful, predatory black-backed gull.

You might wonder if it really makes much difference. If a sanitised, moralised and romantic view of nature is what makes somebody care, what harm can there be? Surely, if anything, this would help rather than hinder conservation efforts?

I’ve been pondering this a lot lately, and have found myself thinking back to something that happened in early spring, 2018. My partner and I were driving through a Cornish village when I saw a magpie pinning an animal down on the tarmac. As we got closer, I saw that the animal was a slow worm, a species of legless lizard. Without thinking, I jumped out of the passenger seat of the (slowly) moving car and tried to snatch the injured slow worm from the magpie, only pausing because my partner shouted what are you doing?!. In this pause, the magpie flew away with its meal.

Only later, when I really examined my behaviour, did I realise that while this may have looked like a selfless act, it was not. After all, if I had saved that slow worm something would still have died that day—a magpie needs to eat. Perhaps it would have been another slow worm, perhaps a chick or a mouse. Or perhaps the magpie would have died, if it had found no other meal. And by saving that particular slow worm, I’d also be condemning its future prey (slugs, earthworms) to death.

No, I’d tried to save the slow worm because (i) I was empathising6 with it but not with the magpie (nor the magpie’s alternative prey, nor the slow worm’s future meals), and (ii) I was not ready to accept the complexity of our interconnectedness, that all life is built on death’s back, that brutality is often beauty’s mirror. I wanted a Disneyfied version of nature, one without darkness or death or struggle, one where our human hearts are catered to and coddle. And when that is not what I saw, it struck me as wrong.

As if the magpie was breaking a promise.

As if the magpie was the villain of the story.

A friend who teaches a university conservation course told me that once, on safari, a group of budding conservationists became extremely distressed at the sight of a lion hunting a gazelle. She felt that the students were not just upset about the impending death of the gazelle, nor simply empathising with its plight, but that they seemed angry at the perceived injustice of it. As if the lions were being mean, somehow.

And when I was recounting the story of the dolphin stranding to a friend last week, she was horrified when I mentioned that a bird had pecked at the blowhole of one of them. That’s so horrible, she said, I just never think about nature being cruel.

Cruel. Villain. Mean. Tyrant. All of these words have such deep moral roots.

I don’t think anyone can be blamed for moralising nature. It’s not a personal flaw, but a perspective that our culture perpetuates—and not only through Disney films, but in a more general way. We are constantly being told that nature is good for us7, that it is beautiful and peaceful and wholesome, that everything ‘natural’ is ‘right’. And we are therefore shocked, outraged, when we see the darker side of nature; the gorier side, the side of claw and tooth and flesh and death, and complete and utter indifference.

I don’t think we can be blamed for this, but also I think that we must challenge ourselves to break free from these perspectives and try to stop imposing our moral values onto the natural world. This is important because moralising nature inevitably leads to us valuing some species more than others, and we simply cannot afford to do this. We must value the whole, because without valuing the whole we will not do our best to protect it, and if we do not protect the whole, then the vast, interdependent, impossibly complex web of life becomes more fragile; more likely to fracture, to break. The web needs the magpie as much as the slow worm, the lion as much as the gazelle, the black-backed gull as much as the rabbit she drowns. The web is not for us to manicure, is not for us to curate, is not for us to moralise. The web has no victims and no villains. The web is just the web.

And in this world where humans dominate and destroy and extract and exploit, the web—all of it—needs our protection.

I watch the black-backed gull bank and swoop low over the rocks, then rise up, up, up, into that blank white sky.

Later, this place will come alive with pumping hearts and smiles and laughter, gaggles of snow-drunk children, cackles of ravens, a highway of rabbit prints in the snow.

But, right now, in this quiet dawn, there is already life.

There is a great black-backed gull on the hunt for her next meal, her pumping heart just as vital and as beautiful as any one of ours.

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It takes me nearly ten minutes to get to her. She is almost a kilometre away from the rest, beached on the sand right on the other side of the bay. I jog across pebbles, wade through a river, climb mounds of kelp, to reach her. I hate that she is alone.

A seasoned stranding responder has told me what to do when I get to her: dig sand out from beneath her pectoral fins; protect her skin with a wet sheet; pour water over her back to keep her comfortable; keep her dorsal fin and blowhole clear (the former for temperature regulation, the latter for breathing); monitor her for signs of deterioration, and stay with her until BDMLR (British Divers Marine Life Rescue) medics arrive.

But, the very first thing I do is speak.

I learnt this from working with nesting jackdaws—to speak in soft, low tones as you go about your work so they know you are there, so you do not surprise them. And I remember, a long time ago, reading something about how this is important for cetaceans (whales and dolphins), too—how when they strand it is good to move slowly and calmly and to speak quietly and gently. I don’t know if this is backed up by research, but it is intuitive, isn’t it? They are sentient, intelligent, emotional beings1. They may well sense panic. They may well sense a lack of care. And so as I approach her I am saying, in a gentle, quiet voice, hello, I’m here to help, we’re going to do our best for you, I promise, we’re going to figure this out.

There are six altogether. Six common dolphins. One adult male, three adult females, and two female calves (one of whom is less than a month old), all of them stranded here on this shallow, sandy bay.

These bays are notorious for cetacean strandings. Without any solid edges—just gentle, sandy slopes—it is thought that the dolphins’ sonar (which they use to build a map of their environment) does not echo back to them clearly. This makes it difficult for them to map the area, and so they can swim right into the shallows, unaware that they are heading into a trap.2

The first thing I notice as I get closer to the dolphin is her size. At around six feet long, she is bigger than the five on the other side of the bay. And then I notice something else, something concerning: there is blood coming from her blowhole, dribbling down her head. None of the other dolphins were bleeding like this. I kneel about a metre from her and listen to her breathing. One powerful, gasping breath erupts from her blowhole every four seconds. This is very fast. I tell her, soft and low: it’s okay, you’re okay.

She knows I am here, is looking at me with her eye—wide, treacle brown—and she is trying to move her fluke up and down. I think this is probably a sign of stress, as if she wants to move away from me, and I don’t want to stress her more but I do want to move her into a comfortable position, and so, slowly, slowly, I come closer to her, speak softly as I do, say over and over that I am here to help.

For safety, I have a face mask and plastic gloves on. I wish I could take them off so I do not appear so alien, so she could feel the touch of warm skin rather than cold plastic, but dolphins carry diseases that can spread to humans—especially through water droplets in their breath—and so I keep the protective gear on as I work.

The first thing I do is dig her pectoral fins out of the sand, move them into a better position, rock her just slightly so that her body is upright. She is heavy. So heavy. And then I ferry water back and forth to her body, let it slip over her skin, say again and again, we’re going to do our best for you. And every four seconds that huge, powerful gasp comes erupting from her blowhole. I can see it open and close, open and close, want to wipe the clotted blood away from its edges but do not want to cause her pain and so I don’t, I just keep ferrying water to her drying skin and whisper gentle nothings to her.

We think the pod stranded in the night, which would mean they’ve been here at least six hours. Stranded dolphins face many dangers, the primary one is the weight of their own bodies—without water to support them, they collapse in on themselves, their organs slowly crushed. Birds pose a grave danger too. Crows and ravens may pluck the eyes from still-living and entirely defenceless cetaceans. Thankfully, human presence largely stops the latter risk, but only the return of the ocean, the cradle of the water, can fix the former.

As luck would have it, the tide is turning. It is swishing into the channels I’ve dug around her, hopefully taking some weight off her organs. But damage has already been done. Her breathing is quickening and her muscles are shuddering and blood has started to trickle down from her left eye, a bright red tear, a sign of a body buckling.

I cannot speak for her, of course, but for me this is the second worst moment of the day. I just cannot imagine the pain she must be in, the panic she must be feeling, but I feel an echo of it in my belly, my bones—panic and pain—because her eye is bleeding and her body is struggling and we are alone here and the sea is not rising quickly enough and she is so strong and beautiful and her eye is blinking up at me and what can I do? There is nothing I can do. Except say hold on, hold on, your family is just across the bay, you’ll see them soon, hold on, hold on.

I haven’t put my wetsuit on yet, it is still in the van. I’d been in too much of a rush to help and now here I am, a kilometre away from the van, alone with this dolphin in the rising tide. The sea is freezing and I have completely lost the feeling in my feet and my fingertips, but I will not, cannot, leave her.

Across the bay, I see that the medics have arrived. They’ve come over from mainland and they have brought not only their stranding knowledge but also stretchers, tarps, ropes, a specialist vet on the other end of phone. And the coastguard is here, too, and two men are coming for us, are wading through the water to us, and I just keep whispering, hold on, hold on.

I have a reverence for human kindness. I am not religious, but I think it is the holiest thing in this life. And so when these two men kneel in the water, either side of this dolphin’s head, and one wipes the stream of blood from her eye, and the other tenderly wipes the blood from her blowhole, I hug the moment into me like a prayer.

The man who wipes the blood from her blowhole tells me that it looks like the blood isn’t coming from the blowhole after all, but from wounds around its edges, wounds most likely caused by a bird pecking at her before I arrived. This is good news, better than blood coming from the blowhole itself, but her bleeding eye is concerning them. The sort of concern that bites like frost.

We’re standing in almost a foot of water now, and noticing what I’m wearing, they ask if I have something warmer to change into. And so, a little reluctantly (although I know the dolphin is in the best of hands), I go back to the van to change. My hands are completely numb and my feet are too and getting into my wetsuit feels like unlocking a door after half a bottle of wine but eventually I am in, and as I get out of the van I am greeted with the most bizarre and brilliant view: the dolphin I had been tending has been inelegantly scooped into the front loader of a local farmer’s tractor, a tractor which is now heading across the beach towards the rest of the pod, the dolphin lifted into the air. She has seen it all today. Ocean, land, sky.

I get to the tractor just as it lowers the dolphin to the ground, and oh! Oh! This is incredible. The volunteers at this end of the beach have moved their five dolphins into a circle, all facing one another, and now this dolphin joins them, the missing piece, and I can see her looking at her pod-mates, and her eye has stopped bleeding, and her breathing is still fast but it suddenly feels like maybe it’ll be okay, maybe they will all be okay.

The tractor leaves and we all step back from the dolphins to give them time to relax in one another’s presence, to destress from the tractor and the noise and the movement, and now I hear the next stage of the plan: if all the dolphins pass their health checks, we will put them each on a stretcher and take them out to sea.

This is logistically difficult. There are five people in drysuits and me in a wetsuit and there are six dolphins, four of whom are adults and extremely heavy (as in, 13 to 23 stone each). And also, we can’t release them one by one. The first one released will just come back to shore, driven by an instinct we cannot name and cannot understand: the instinct to be with the pod no matter the cost. No, it is best to release them together.

And another complication, something I had not known: dolphin muscles seize up when they strand, so they are likely to drown if simply let go in deep water. They also lose their sense of balance and often cannot stay upright, and this can also lead to drowning. So, not only must they be taken to sea together, but they must be gently supported by human arms while they move their muscles and warm them back up, and they must be rocked gently from side to side to help them rebalance themselves. And then, finally, they can be guided into the deep.

After the health checks have been done, I hear that there is a problem. It is with the dolphin I’d been tending on the far side of the bay. Her breathing rate is too fast. The lead medic calls the vet. There are concerns about her health, that she may have too much internal damage. There are discussions of having to leave her behind. Of releasing the rest of the pod and then euthanising her afterwards.

This is the hardest moment of the day and I am a chaos of emotion: all the logic in me trying to calm all the parts that want to shout—please, let’s just give her a chance.

The problem is that if she is too sick to make it back to open water, she is likely to re-strand. This both increases her suffering and increases the likelihood of the whole pod re-stranding. Sometimes our innate responses are the ones we should attend to, and sometimes they are not. Either way, those instinctive reactions make themselves known, don’t they—they flood us and knot in our throats. But I swallow that desperate knot down and prepare for the fact that she may be left behind, she may be euthanised, and this would be for the best. For her. For the pod.

But then, thank god, her breathing rate normalises. The vet says she can be released. All of them can go, together. Ah, the relief!! But there is no time to soak it in because the tide is slipping in around us, lapping at our shins, and it is time—finally time—to take them to sea.

There is a flurry of activity as dolphins are loaded onto stretchers and taken into deeper water. I am given a life jacket, told to shout if I get too cold (I have far too much adrenaline to know if I am cold), but then I get assigned a job that does not immediately require wading into the deep. And oh my gosh, what a job it is. I am asked to care for the four-week-old, keep her blowhole above water while the other dolphins are taken to the sea.

We know she is four-weeks(ish) because we can still see her foetal folds: pale, vertical stripes on her flanks where she was folded up in her mother’s womb3. Gently, I hold her head up—a surprisingly heavy head, given her small size—and keep her blowhole above the surface as the tide comes rolling in. While doing this, I accidentally cover her eyes with my forearms and she begins to squirm, her little fluke thrashing, and a medic tells me to move my arms back a little so that she can see the rest of the pod. When the other dolphins are in her sight line, she instantly calms down.

And then! She whistles! I hear her voice!

These whistles come from ‘phonic lips’ (also known as monkey lips4) inside the blowhole. Of course, we do not know what she is saying, but given her age she is probably calling for her mother. When she is older, around a year old, she will name herself with a specific, unique whistle. She will do this by coming up with a noise (a ‘signature whistle’) that differs from the signature whistle of everyone she knows, and she will then use her name to identify herself to other dolphins, to tell them: I am here!

While this calf is too young to have a signature whistle, the adults will all have their own names. So, later, when I am supporting the adult male in the water (waiting for his muscles to warm up) and he begins to whistle, and then some of the other adults, all in a line next to us, do too, they may well be calling out their names. Indeed, studies have found that when dolphins strand, or find themselves in other stressful situations, they start calling their names more frequently, in an attempt to call for help from their pod-mates, and/or to find out who else is present5. So it is likely that what I am hearing as I support the weight of this gorgeous male, is the wild secret of his name. Of all their names. All of them saying: I am here, yes, I am here! Me too! Me too!

But they might be saying something else. We just don’t know. All I know for sure is that as we line them up on their stretchers, support them as the water rises, rock them gently from side to side and wait for them to find their balance, there is a conversation happening.

The male is becoming more and more mobile within my arms, his fluke moving like he wants to swim, his body staying upright without my help, and I notice that his head is craning, as if he is looking for someone. We realise that his view of the next dolphin in line is blocked by another volunteer. When they move and he can see the dolphin next to him—the female I had first tended—he relaxes. I feel this. The relaxation in his body. He’d just needed to see her; he’d just needed to know she was there.

And now, it is time.

We release them in two groups. The three liveliest, strongest adults are to be released first, followed by the two calves and remaining adult.

The male, the female I’d tended, and another adult female, are in group one. We walk them out into the ocean, leaving their stretchers behind. The male moves his fluke, up, down, up, down, and I move my hands slightly away from his body to check he is staying upright, swimming strongly, and then I let him go. At the same time, the female I'd tended is let go, too, and the two of them come together, side by side, so close I swear they are touching, and then they swim west, out towards the open ocean, slowly at first, and then faster, faster, faster, and we watch their dorsal fins disappear into the deep.

Two seals watch them, too. I have only just noticed them, bobbing up and down in the water near us, their moon eyes blinking around at this peculiar sight of dolphins and humans in a bay they should not be in; this peculiar sight of humans grinning, laughing, clapping, calling, ‘goodbye, good luck!’ after two disappearing dorsal fins.

But the celebrations do not last long, because the last dolphin of this group has swum free of her human and is circling back around, back towards shore. We try to sprint (hard in thigh-high water!), try to block her path back to shore, and we clap and we splash and we yell and we knock ourselves breathless. And while she does turn around, away from the shallows, she does not swim into the deep. She stays close. We think she must be the mother of one of the calves.

When the calves are let go, along with the final female, the four unite in the water. One of them breaks away, swims out west, and we hope the rest will follow but they do not. They stay in the bay, swimming back and forth, back and forth, and the sun is setting now, the sky nipped in blue and pinks just like our skin, and darkness is coming.

There is not much else we can do now, except hope and hope and hope that they find their way out, that they find their way to open water.

We can do nothing but wait for first light.

I have debated whether to write the final chapter of this story. We are in dark days, and aren’t we all searching for a shard of light? But nature is not a fairy tale, and I do not believe in contributing to the illusion that it is. To do so is to use the natural world as a tool for our own ends, rather than to respect it for what it is: a powerful, indifferent, brutal and beautiful force. To soften it, to aestheticise it, to bend it towards the light, is to put our own human hearts in the middle of it. But we are not in the middle. We are just a thread woven amongst a million others—the dolphin, the seal, the bat, the mayfly, the lobster, the lion, the oak. We are not the centre of the story.

So, I hope you will join me for this ending, but know that it is not the ending we had hoped for.

When the sun rises, I drive back to the bay. It is covered in great heaps of kelp and from the road it is impossible to tell if any of those dark heaps are dolphin-shaped, so I pull up outside the cottage that overlooks the bay, put my binoculars around my neck, and jump out of the van. As I do, one of the residents of the cottage emerges. From the way she is holding herself I know, instantly, that she is carrying heavy news.

Two have re-stranded, she tells me. One has died. One is still alive.

I go to them. They are there, high up the beach, in amongst the tangles of kelp, their bodies just feet apart. One is stiff, eyes closed, mouth open. One is gasping for breath.

They are both adults, and neither are the first female I tended to. But beyond that, I cannot work out who they are. Most likely, they are the final females to be released: the third of the first round, and the one adult in the second round. But it doesn’t really matter who they are. All that matters is that here, in front of me, is a dolphin in pain, struggling for breath, gasping and blinking and shuddering, and she is lying next to the body of her friend, and I do not know what to do, what to say, because the resident of the cottage has just told me that this dolphin is about to be euthanised—the vet has said she’s not strong enough to go back in the water—and what does a dolphin need in such a moment? What does a wild one need in their last minute? What does a wild one need when they are collapsing in on themselves like a dying star?

I say something to her. I don’t remember what. I think it is something like I’m sorry. And my instinct is to stay with her until the euthanising team comes, to speak to her softly, to cup seawater in my hands and dribble it down her back, but logic elbows her way past instinct and says to me, gently, firmly: this is a wild being who, all her life, has known only water and sky and the company of dolphins, and here she is now in shallow water, and here she is now with the swallowing sky, and here she is now next to her pod-mate, and you might like to think she needs you but she does not.

In her last minute, she needs the sound of ocean and the touch of water and the cradle of the wild.

In her last minute, grant her this.

I walk down the beach, sit on the sand, look out to sea.

In my periphery, I see that a truck has arrived, that it is driving onto the beach, that it is next to her now.

A shot rings out across the bay.

And then, silence.

And then, the gentle roar of the ocean.

.

.

.

Two did not survive. Four did. There is shadow, there is light. Horror, joy. Death, life. To know the world fully we must invite it all in; we must accept the shadow while we tend, tend, tend to the light.

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The BDMLR medics and volunteers who attended this rescue had to drop everything to come. They travelled over an hour by boat and then spent 5 hours coordinating the rescue. Without their commitment and expertise, none of the dolphins would have survived. If this story touched you, please consider donating. You can do so here.

I read Chloe Hope's piece ‘what remains’ the Sunday before the stranding. Her words ‘I have to lay down my stories about what things mean and how things should be, and simply respond to what is’ were echoing within me as I decided whether to stay with the re-stranded dolphin or give her one last minute of space and wildness. Thank you, Chloe, for your words and your guidance.

Death & Birds

what remains

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4 months ago · 354 likes · 126 comments · Chloe Hope

I read Kendall Lamb's piece ‘What is Ours’ the day after the re-stranding. She talks about tending to what is ours to tend, and how this tending is an act of resistance in a world that, right now, seems to brim with darkness. Thank you, Kendall, for these beautiful words. They helped me find the ending to this piece.

Touching the Elephant

What is Ours

Dear friends…

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4 months ago · 56 likes · 59 comments · Kendall Lamb

So here I am, at my writing desk on a stormy Sunday morning, hours before sunrise, the wind roaring up from the south and the rain slamming at the windows, thinking back to earlier this week when I discovered, from the floor of my living room, a small pocket of light that I have been carrying since like an egg or an ember. And here I am, hoping to find the words to share that little pocket of light with you.

I’d just finished reading a novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan, and it was gorgeous and tragic and beautiful, and I’d been hoping to spend the afternoon writing but his novel was filling all those fertile spaces and so instead I curled up next to Magnus, on his bed in the corner of the living room, and I rested my head against his sleepy body and I let myself be buoyed up, down, up, down, on the tide of his breath.

It isn’t often that I carve an empty space for myself. There is always something: painting or writing or reading or listening to music or a podcast or, or, or… empty space is something that I am always filling up. Perhaps because what comes in the emptiness is never known until it is—it can be joy, or something else. And in these days where news keeps coming, coming, coming, filling us all up until we are brimming, overflowing, it is often the something else that comes lurking when the mind is allowed to find its own path.

But not today. Today I am lying my head against Magnus’s warm body and a hollow winter light has slipped over us, cocooned us here in the corner of the room, and I am not really thinking of anything at all, just listening to the quiet, just looking around. The patterns of light on the ceiling. The snake plant on the windowsill. A handmade card from a friend. The bottom shelf of the bookcase.

And then, right there on the bottom shelf, some poetry books catch my eye. Four books, sent by my Dad after the death of his Dad and his step-mother, Pam. The books had belonged to Pam, a woman with a quiet, gentle way who I never really knew. My Dad thought I’d like these books, and he was right, but I hadn’t spent any time with them yet, always had something else to swallow up the minutes. Now, though, here I am, embracing the empty. And now here they are, saying hello.

and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own1

One of the books, New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver, contains many poems I already know and love. On the contents page, I see that Pam has marked the poems that spoke to her. Many are the same that speak to me, the same that are dog-eared and underlined in my own copies of Oliver’s work, but there are some highlighted poems that I haven’t heard of, haven’t read before. I read them all now, sat cross-legged on the living room floor—all the poems Pam highlighted. I drink them in, guzzle them up, and when I open the next book, a collection of Seamus Heaney’s, I see that she’s marked poems in there, too.

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence2

I’m less familiar with Heaney’s work, don’t know many of the poems Pam has highlighted, and as I flick through the pages to read the ones that spoke to her I find newspaper cuttings from decades ago tucked inside—a photo of Heaney, an article where he talks about what it means to belong, to not belong—and I also find that Pam has written little notes about him, reminders of other poems of his to read, other collections to explore.

I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.3

I put the cuttings back exactly where I found them and then read each of the poems she highlighted, go online and read the others she had noted down. And it dawns on me, as I do this, that almost all of the poems she has highlighted, between both Oliver and Heaney, are explorations of mortality, of what it means to live, and live well and wholly and magically and lightly, when death is a certainty, when it feels like there is darkness all around. And this has always, always, been why I read poetry, and it is why, in my own copy of Oliver, the very same poems are feverishly underlined and annotated.

when death comes
like an iceberg between shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?4

And isn’t it astonishing, how poems and stories connect us, how they transcend the physical constraints of this world and gather us in, side by side, mind to mind, a fresh and unnameable closeness that pays no heed to time or distance or death? Isn’t it strange and beautiful and a little bit magic?

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility5

The third book I open is a collection by Wendy Cope. This one, according to a note in the front, was gifted to Pam by a friend in 1993, the year I was born. She hasn’t annotated this collection and so I read at random and immediately fall in love with The Uncertainty of the Poet. It is a poem that uses only eight unique words to question, deeply and hilariously, what it means to write poetry, to be a poet.

Yesterday I took this book with me to a friend’s house, where we spent a couple of hours leading a poetry workshop for young island writers. I read the poem out, and then everyone wrote their own poem in the same format. Just eight or so words, ordered and reordered into questions and statements, exploring what it means to write, what it means to be a writer, always ending with Cope’s final words: Am I a Poet?

Some of the poems the children wrote were philosophical, some whimsical, some so hilarious that the whole group was laughing.

And when I got home yesterday I thought, isn’t that something? A book gifted from one friend to another, three decades ago, was then read in the quiet light of an empty afternoon by someone a few generations removed, and was then held in budding writers’ hands, a few more generations down the line, as they delighted in words: the play in them, the power in them, the way they can hold so much with so little.

Isn’t it something, the way words can do this? The way they cinch our hearts—joyful or lonely or struggling or calm—up together, let us reach beyond the borders of body and time so that we can find one another, see one another, share something together in a way that is simultaneously entirely mysterious and entirely human. It is, I think, a little bit magic. It is a little pocket of light.

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.6

This year, if any of you lovely folk would like to support my writing by becoming a between two seas founding member (the price for which is £100, or £60 on top of an annual subscription), you will receive a watercolour selkie woman. These strong sea women are part of a new collection I am working on, celebrating the oceanic and the feminine. Each selkie woman is original and unique (no prints will be sold of them), and each comes into being slowly, over days, weeks, emerging gradually from the inspiration this island gifts me.

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gathering i

In winter, huge tangles of kelp wash onto our beaches. Sometimes they cover the sand entirely: bright white shores repainted, overnight, in a canvas of slimy, twisting ribbons. A brown, dead blanket, in some places thick as I am tall. Only when the tide is high does it come back to life, raised up from the sand, resurrected. And when this happens, it dances. I often mistake this dancing kelp as animal, as corpse: a frond like a neck in the shallows, a stalk like an elbow, a ribbon curved like the arch of a back.

When we lived in Cornwall, my partner and I used to go to Porthleven in stormy weather—on the wild west coast, storms came raging right into the harbour, waves knocking at the door of the town, and we would just sit and watch it—all that power, all that fury. But one winter afternoon we saw a shape in the waves, winking in and out of view, hidden by the huge swell before appearing, disappearing, appearing again. It was purple, with a hood. It was child-sized.

Minutes later, on the phone to the coastguard, we realised it was, in fact, just a child’s coat. But it is exactly that shock of fear that greets me every winter morning when I see the shape of a limb, a neck, a curved back emerging from the waves. And there is no exception on christmas morning.

It is a calm day, but the Atlantic is all muscle. There must be a distant storm somewhere out there, in those arctic waters. And in the push and pull of all that water is the kelp, dancing to and fro, making me think, for just a moment, of struggling bodies, of grasping limbs.

And then, a blink, the thought: no, no, it is, as it always is, just the dancing kelp.

Except this is not all kelp. Another blink, a step closer to shore.

Many of those fronds are, actually, blinking back at me.

Many of them are the bobbing heads of seals.

Usually, along this coastline, I might see four or five seals, but here there are fifteen, twenty, more. I try counting them but I mistake one head for a frond of seaweed, mistake one frond of seaweed for a head, have to start and restart all over again. And I feel, as I do this, that delightful bending of reality, of expectation, that the sea so often gifts: one shape morphing to another, another, another—a constant shifting, a constant rewriting of what is real, what is not.

And it hardly seems real, all these dark moon eyes blinking up at me from the inky water, from between those limbs of kelp. It hardly seems real and yet it is, and it is the first gift of the day. The first of three peculiar gatherings.

gathering ii

We go snorkelling. I know, I know. It is mad. It is christmas day and it is freezing and the sea is cold as a sharp tooth. But in a sheltered bay on the east coast, the water is calm and beckoning us in and so we go, for who can resist that call?

A large plastic box, drifting loose—we see it as soon as we are in the water, had seen it, actually, the day before, from our paddleboards, had thought nothing of it. Just another piece of marine rubbish. But today, and who knows why, we check it. It is not an empty box. It contains a gathering.

Inside there are eight crabs and two lobsters, packed tight, claws bound. Clearly they had been caught by a fisherman, had been packed up in this box ready to be taken to shore. But the box must have fallen overboard and now here they are, these ten creatures, drifting.

We are quite sure most are dead. There is only the smallest hint of movement from within, only a faint impression of life.

We open the box, untie the ropes that keep it shut. Difficult, with neoprene gloves, already-numb fingers, the sway of the sea. I extract a large lobster, claws tied in tight bands. I think it is dead, but as I turn it around in my hands it bucks its huge body and I feel the power of the animal, the muscle of it, the desperate life in it, and I have to hold it against my chest to keep it still so that I can unbind its claws.

It goes limp in my hand. No movement until that first claw is unbound and then, a perfect moment: that huge claw, slowly, stretching open, closing, stretching open again.

I feel it in my body, the relief of that stretch. The release of it.

The lobster doesn’t struggle again. I unbind its other claw. I speak to it with my blue-fringed lips as its dazzling blue body shines up from my palms and it is another astonishing gift of the day, to see a lobster so close, to know the electric, hypnotic blue of it against the grey sea, the grey sky, to feel the living weight of it in my hands and, finally, to give it back to the ocean.

It goes to the seafloor, to the kelp, and hides in the shadows. So too do the crabs (all but one still alive), and the other (feistier) lobster.

Kelp creatures now, like the seals. I hope it keeps them well.

gathering iii

At dusk, I take Magnus down to the sea. The sky is heavy, the wind strengthening. On the way home, when we walk back up the hill, we find a peculiar group. While all the humans of the isle are gathering for their christmas traditions—dinner, films, TV, games—there is, at the top of this hill, overlooking the roaring ocean and the thickening skies and the quickening wind, a different sort of gathering.

Atop a fence post sits a raven, facing me. Tall, regal, a shocking shade of black. Next to the raven, a starling. Before them both, on the ground and looking in their direction, are two ducks, three hens, and one short-legged white horse.

The raven, upon seeing me, spreads her gorgeous wings wide. The starling hops away from her, so as not to be pushed off the fence. The horse, sensing some sort of interruption, turns around, gives me one long look and one slow blink. The ducks turn too, quack; the hens scratch at the floor. I imagine this is what it must be like to walk into an unfamiliar church during Sunday service. A shuffle of disruption, a curious murmur.

But then, the raven settles her wings back down, the starling hops back to position, and the horse turns back to them, the ducks and hens too. It seems Magnus and I have been accepted into the congregation. I do not know what, exactly, this means. Perhaps we are being taught a new religion. Or, more likely, an old religion. Perhaps we have inadvertently joined a farmyard uprising led by two winged and skybound things.

Whatever this peculiar gathering is, it is my final christmas gift: ten eclectic animals, including one bemused human and one oblivious dog, clustered on a hilltop as the sun sets over the cliffs.

And it seems to me now, reading back over these three strange meetings, that the day was an otherworld sort of day, as if, in this dark midwinter, I had stepped through the veil and into a different kingdom, a kingdom of moon eyes and black wings and shimmering, dazzling blue bodies returning to the deep. A kingdom woven from threads of fairy tale and feather. A kingdom I hope to be invited back to, but I have a feeling that is not how it works.

Friends, I hope you had a wonderful holiday break, and thank you for joining me in this new year. I am so happy to have you here.

This year, if any of you lovely folk would like to support my writing by becoming a between two seas founding member (the price for which is £100, or £60 on top of an annual subscription), you will receive a watercolour selkie woman.

These strong sea women are part of a new collection I am working on, celebrating the oceanic and the feminine. Each selkie woman is original and unique (no prints will be sold of them), and each comes into being slowly, over days, weeks, emerging gradually from the inspiration this island gifts me.

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I am grateful to every single subscriber—paid or free—and want to say, to every one of you, thank you for your support, your presence, and your time. Happy new year to you all xoxox

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We walk for as little or as long as the walk takes: half an hour, an hour and a half. Sometimes I spend half an hour drawing patterns in the sand. Sometimes I chase Magnus around the beach until we are both out of breath, exhausted. Sometimes we commune with the ravens, the seals, the sun, the sea.

I don’t keep track of the time, only know it is passing by the angle of the light.

This, I know, is a privileged way to spend my mornings; I am under no illusions about that. But as well as being a privilege, it is also—in some small way—a rebellion.

From our very first school years, we are taught to treat every hour of the day as an opportunity for industriousness. Idleness is laziness; play is not as important as work. In secondary school, I found my days so exhausting that by the time I got home, all I wanted to do was watch TV and eat junk food. This exhaustion might have had something to do with being neurodivergent in an environment not built for a brain like mine, but I also think it had a lot to do with the sheer amount of work, sitting still, obeying orders, navigating hierarchies, and meeting the expectation of perfection that school required.

My friends were also exhausted. We all felt The Sunday Dread, not because we didn’t enjoy learning, but because the way we had to learn was just too much, too tiring, too demanding. We had to produce, produce, produce, strive for efficiency, strive for perfection, strive to ignore the complaints of our bodies and our minds, all at the expense of rest, at the expense of wellbeing, at the expense of creativity and play and exploration.

It sounds bitter, perhaps even conspiratorial, to say that our current educational system—built around assessments, exams, packed schedules, homework, barely any free time—is excellent at indoctrinating children into becoming workers who will not question the status quo, who will not ask what an alternative society might look like, and who will not critique the system they must graduate into. And yet, I think this is exactly what our school system does. It teaches us that being productive at the cost of wellbeing is the norm, and that our time does not really belong to us.

Under capitalism, our time is our worth, with most of people ‘leasing’ eight hours a day (one third of their lives) to employers. And because the aim of the capitalist game is to accrue wealth, those who own the means of production sell whatever it is we ‘produce’ during our work hours for more than it costs to make, and they accrue this profit, hoard it.

The money they accrue is, on the one hand, a representation of economic ‘success’, but on the other hand it is a representation of how well they have managed to exploit the time of their workers; how well they have managed to underpay them and accumulate surplus; how well they have managed to keep that surplus all for themselves. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are capitalist heroes in both respects, because success and exploitation are the same thing under capitalism. The riches of these men are, quite simply, a token of their ability to exploit.

It suits such capitalist heroes to have a workforce trained to produce as much as possible, to be as efficient as possible, to ignore their physical and mental needs in order to get the job done. It suits them very well indeed.

By the end of primary school, I equated my worth with my grades. By university, I equated my worth with productivity, and free time with wasted time. During my master’s and PhD, I had friends who slept in the lab so they could run their experiments as quickly as possible, most of us worked in the evenings and at the weekend, many in my cohort had not read fiction in years because we felt it was a waste of time when we could be reading scientific papers instead (myself included), and I would regularly join unpaid meetings with researchers on the other side of the world at midnight, sacrificing sleep for an opportunity to ‘network’. And I did not question any of this. In fact, I was super proud of it all: of myself, of my friends, of my colleagues. We were working hard, we were on our way to success.

By the time I started my first job as an academic researcher, I had lost all sense of who I was outside of my career. I spent my free time thinking about how to fix problems with my analytical code, I dreamt about the studies I was designing, I caught up with emails at the weekend so I’d have less admin to do in the week, and just like in secondary school I got home from the office exhausted, wanting to do nothing other than watch TV and eat junk food. I had no real time for anything that was not work-related. No time (or brain space) for out-of-the-box thinking, or daydreaming, or creativity, or play. I am not saying this is true for every academic, or every busy person, but it was true for me. I was so caught up in busyness that I simply had no time for anything else, especially not questioning whether this was a fulfilling way to live life.

Which is interesting, isn’t it? That we are taught from a very young age to strive for busyness and industriousness, and to feel guilty about rest and idleness—the very things necessary for creative thinking, and healthy brains, and happiness. It serves the richest 1%, who own nearly half of global financial assets while nearly 10% of the world live below the poverty line, very well: keep people so busy, so tired, and/or so caught up in the idea of ‘success’, that they do not have the time, energy, or motivation to question the system they exist within.

Now that I am out of the rat race I found myself in, working as a much happier, much less stressed (and much less financially stable) freelance writer, suddenly I have time to read about capitalism and inequality and time and labour; suddenly I have time to read about exploitation and patriarchy and extractivism and corruption; suddenly I have the brain space to digest what I am reading and to be furious about it all. And also, I finally see that my worth should not be tied to my productivity; that to view myself in this way is, quite frankly, to be a billionaire’s dream.

Even still, I am unquestionably a product of the system. Indoctrination binds us in shackles that it can take a lifetime to free ourselves from, and even though I know it serves nobody except the 1%, I still find myself measuring my worth in terms of productivity and efficiency, in outcomes rather than process, in word counts rather than quality. My god, it is a hard habit to break! But I am trying.

And this is why, every morning, I watch the sun climb into the sky and then walk down to the beach—no phone, no watch, just me and my dog.

For that fraction of my day, that timeless fraction, I am not a vessel of labour-time, I am not a quantifiable, exploitable resource. I am just me, a human animal, existing on my own terms.

I am unlearning. I am learning.

Wonderful readers, this will be the last post of between two seas until the new year, as I am spending December working on a different writing project (more on that soon). Thank you so much for your presence, your support, and your comments this year; it has been such a joy connecting with you all.

Wishing you all a relaxing and joyful holiday season, and may you also find a pocket of time that is truly your own x

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And all that oceanic power, that mass, that gravity, gushes back and forth upon this tiny slice of land, each day re-sculpting the beach’s anatomy, reshaping its geography, writing a new story upon its sand.

This is especially true in this stormy season. Squall after squall has blown in from those arctic waters this week, and a huge swell—not tall and yet powerful, ravenous—has gnawed at the beach, chewed at it, swallowed up sand and spat out boulders, bits of boat, mounds of kelp with each frond thick as a limb, long as a body. And so every day, the beach has changed its face. A sand bank gone, a sand bank made, a ledge of rock unearthed, another buried.

I have written about the changing beaches of this island before, and I am sure I will write about them again. There is something deliciously untethering about having to redraw the map of that which should be familiar every week, every day, every hour. And there are so many questions, lessons, answers that can be found in the liquidity of it all.

At the very end of this favourite beach of mine, the one that shifts and shuffles, arches its back and swallows its tongue with every squall and tide, are slabs of rock that have ripples etched upon them.

These ripples are the fossilised imprints of four-hundred-million-year-old ripples. Ripples formed on the bed of a lake that no longer exists1, by water that will have completed the entire water cycle (from sea to sky to rain to river to sea again) more than one hundred thousand times since. Ripples that formed because, at one specific time, in one specific spot, various environmental conditions just happened to align so that they could become permanently marked in the rock2.

And here these unlikely ripples are, millions of years later, watching over the ever-shifting sands of this beach.

This morning, I sat on those fossilised ripples as the sun rose in the east, and I watched the pink-gold light unfold across the tips of the cloud, across the sea.

I was thinking about what gets to last, and of what does not (a very human question, of course—we who are obsessed with legacies, with leaving our marks on the world), and as I thought about this, a bank of steel-grey storm came marching in from the north, moving quickly across the sky, tussling with the surface of the swollen, golden sea and then, finally, finally, pummelling the white sands of the beach.

The beach instantly became a pock-marked thing etched with a million dimples. Before, it had held the map of the morning: wader footsteps dotted along the strandline, seal flipper marks, an otter’s track, my footprints, my dog’s footprints next to mine. But that story was lost to the will of the rain, to the will of water, as almost every story told here will be.

What I suppose I am saying is this: in many ways, the beach teaches me to be small.

The land shifts, the coastline changes, and there is nothing I can do to keep this geography static, familiar; static and familiar is not how it is supposed to be.

Some rare things will last for eons, like the ripples on this rock I sit upon, but it is not up to us to say what finds permanence and what does not. That is up to forces we have no power over, forces far beyond our small human selves.

But let me be clear: I do not mean small as in powerless, or small as in meaningless. I mean small as in a single thread in an intricate tapestry, or a fleck of sand on a gorgeous beach, or one thunderous tick of a clock.

What I suppose I am saying is that the beach humbles me, reminds me of what it means to be human, which is to spend a lifetime struggling against how small we are, and to spend a lifetime learning, unlearning, relearning3, over and over and over again, that to be small is no bad thing. And actually, if you look at it in just the right light—pink-gold, unfolding—it is really quite a beautiful thing.

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I’ve never really paid attention to limpets. They are the quiet child on the side-lines of a raucous birthday party: tucked away, regrettably easy to ignore. Still, I have been known to pocket the odd washed-up shell and ferry it home to add to my collection of small and beautiful things—recently I even found one at the bottom of my underwear drawer (I don’t know how it got there; our house is full of such mysteries). But the other day, something happened that made me fall head-over-heels in love with limpets—an immediate and permanent sort of love, the sort that means they will now forever occupy a corner of my heart.

What happened is this: my partner, upon seeing my hair tied in a topknot one morning, said, oh, like the fish, and I said, huh? And he told me of a fish called a topknot; he’d seen it in our rock-pooling field guide. I found the book, looked it up (a flatfish, Zeugopterus punctatus), and then, as always happens when I open a field guide, I had a flick-through, stopping to read about whatever caught my attention. And the title THE SECRET LIFE OF THE COMMON LIMPET: HOME SCAR caught my attention.

Home scar.

That phrase alone was enough for me to fall in love; cosy, violent, visceral, it is poetry1. But also, the home scar itself is poetry. Let me explain.

After a few days existing as planktonic larvae, limpets (a type of mollusc, related to snails) choose a rockpool to spend their young lives in. Then, when they are big enough, they venture further up the ‘intertidal zone’ (the part of the beach that is exposed at low tide and underwater at high tide) and choose a spot on a rock that will become their permanent home2. On this spot, they clamp themselves down with their muscular ‘foot’ and the force of their shell against the rock etches a perfect outline of themselves into the stone.

The limpet will move back and forth from this spot in order to forage (they eat algae), but will always return to this exact location, this outline of themselves, and, over time, the outline deepens and deepens such that an obvious scar forms on the rock. A home scar.

It is an adaptation, this home scar, not just a by-product of choosing to go back to the same spot every day. By creating a perfect outline of themselves, the limpets can form a watertight seal between themselves and the rock. This means they can trap water inside their shells, and they therefore avoid desiccation when the tide goes out and they are exposed to the heat of the sun. So this scar in the rock that they create, it protects them. The home scar is safety. It is comfort. It is survival.

Human activity—most notably ocean acidification—does, sadly, pose a threat to limpets. It is weakening their shells, meaning they are less able to form scars in the rock. As a result, they cannot create the environment they need in order to survive—cannot protect themselves from sun, from heat, from environmental variation. Oh, the metaphor runs deep, doesn’t it? Their home scar is an etching in a rock, ours is a little blue dot.

Until November 20^th, the UK government is in ‘public consultation’ over a new, massive oil field off the coast of Shetland. This oil field (Rosebank) will release more carbon dioxide than the annual emissions of all twenty-eight low-income countries in the world. It will add 250 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to our atmosphere and blow the UK’s carbon budget out of the water. It will, without doubt, decrease the chance of our little blue dot remaining a place of safety for us (humans and nonhumans alike).

It looks likely that the UK government will approve the oil field, but it is not yet set in stone. Through the Stop Rosebank movement, you can make your voice heard. People of any nationality can send a message to Starmer here. And if you are in the UK, please do consider emailing your MP—you can do so quickly and easily here.

After finding out about home scars, I prepared a poetry workshop for local children. As I was walking the strandline, searching for washed-up limpet shells to give to the kids, the thought struck me that every one of these shells would have the perfect, unique outline of itself etched into a rock somewhere close, somewhere on the shores of this island. A jigsaw: one piece a life, one piece a scar.

As I handed out the shells at the workshop, I said this to the kids. To my delight (because you never quite know what might capture a child’s imagination), there were some awed gasps. And, at the end of the workshop, two of the kids asked if they could take a limpet shell home, each holding a shell in the palm of their hand as if cradling something precious, something made of magic, poetry.

If I’m being honest, those moments felt as important, as meaningful, as sending imploring emails to politicians. Just sharing these small wonders. Just sharing these small and limitless joys.

In other news… those of you who’ve been here for a while will know that last spring I signed with my wonderful literary agent, Laura, and I said I’d keep you updated with novel news. Well! I have some novel news to share—but not quite yet. I’ll be announcing the news in early 2026, and I am so excited to share it with you all! x

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When I am home I write this in a flurry, trying to get it all down, make it indelible—this fragile, fleeting moment. Meanwhile he is out there in the wild, doing what wild creatures do best: getting on with his living, perhaps only a flicker of a thought for that peculiar creature he met today, blinking back at him with her curious eyes, singing her peculiar song.