highlighter green nails

notes from cookham dean

Yesterday I sat on a big crooked wooden bench. The bench was in the woods. I was walking through the woods to clear my head. I often come to this bench when I am at home because it is positioned behind a gap in the forest, a spot where the dense trees clear for a brief moment to reveal a bird’s eye view of the town below. It is a good place to think about things. 

The woods are on a hill, and from this hill you can see the rolling fields of Berkshire seamlessly weave into each other and here the world looks lumpy, like a patchwork duvet and this makes me think about lying in bed in the morning and observing the clouds from the window and how everything is kind of connected by way of our perception.

The subconscious is the red thread that ties the world together, I thought as I took my phone out to take a picture. To write you must put the world on to the page and our perception of the world makes the world a story. I further thought as I realised I should probably be writing something down.

I wrote about the town and how the fields sink in the middle to make space for a church which sits at the town’s centre. The church is very big and imposing and its spire pierces through the scenery. It sits in front of a river and yesterday it was windy so the river was crashing into itself and it was white and foamy and dramatic. 

A couple walked past me. An old woman and an old man. They were dressed similarly, both in black waterproof jackets and black waterproof trousers. It wasn’t raining. They were holding big thick sticks they must have foraged from the forrest floor. They were using the big thick sticks to help them walk.

The couple captured my attention. They looked down at me as I looked up at them. The woman’s stared lingered and she smiled at me, approvingly, as she noted my little black notebook. I returned her smile and thought I would remember them.

I looked back down at the town below. When you view a town from a crooked bench in a woods on a hill, you can not see the people that inhabit the town. You can just see the main features that make up the town and these features only reveal themselves from a height. For this town, it is the church, the river, the trees and the houses that make up its features. A town is just buildings and the meaning of a place can only be found when you are inside it, roaming its streets. From up here there is no meaning, just the church and the big spire that pierces through everything like an arrow.

I turned my head to see if the couple were still there. They had vanished in the greenery.

I had come to the woods after driving for around two hours in my small white car. In the car I listened to all my music. I pressed play on a playlist that contained every song I have ever ‘liked’. I skipped many of the songs because I was not in the mood to listen to them. I was not in the mood to listen to anything in particular yesterday, but some songs pleased me when they came on shuffle. I listened to Vienna by Ultravox twice. When it finished the first time, I immediately played it again and thought about how it might be the greatest song ever written. I smoked a cigarette in the car because I like to drive fast with a song like Vienna playing loudly and a cigarette in my hand and the window rolled down. I think there is something quite charming about this when drifting through the narrow lanes of the countryside where I grew up. 

I had driven from my flat in North London to Cookham Dean. Cookham Dean is the place with the narrow country lanes where I grew up. To get to Cookham Dean from North London you must drive through the London suburbs and then onto a big roundabout and then onto the motorway for a long time before the greyness of the city soon starts to transform into greenness of rural life. Much like the changing of the season, you don’t really notice the change until you are in its wake.

I came off the motorway and went up a long hill. I realised I was in the countryside when I turned onto Winter Hill Road.

Winter Hill Road is a long straight road that goes on for around 4 minutes if you are driving fast enough in a convertible sports car. My grandma had many different cars throughout my life, but they were always convertibles and they were always sports cars and so we could get from one end of Winter Hill Road to the other end in no time at all.

My grandmother was a terrible driver and her house, which was also my house, was at the very end of Winter Hill Road, where you would take a sharp left at the safety mirror and go down a small lane. This lane was called Hockett Lane. At the end of Hockett Lane was her house and past her house was a woods. This woods was dense and green and often muddy. At the edge of the woods is a spot, where the dense trees clear for a brief moment to reveal a bird’s eye view of the town below, and this is a good place to think about things.

There were many long winding roads my grandma and I would drive down in her convertible sports cars to get to school, but Winter Hill Road sticks out in particular. 

When we would drive down it she would be listening to BBC Radio 2 and that jingle still stays in my head Steve Wright in the afternoon. She would be smoking a cigarette without the windows rolled down and I would always notice her hands which were long and slender and her nails which were painted very bright colours. Highlighter green, pink, orange, blue. It was only when she would remove her nail polish for a day or so to let her nails breath you could see the nicotine stains which made her nails very yellow. 

Out of all the roads, Winter Hill Road has remained very prominent in my memory. It feels particularly nostalgic when I drift down it in my own convertible car, which I did yesterday, after having driven down the long monotonous motorway from North London for two hours, just to sit on a bench in the woods and think about things.

I drift sentimentally, and think about the past. I think about this road and how, as a child, I was captivated by the greenery that surrounded it. Winter Hill Road cuts through a woods and so the there are trees on either side which bend over you, giving the illusion you are driving through a green tunnel.

In my memory, it is always sunny and so the leaves were always very bright like my grandmother’s nail and the sun would poke itself through the gaps in the leaves like a kaleidoscope and as a child I found this very romantic. I’m not sure if romantic is the right word, but it is the word that comes to my mind as I write this and yesterday when I drove down this specific stretch of road that was exactly how it felt, romantic. Because when I realised I was in the countryside after being on the motorway for so long, it came to life exactly as it has lived in my mind since childhood.

It was very romantic with the green leaves and the sun poking through and I became very sentimental and started driving very slowly and smiling to myself and a song came on that took me back to my childhood, a song by the band the Fratellis. It is not a very good song, but I remember this song very much because I remember driving to school with my grandmother one day and instead of listening to the radio with her, like I always would, that morning I decided to put on my headphones and listen to my own music. That morning, on the way to school, I turned my head away from her, not from annoyance, but because I felt very free and I looked out the window and thought of myself as an adult with my own taste and yesterday when that song came on serendipitously as I was making my way to the woods, I sang the lyrics very loudly because I remembered them all and I thought of my grandma, as I always do.