Caught by the River editor Diva Harris closes the door on Shadows & Reflections season, sharing excerpts from her 2024 diary.
5th February 2024
An egg yolk spilt across the supermarket tiles, and a small child pointing, asking their mother who did this?
By night, warm winds whipping the bedsheets, pinging the pegs, catching the soft cotton in the dogrose thorns.
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11th February
Scoop a handful of frogspawn off the pavement — firmer than I expected, more gel than jelly — plop it into our friends’ pond in the hopes it will soon be frogs.
Find a mimosa postcard in a junk shop, and then I see mimosas everywhere — as wispy, tall saplings contorted into cars; flanking the large doors of expensive houses in big pots. The magical association cements when B tells me that as a teenager he grew them in his bedroom, because he liked looking at and collecting the long seeds from his mother’s tree, and giving the new trees away to friends on 18th birthdays. I feel love deepen when I get haphazard glimpses into the past like this; I knew he was the one for me when, early on, he told me about the pet rook of his childhood, who would sit on his head and fly to find him in the school playground at lunchtime.
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2nd March 24
Flowers blooming in the bath. The first in a year of 30th birthdays. My friend’s party trousers, which were stolen from the washing line by foxes 9 months ago, are found under a bush, degraded by soil and covered in worms. Happy birthday!
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24th March
Crows pick at an injured magpie. It’s Palm Sunday and I walk the dog in the cemetery where she is surprisingly permitted to trot amongst the older stones. Eliza and John, Frederick, Albert, Frances and Francis and William and William and William, so many Williams, so many Marys, Sarah Marys, Susannah Marys. And then there’s those with Victorian curlicues, Ivy, Eustace, Herbert and Maud amongst the ivy, primroses, daffodils and grape hyacinths — the latter Google describes as having spikes of dense, most commonly blue, urn-shaped flowers resembling bunches of grapes in the spring — ivies amongst the ivies, urns amongst the urns. The dog stops to drink rainwater from an urn on a headstone. I hope the ghosts don’t mind.
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26th-27th April
At the station: escaped red foil heart-shaped balloon — someone’s love, all the way up on the ceiling.
On the train, everyone is doing a crossword. A woman leans over to another, older woman and asks what perfume she is wearing, because it smells like her grandmother, and she’s been trying to track it down. The past tense and the tenderness, the wobble of the voice that asks. Lavender, bergamot. We blur through fields of rattle and rapeseed, past chalk horses, the River Exe.
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Monday 29th April
Dog walker takes 6 handfuls of seed, worms, from her bag, scatters, is followed by crows who hop and glide and shadow. It’s magical and we stay back, the crows gently, familially spat over juiciest bits, most preferential crypts and posts for sitting to snack. They are custodians of the cemetery and the woman, or maybe she and they custodians of each other. We can locate her based on the direction of the crawking. We discuss whether they would protect her in a fight.
Wren in front, blackbird behind, blackcap as squeaky wheel. B tricks the merlin app into thinking he’s a cuckoo, a collared dove.
Holly blue; winged helmet made of bark.
Accidental glimpse of coffin through ill-kept tomb. Lid broken, accidental glimpse of bones. Try not to be voyeuristic, wish peace and leave two bluebell stems on the mantle.
Nonetheless unnerved — not sure if more by the prospect of being haunted or having faced so unequivocally our own mortalities.
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4th May
A ploughman’s of sorts, cheese, cucumber, baguette roughly sliced with a pocket knife on a white plastic table in Sussex. We meet a worm of alarming length and speed.
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8th May
The smell of drilled pearl and bone.
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10th May
A solar storm and unusually clear skies mean that it’s possible to see the Northern Lights, even in London. I sneak out in pursuit of wonder, and hot-foot it to the locked park gates, even though it’s the middle of the night — it’s the least light-polluted place I know. Briefly wonder if I will be mugged as a man I don’t know walks quickly towards me, but he is in shorts and flipflops, eyes full of the rave, and has merely had the same idea as me — asks if I’m “looking for the Aurora?” It’s weirdly intimate and humbling looking at the green-purple sky through the railings together, before he flip-flops away again.
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11th May
Unripe apricots and Sweet Williams. Willing myself not to be a one-trick horse.
My mum texts me to say she’s putting a peony from the garden in the fridge, in the hope that she can delay it blooming until my birthday.
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6th, 7th June
A Barn Owl swoops through the headlights of the car, silent and fast. Glenelg, Scotland, Earth is twinned with Glenelg, Mars. The peat makes the water run from the taps golden, soft and silky, and there is still light coming through the windows as I bathe in it at 11pm.
On the beach we find bits of Codd bottle sea glass and wave-washed Victorian plate.
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9th June
Brocks
Dead owlet
Moon jellies
Headless body of a seal
Jumper knitted in the colours of heather
Woodpeckers and deer
Ponies playing tag in the woods
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10th June
Sea eagles
Yellow gorse and yellowhammers
A giant hare and a tiny airport
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13th June
Not a grey hair exactly, but gold into silver, the texture of a cat’s whisker, exactly in time for my 30th birthday.
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18th June
Feel like I’m going to find a four-leaf clover and then, improbably, do, which feels significant in the first week of being 30. I always wanted to find one when I was a kid and never did — eventually I started thinking they were made up. I press it in a 1930s book with a decaying spine.
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19th June
Free a beetle that came in with the socks.
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1st July
The carbon in our bodies comes from the formation of the universe (something B said)
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19th July
Lip sticks to orange ice lolly, rips the skin.
We say goodbye to our mauve, cuboid car that one belonged to B’s Ga — and I sense resurfaced grief — the same grief of disintegrating objects that I feel when an ashtray, item of kitchenware or other object from my own grandmother’s house chips, or crumbles in my hands — a reminder that even our mementoes become obsolete and cease to exist. I think that P was somewhere in the glovebox the week before as we sputtered down the motorway with unhappy clutch bearings, pleading and praying that we would get home safely (if slowly), which we did. Objects as living embodiments. Another small piece lost when the object is gone. I tuck a spring of lavender behind the windscreen wiper and thank her for all the safe journeys. A pat on the bonnet and a wish to go well.
We are woken in the middle of the night by foxes playing with the dog’s squeaky rubber snake in the garden.
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7th August
I probably learnt to identify a Red Kite in the first year of my job, the three of us in the front of the Luton van driving to Wales. It was still a shock to see one — but now I know them on sight and their remarkably successful reintroduction punctuates most train and car rides out of the city, looking back and forwards — the steep arrow of the tail pointing to the future, the ribbons to the past. I spy one out of the window on the train to Luton, red tin lunchbox on my knee, red bird, flight and anxious flyer, tension in the country building up like an egg in a kettle.
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17th September
Gig like a jewellery box
Songs about astronauts, beached whales
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28th September
The split in the small sycamore cake plate turned by B’s dad finally gives, the plate cleaved into halves as it hits the kitchen counter from a height. Run a thumb along the new seam, secret texture exposed, stripe of the grain a contradiction of the eating surface worn smooth by crumbs, buttery fingertips, circular scouring.
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30th September
A text from an ex, the void, a wormhole to 2016, how am I doing, do I want to catch up? ‘Erase/Rewind’ plays in a strange railway pub and a thin young collie strains to the end of his lead, whining at a curly fry that is just out of reach.
An awkward, end-to-end encrypted dance between relative strangers once like backs of hands, now just grainy profile pictures.
What do you want me to say? That in the time since we last spoke I have shaved off all my hair and grown it back again, learnt to operate a car and poach an egg and knit a sock, raised a puppy into a dog, moved around London in triangles, stopped and started and stopped and started: biting my nails, smoking, sleeping well, writing diaries, making bread?
My teeth have drifted into slightly weirder positions, I stopped shaving my legs, I sometimes eat salmon, my parents have moved to Kent.
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Friday 9th October
First day of our big adventure to Japan. We chase the nighttime, flying into the future. I blinker myself like a horse, a hawk with a hood, during unexpected turbulence. Mystery slabs in cheese sauce are served for breakfast, and we are both heavily frisked at Hong Kong airport.
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Friday 10th October
I use Google translate to ascertain that a sign in the shape of a smooth dog says Let’s make everyone’s town beautiful!
Egg sando and pickled plum onigiri. Cormorants and swan-shaped pedalos.
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Sunday 6th October
At the antique market, we buy a small tin fish on wheels.
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8th October
At a temple dedicated to radishes, we watch smartly dressed delivery men maneuver fresh boxes of rained-on daikon into the temple.
In Yanaka, we sit on rexine benches at a Formica-topped table and eat little rectangular sandwiches and beautiful desserts — custard with candied nuts; agar jelly with red bean paste, ice cream, mochi and a lacquer-red cherry on top.
We spend our last night in Tokyo under a rigorous self-imposed system of steaming, quarantining and bagging all our possessions to try and rid them of bed bugs.
1am alone in a Tokyo coin laundry, I work out how to operate a Japanese washing machine. A stray sock on the floor; the ceiling painted to look like the sky. Jazz plays from a radio I can’t see and no one else is around (obviously). Later, waiting for the dryer to finish, the guy that serves me in the convenience store next door has an impossibly high quiff.
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10th October
A beautiful train with green seats slides us into the mountains. Through the long windows, the landscape is one painted by a small child — wobbly green triangles stark against a flat blue background.
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15th Oct
There are warning signs about Black Kites stealing food, like the signs at UK seaside resorts warning about seagulls.
We visit luminous green moss-gardens up a mountain. A man in rubber boots gently sweeps the first autumn leaves from the moss.
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16th October
Everywhere we go we are followed by birds. In the Kamogawa River, egrets skewer small fry with needle-sharp beaks. Herons, kites, cormorants abound. The crows are bigger and sound different than in London; gruffer, more deeply voiced, guttoral. A fallen nest sits on the pavement, surrounded by wire hangers. Underground stations play birdsong over the tannoys and pedestrian crossings peep with the sounds of chicks and cuckoos.
We work our way through a big bag of persimmons. Persimmons are ripening in the trees. I buy some antique clay bells in a shop with persimmons on the sign, and when we visit the shibori museum, we learn that persimmon juice is used to prepare the pattern blocks.
A man has rigged up a car air conditioning unit in his bicycle basket in an attempt to stay cool in the heat. Workmen and crossing guards wear gilets with built-in fan systems.
Every shop seems to play Auld Lang Syne over the tannoy when they are closing.
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19th-20th Oct
Pumpkin scones and potato and apple danishes at Osaka station. In Okayama, someone imperfectly plays Happy Birthday on the xylophone through an open window.
We are ringfenced by mountains. I think about how old the mountains are and how we say “old as time” but never “old as the mountains”.
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Tuesday 22nd October
We get on the peach-coloured line named for peach-boy of local legend (Momotarō) and even the train is the colour of peaches. We hire 3-speed bikes and cycle through the countryside, startling herons and egrets, flushing house martins from telephone wires which reach across fields of rice.
I try to renew my library books from the other side of the world.
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23rd Oct
In the Folk Toys Museum, we see goose-shaped kites and whales on wheels.
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31st October
Sometimes it is nice to eat a sandwich standing up.
On the tube I see the halloween costumes: sexy clown, sexy reaper, sexy shark attack victim.
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1st November
The veil remains thin and I can feel my grandmother, hear her singing along to the song that plays in the bakery.
Squirrel acrobatics and the smell of decay. I read about Julian of Norwich — discover I am the same age as she was when she had her visions.
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15th November
Toothache from the supermoon, which lights up tinfoil strewn around the garden by foxes who scavenge half-eaten sandwiches from dustbins.
We discover ivy growing inside the window sash, neatly framing the balmy glass. We know we should remove it, but don’t.
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24th December
Haddock and chips overlooking the Mousehole Harbour Christmas lights — bright neon octopus, Loch Ness Monster, wheelhouse, stargazy pie — everyone sharing their ice creams and flaky white fish with their jumpered lurchers, dalmatians, dachshunds and poodles. St Piran’s flag graffiti says Fuck Your Second Home.
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In between days
27th? 28th?
Mist envelops all. The dog barks tentatively, a question mark in her voice, at nonchalant ponies under their rugs and we walk: stalactites and echos, wet tangles of wool.
Back to the house and the mist feels supernatural, hovering in unexpected, unexplained patches, concealing sheep.
The dog chews logs destined for the wood burner and we play Pik-a-Styk listening to Cindy Lee.
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New Year’s Eve eve
We eat satsumas by the wood burner and crisp their skins on the top, sweet smell rising through the house as they are transformed into kindling. The wind rises dramatically and I take shelter in the triangular wood shed, climbing over a rusty lawnmower and a child’s bike to refill the wicker log basket. It is a kind of church, the sweet split stumps perfuming the air.
