good predator manners

in which I sleep, finally, thank god

(Psst, if this email truncates, you can read it in full in your browser.)

We’ve acquired a sparrowhawk. She has built a nest in the tall tree by the paddock and I’ve named her Aesu¹, which is an Iceni name. She introduced herself to me by careening wildly at my window while I was in bed and she was trying to harass some woodpigeons on the roof. This seems to be a favourite activity of hers, so I have given her the full title of ‘Aesu, Harasser of Woodpigeons’. In the mornings when I go outside to try to help my brain understand what time it is she is usually sitting on the very topmost twig of her nest-tree, which must be a bit like a roof terrace for her. Sometimes when I walk out to the paddock to check on the baby woodland she comes too and hovers over it in that strange kite-strung way they do, looking for breakfast. I am pleased that we are now acquainted enough to go for breakfast together, though I noticed she always hovers over a different bit of the paddock than the bit I’m in, and moves when I approach. I think this must be good predator manners – she is letting me have dibs on all the mice, shrews and voles in my patch. Yum.

she’s not playing around guys. i hope no pigeons read this newsletter

After eight weeks of not sleeping I finally caved and phoned my GP.

“I don’t know that it’s fully cortisol dysregulation at this point,” the GP said. “You might have just forgotten how to sleep.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. “I’ve never forgotten how to sleep before,” I said, feeling somewhat defensive. The GP gave me a prescription for a week of sleeping pills and told me that if I’m restless at night I ought to get up and do something boring. Thus began a week of night-laundry and strange wandering about the house in the dark like some kind of adrenal wraith.

if only other ghosts also did your laundry

There is lots of information online about dealing with chronic insomnia, all of which assumes that you have an average physiology and can handle a certain amount of sleep deprivation in order to reset your cycle, and also that you don’t generally need to rest in bed during the day. I don’t know why I still persist in trying to use tools for people with average physiologies – the idea of being part of something (the something being “everyone else”, I guess) must be very appealing. The result was predictable: after several nights I ended up confused, clammy and retching. In the morning I cried about how much I had ignored my body politely communicating its imminent collapse, how pointlessly hard I had been on myself. When I couldn’t sleep the next night I tried getting out of bed for only a few minutes, just long enough to do an ink drawing of a leaf. After a handful of nights of this routine I slept for nine hours total and woke up with four half-remembered ink drawings penned by my nighttime self, which seems to me in some ways even better than a normal night of sleep.

a night-leaf

Sleep is worth celebrating, especially when it reappears after months of absence, so I put on my loudest red coat and went book shopping. Being alone is still a huge novelty² for me and I made sure to take advantage of all the different aspects of it – following inconvenient routes for no reason, wearing headphones, thinking my own thoughts, not talking to anyone. I walked around the park in my red coat while listening to a playlist I made specifically for listening to when I am wearing my red coat. Then I went to a coffee shop and got a pastry that I didn’t like very much and tried to read my book, but I kept getting distracted by the fact that I was reading a cool book³ in a cool coffee shop and that this was very cool of me. In the end I took in very little (of book or pastry) but I did feel very cool.

this coat was my grandma’s and it’s full of moth-holes and smells like a wet dog when it rains but it’s one of my favourite things in the whole world

Nettle and I have been together for ten years, which is a third of both our lives and rather mind-boggling. Our first ever date was the day before Valentine’s day, which we both found awkward and hence pretended not to have noticed. We went to a Moroccan tea shop where they poured mint tea into a cup from very high in the air while we ooh-ed and ahh-ed, and I remember that it was one of those absolutely frozen winter days in New England when the snow is piled up higher than your head from the plow and your skin screams on contact with the air. I remember Nettle hadn’t zipped their jacket all the way up, leaving some of their neck exposed, and I enquired as to how they could possibly exist in that context, and they explained the Midwest. I also remember that I was wearing my grandfather’s green flannel work shirt with a fluffy white lace dress over the top and two pairs of tights, which sounds like an insane outfit and, in fact, was.

who wouldn’t want to date me for ten whole years

To celebrate the fact that we have grown from scrawny proto-humans into actual humans and still like each other, we went and hung out with some owls⁴. I learned that owls are very stupid⁵ and astonishingly beautiful. They are also very lightweight and it feels as if you could throw one quite far if you were so inclined. Human-imprinted owls are also very noisy because they think they are babies and every human in the world is their mother, so as soon as they see a human they start screaming for food (this behaviour reminds me a lot of TLTOFC, which makes me wonder if we have accidentally imprinted it on us and/or if it might be a very long owl). I highly recommend going and hanging out with some owls if you have a bird of prey center nearby, especially if, like me, you like to make weird noises (they are wonderful inspiration). I also was able to acquire a lot of feathers from the falconer from which I plan to create all manner of bizarre things.

Beau the barn owl was my favourite. she came to land on me even when I wasn’t holding a piece of rat, which must be the highest compliment I have ever been paid

Earl the Great Grey Owl was so ridiculous that I had to draw his portrait in india ink

An Odde Thing To Read

I bought this book of seasonal practices without really knowing what it was just because I couldn’t decide what edition of Emergence Magazine to buy in print so I panicked and bought none of them. What a happy accident because wow this book is amazing! It suggests things that you can do in nature, and ways to think about them, that you might not have considered before.

An Odde Thing To Hear

This week you can hear the playlist I made especially for wearing my loudest coat. I trust you will adhere to the rules properly and be appropriately attired to listen to it, or else Aesu will come find you and tell you off.

An Odde Thing To Do

Hear me out – try doing something creative in the middle of the night. Set up a pen and paper or some other appealing supplies somewhere you can easily find them while half-asleep, like maybe your bedside table. Don’t set an alarm or anything horrible like that, but if you find yourself awake at random (perhaps to go pee) write a haiku when you get back. Or draw a picture if you find yourself awake ruminating about something someone said at work. Your midnight self is quite different and might have interesting things to say if you give them an outlet.

Thank you as usual for reading and wishing you an Odde week,

1. A gendered character in an Odde Chronicle post – what is this?! I have decided to make an exception for Aesu, as I believe she, with her razor-sharp talons, yellow-eyed glare, and penchant for murder, is the platonic ideal of the feminine. On the other hand I have no idea if Aesu was a male or female name back in the day, I just like the sound of it.

2. I suffer from weakness in all four limbs and my trunk but I can only afford a manual wheelchair (if you are able-bodied you may be unaware of how expensive electric wheelchairs are – it’s astonishing) which means when I am flaring I can’t propel myself and basically have to be accompanied everywhere at all times so someone can be my human motor. Which gets rather tiresome.

3. The book is The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald and I love it so far because it is about people being socially awkward amongst the immense flatness of East Anglia. I love books that don’t particularly try to be realistic and just hurl all their energy into trying to be weird instead.

4. This is of course the traditional ten year anniversary thing – the Owl Anniversary, when people gift each other owls. I would know this, with us being such traditional types when it comes to relationships.

5. They are so stupid that they can only know one thing at a time, which means once they learn how to fly to a glove they completely forget how to hunt in any capacity and must be hand-fed forevermore on such delicacies as chick heads and bits of rat.