Charles Harries | Blog
I’ve been trying to introduce friction into my life. I’ve spent the last maybe eighteen months in a totally frictionless zone and it’s led me down a totally frictionless slide of saying Yes to things and now I’ve got altogether way too many things going on. I woke up in the middle of the night the other night because Sam punched her nightstand (“someone was coming at me in my dream”) and then I…
Out with Ghyll at night for the first time in a while. Night comes rarely at this time of year. Day was muggy and overcast, down in Leeds for an Office Day. Earlier, when I shut my overheating computer and left the building for the promise of a cold pint of lager, I was staggered, just a little, by how warm it was outside. Now the sun is down and there’s a bit of a breeze up and the world is…
We’ve now totally moved on from green summer to yellow summer . Maybe, between the flowering and fluffering of the thistles, with an intermediate stop at purple summer . Rain has forborne pretty much all summer, so the fields are dry and golden. The barley and the wheat look ready to go, but I am not a farmer so ???? All that’s left of the hogweed on the side of the road are dark brown husks, and…
Good — quaint. Sometimes it’s nice to read a book with little stakes and nice endings. People find themselves at inflection points in their lives and navigate those points with the help of books that nudge them in just the right direction. People open to new possibilities and opportunities, willing to do a little bit of openminded self-reflection. I like the bit at the end about how society is…
First time in Cambridgeshire. First proper time anyway. There’s a free car park in the middle of the city and on a Thursday night the people of town trek back and forth between their mk. II Skoda Fabia Combis and their wellness classes. There are a surprising number of wellness studios in Ely, and a surprising number of pubs also. We walk up to the cathedral; a mixed group of parents and older…
Lorton, Cumbria. The heat lets up with the setting of the sun, but, typically for this time of year, light lingers in the sky until late. It's my favourite time of day: light still enough to find one's path through a gate and across a field, but too dark to navigate safely among trees. The sky's a mottled grey overhead, distantly roiling with high-up wind. Rain spits and then relents. It doesn't…
Slow week in hot weather. When Ghyll and I go out the sun is stifling. Something blunt and bludgeoning about the sun on a hot day in northern climes: in Florida the sun has sharp canines and so nearly everywhere is airconditioned to the hilt to prevent you coming apart; but in Britain the sun grinds you between its molars whether you’re indoors or outdoors, only letting up around 9pm when it…
I like dystopian science fiction, and I like books set near where I live. I see the Redcar wind farm pretty often and I think it looks awesome, and I love the idea that the North Sea is really not even that deep and it had humans living all over it not even that long ago: and so I thought I'd be primed to like Doggerland . But I didn't. Because I don't like books that promise to go somewhere and…
June is ripe and we've moved past the flush of summer into the golden days. By which I guess I mean that notwithstanding the muscular hogweed, all of the spring flowers have been and gone and what remains are flush green leaves and withered buds and the satanic knots of juvenile thistles like black metal band logos. I regret not taking any pictures of them. The ground is baked hard and the cars…
Writing these is cathartic, and also is a reason to stop and look at the trees so I can do environmentalist virtue signalling on my blog that I suspect very few people read. In the field, Ghyll bounds amid big heaps of clover, thick and dense and cream and pink. The bees are out, and the little gnats and flies that feed on pollen, and at one point Ghyll even chases a little brown butterfly. On our…