Solstice Fires
On Spinal Tap, California poppies & the Seattle Sound
10pm / summer solstice
Over the top of our fire barrel, I can see the summit of Butser Hill.
I met the solstice dawn there this morning at 4.50am, my thighs a-burnin’ after completing a 12 mile hike along the South Downs Way to get there in time. Some local druids were there to perform a dawn ritual, praising the east wind and the hawks of dawn, etc. I like the ceremony of this kind of stuff but I’m not a very neopagan gal at heart. Too many Aleister Crowley vibes and all I hear is Spinal Tap’s Stown-enge:
But they were nice folk, and the skylarks above them were so loud I could hardly hear what they were saying anyway. I bought a hot pastry and a cup of tea, and watched the sun rise with my friend Gina. It was a good walk - a solid block of time to chat and think and laugh without being disrupted by our sweet, sweet children.
I got back at 6am and managed three hours of sleep before the kids woke me up, and I should have gone to bed by now but the night is quiet and beautiful, so here I am still in the garden, watching a fire burn away our garden waste on solstice night. We tossed in a skanky tree stump, offcuts from my new garden room, fronds of pine needles thrown in by the kids. All flickety nickety into the flames.
There are bats overhead, and Alice in Chains Unplugged on a low volume. Layne Staley died on the same day as Kurt Cobain, eight years apart. He was the same age as me. Cycles and spirals. I read something recently about how sometimes it can feel like you’re going round in circles and never progressing, but actually, what looks like a circle can often be a corkscrew. So you come back to the same point on the circle, but you’ve actually moved up, spiralling upwards. Some people also go down.
I can smell honeysuckle. For an instant, a moth in my eyelashes. The moon is a perfect crescent, the shape of a Danish half moon cake. The week ahead is looking hot. I can feel it already in the air, and from the fire, which I’ve realised too late is shrivelling my nasturtiums.
Thursday 25 June
I’ve forced myself to sit down and draw something for fun and it isn’t very fun at all. I can’t stop squirming around, feeling like I should be doing something more productive. I’ve spent the last year squeezing tasks into tiny pockets of time, which means I am on high-alert mode all the time, and the idea of sitting and drawing something for two hours - something that isn’t part of a commission or book project - feels very uncomfortable and decadent. One school of thought would suggest I shouldn’t force it, but I think sometimes these things need to be forced or we just avoid them.
So I went into the garden and drew my favourite flowers in the whole world - California poppies. They’re growing in big, beautiful straggles around our garden and they withstand the heat well, which is unsurprising being they are native to California, land of the gold rush, wildfires and cacti. I managed five minutes sketching the outline outside before I had to come back in to escape the heat, then I sat in front of the fan and drew three Cali poppies, trying to capture the intensity of the June inferno.
Aside from the climate anxiety and heat-related deaths, there’s another reason I resent this ridiculous weather. I haven’t been able to go for my long walks, and I know that’s small and selfish but it’s really bugging me. The last decent walk I went on was Monday evening, and the temperature was manageable for the first two thirds, before I turned a corner and must have entered some kind of microclimate pocket because I was immediately savaged by a swarm of horseflies, and I had to run the last mile back to the car to stop them landing on me. I thought ticks were my biggest nemesis but Jesus Christ, these things were bloodthirsty. The horror, the horror!
Instead of walking, I’ve spent every evening this week cooling off in the garden with a really good book. I like all genres if they’re written well enough, but I have a particular love for non-fiction books that are so gripping, they read like a novel. One great example of this is The Unwinding by George Packer, which documents thirty years of decline in American society through the perspective of four real Americans living very different lives. It’s an absolute banger and helped me understand how the US became such a corrosive and self-destructive power, particularly since the end of WWII.
This week I’ve been devouring Everybody Loves Our Town by journalist Mark Yarm - not to be confused with Mark Arm from Mudhoney, who is one of many musicians, producers, photographers and associated personnel interviewed in this mammoth book about the history of grunge and the ‘Seattle Sound’ in the 80s and 90s.
As a fellow non-fiction writer, I am blown away by the work that must have gone into curating this book, because it is essentially made up of fragments of interviews, all pieced together to make a vaguely chronological timeline of an era that was defined by chaos and rebellion. It’s a mad story to try and tell but I haven’t been able to put it down, it’s so good. Plus I’m having a lot of fun looking up visual references like the original album cover for Tad’s 8-Way Santa, or photos from Lamefest 1989.
And I’m learning even more about why the early grunge years were so powerful in the way that so many of the artists didn’t care about making it big, or selling their souls to the masses. Some of that changed as the nineties kicked in, but for the early years, they were just having fun and making the most of what could have otherwise been a fairly grim existence growing up in Seattle, particularly in contrast to the bright lights of LA. As journalist Jeff Gilbert wrote:
Seattle isn’t a glamorous town at all. It was pretty pathetic. Very depressing. That’s where this music came out of. I’ve made this comment before: Grunge isn’t a music style. It’s complaining set to a drop D tuning.
It’s so refreshing to peer back into this pool of raw creativity and just feel all the angst and discontent these dudes were feeling, and to keep discovering all their musical output. I’ve made a whole new playlist of ‘grunge origin’ bands I’d never heard of. So many sullen tunes await!
Highly recommend this book if you also enjoy getting lost down cultural rabbit holes. It will definitely be a re-read for me.
I grew up in Seattle in the 90’s and I’m so nostalgic for that time. I often wonder what the grunge scene was like from the outside. It was all encompassing with concerts and radio. I was glued to my radio. I’ve seen almost all of the best bands at “Endfest” alone over the years. It was great and a time that will never be replicated.