The Places That Met Me

Alongside Sam and Taz travelling between Kings looking for work and a room to rent hand roguing wild oats sprawling through shimmering swathes of barley up down down up singing as we went. On Fridays a small brown wage packet pressed into my hand a passport to music. Portass & Carter paired me with a dark green six-string. We thumbed our way nine miles to Holbeach tipping coins into honesty boxes devouring strawberries from Fenland gardens. The winter before I slept crouched

Part One Stonehouse, Plymouth. Norah Jones’s Sunrise playing, with tea ’n’ toast Easter my birthday. Friend of a friend Toot! Toot! Surprise! drove Daisy and me in his silver Ford open sunward, to a wild-windswept-rugged-headland sand-dusted ponies sea-salted sheep and a chocolate Labrador < look left look right > so fucking amazing my heart filled up nine times at least then my eyes caught a minnow of a boat dancing on the belly of the blue THIS IS A NO-ANCHOR ZONE PLEASE CH

Baby tomatoes asleep on the vine, roots tucked into cosy compost at the cherry-brick house on the corner of Clarence. Kate Rusby’s Underneath the Stars filled the ceiling space of our warm-bread kitchen observatoire. A burgundy town bike propped against the wall in the paved side yard, where our cat squeezed himself through the trellis like piped icing. I rode to work as the sun clocked off and home in the mornings, clattering past Four Lane Ends metal mudguards menacing the