Don't Proffer Your Neck to a Vampire

On continuing to resist despair and machination via attention to the real

In a car park near my home, this winter past…

This week, glimpses from a week wrestling with good.

The Great Mystery, as I experience it, is in all things and makes itself known hour by hour. We have never had a pugilistic relationship. Instead, I struggle with good, that is, how people, including myself, behave to one another, especially online. Online is where I must sadly spend a large amount of time at the moment to make certain projects that I care about take place. Screen-life can have the effect of hollowing me out. Here are sundry recent Notes and notes from the bone marrow of my soul as I attempt to fill back up after what feels like a puncturing and the sense of having briefly become an uncanny drink to a malign and greedy being.

The field of deer has grown to such a degree, the red deer on the south and the roe deer on the north. Denser and denser, always there, barely raising their heads at the passing train where once they would run off as we approached, their white tails flicking. Now they graze and rest in the shade of willows, like a fuzz of giant ribwort heads upon the field.

The Stonemason’s Arms. It took me thirty-six hours to become sane again after too much screen time over the last few weeks, all for ‘very good reasons’: writing books, editing books, commissioning art, writing collaborative pieces, organising my book launch, writing courses and classes…

Whatever the reason, my body just said no more, and sent me to the shore, where there is no phone signal and no mains electricity. One and a half days passed, hearing only the sound of the sea, no music, just a daily coffee and conversation about rocks, shelves and teak oil with Martin the wren-brown stonemason.

Sanity is tidal and not all flotsam is wholesome. I dragged three huge bags of plastic out of my ruminating brain and took it to the dump. Not even good for recycling, that kind of thinking. ‘Once through with a new thought and not again’, I reminded myself. Back to the flossing stage of mental hygiene. To forget it is to call down the same kind of pain as a bad tooth brings - the inability to get free of one’s own head.

After the grief, the relief. I am still always surprised at the falling away of the loss-ness of loss. Scouring, the little places where the speck of sand takes a bit of one’s body with it in the scrub. The redness, and then, how it heals. I see the scars but have little recollection of the injuries.

Stone dust is dry and cracking, I go to gather with a spoon and yoghurt tub, but instead it requires bare fingers and a reused Ziploc bag. Unseasonably dry, no April showers, not one, this year. Soon they will announce drought. I will make beautiful off-white pastels with the stone dust but miss the gloopy stage of mining the puddle’s edge with a spork. Added to the short dandelion stems, already over, the year’s heat and dryness is apparent. Populist mouths on screens deny anything is happening and guzzle their pints, grinning. I gather eight scores of long stems along the railway cutting for teaching cordage-making in July and make a mental note.

Denial twines no ropes.

photos taken at dusk at home

I am home and can reply to Ruth Gaskovski‘s note substack.com/@ruthgasko… about an ‘architecture of a free mind’. Not having the money to build my own place, (since the last time I designed and had a steel boat built, which was precisely the unconformed space of my dreams…) I now work with what I have, a rented flat. But still, unconformed interiors of the home are akin to those of the mind. To be surrounded by natural materials within the home, not just when walking ‘out in nature’, is to be reminded of beauty and to feel grateful every time one looks up. It is hard to maintain disillusion when confronted with seven sheafs of chestnut sticks harvested in January, which you know will make beautiful drawing charcoal, or become baskets, or both, and in the meantime give one’s bedroom a fragrant charm that no ‘air freshener’ (an oxymoron) could provide.

That vast Great Mystery is in all things, and that includes bright red haematite in a repurposed baking tray on the drawing desk, pots made of ash bark from much missed trees, and flints, knapped into useful shapes by friends, awaiting their moment to strike a spark. All these objects in their different ways have been, and still are, alive. Machine-made things cannot contain this ensouled between-ness. The hand made and found belongings here lend their liveliness, utility and harmony of form to my living space. They defy commerce and are luxuriant in their wanton devouring of hours of the makers’ time. In short, they furnish my rented rooms with the love and care of thousands of hours of hands’ - that is to say hearts-in-focus - work, both mine and others’.

It’s dusk and I’m ruminating about the news again. I glance up, passing my wine-box ‘bushcraft shelves’ in the hallway and the memories of the hours spent in making are enough to change my mood. To be surrounded by these objects, as with books, is to remember the best in people, in nature and in life, and to remember to commit again to making beauty, even in the ruins.

and you will know us by the grail of the bread

A characteristically stunning piece ‘All Glory Is Fleeting’ by David Knowles, raised a heaving sob in my chest. I may not be northern, but I am still a lover of crabapples and damsons, even going so far as naming my boats ‘Crabapple’ and ‘Wassail’ in the fruits’ honour. The damson trees of the lock-island of my old river home are now ravaged by drought and are these days cleared before ripening by parakeets. I am down to my last few jars of that purple, but I will not hoard it. To make jam or jelly of tiny tart gifts is to live in hope that friends, nieces and nephews will visit again and a jar can be pressed into their hands on leaving.

Blossom, which here in Dorset was a few weeks ago, is known to me and my beloved by our new kenning ‘apple-promise’.

All glory is fleeting, yes, even a shelf packed full of salmon coloured crabapple jelly and deepest wine-dark damson jam can only keep so long. Like lasting love, it’s made with the right balance of sharpness, sweetness, heat and joy each year, to be given away freely.

Next week, an essay, whether on AI as a form of plastic; natural materials as essential nutrients; or the aesthetics of faith, I am not sure yet. I will be in London all week, so we will see what the change of desk does for the topic-choosing aspect of my heart-mind. Go well, all who read this. Do not offer your wrists and necks to the entity which sucks our life force from us, however that manifests in your life.

This week’s good thing: You are invited to the free online book launch of my new book Drawn From the Wild. The sign-up for the event will give you the Zoom link. Several of the guest artists will be attending and there’ll be plenty of time for questions and comments. The event will last an hour or so. All are welcome, especially those with an interest in art, nature, history or ecology, which I think might include a fair few of my dear readers here at Uncivil Savant. You’ll be very welcome. Just turn up at 5pm UK time, 5th June 2025. The book is officially published worldwide on 12th June, but I hear it will be shipping before then for those who order it here at Search Press. Founder members who requested this as their free book will get their copies as soon as I get my first box from my publisher.

If you want to send me a little help to keep my writing going, then please feel free to

If you would like to comment but cannot afford a subscription, reply to this email and I will comp you 3 months for free.