Small Stories with Laura Pashby

Dylan Thomas’ Writing Shed, picture my own ‘a seer of strange beauties’ This is how Welsh artist Gwen John described herself in her private notes. At the end of the nineteenth century, the girl from Tenby studied at the Slade School of Art (one of the only UK art schools to admit women at that time) before moving to Paris, where she lived on the top floor of 87 rue du Cherche-Midi in a tiny apartment overlooking the rooftops of Montparnasse.

'Come with me into the woods where spring/ is/ advancing, as it does, no matter what.' Come with me into the woods and you will see the starburst twinkle of wood anemones all along the banks. Freshly unfurled beech leaves shine iridescent in the light and on the edge of a clearing, a haze of scattered bluebells shimmer. Spreading beneath th…

On my way to the city, I notice a dusting of blossom from the train window. Blackthorn bushes cloud the embankments and cluster around the railway bridges, thin branches scrappy and unruly, flowers shining pure white in the sun. Later, I walk through London at dusk. The taxis have their lights on, there’s a happy hum from the pubs and passers-by wear spring coats with thick scarves in the crepuscular half-light.

I didn’t expect to see her, looking back at me with sleepy eyes. With her unbrushed hair and smooth forehead she looked pensive, a little shell-shocked — brittle happiness tempered by the darkness of exhaustion as she inhaled the addictive scent of her baby’s hair. In the weeks before my son’s eighteenth birthday, I was searching my photo archives for p…

Over twenty years ago, with the boy who later became my husband, I saw a Richard Long exhibition at the RWA in Bristol. I left with a black and white postcard of a piece Long had made in 1967 (when he was an art student at St Martin’s) by walking backwards and forwards in a field of grass — it was called ‘A Line Made by Walking’. I kept the postcard on my desk in our tiny flat until it disappeared, presumably used to mark a page and then forgotten.

Sometimes, writing happens at desks, sometimes writing happens in grand libraries and sometimes writing happens on trains, but there are just as many times when writing happens only in the Notes app — in the bakery queue or the rugby club carpark. Words are words, when it comes down to it and on the day a book is published the reader will not know — and…

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I found the coat in a charity shop. I was in my duffel coat phase at the time — I had a black one, a navy one and a pale blue one with a hood and a nipped in waist. This coat was — I thought — more grown up. Pure, grey wool, expensive-looking and tweedy, it was heavy on my shoulders and reached down to my ankles, swamping my small form. I was a teenage girl, and this coat was made to fit a man. Now, we might describe it as ‘oversized’, but in the nineties, it was just ‘too big’.

I know it’s a cliche, but I do think of February as a month of love. There’s Valentine’s Day, yes — and also Galentines — but it’s also the month I became a mother. To me, February is bunches of snow drops, custard cream hearts and dancing dragons. It’s a dusting of snow (if we’re lucky) and the gradual return of the light. After a long, wet, universall…

Sometimes, a month in one particular year comes to represent that same month in all the years that follow — for me, January will always mean frost, mist and ice, as it was back in the locked down season when we couldn’t leave our little town. Memories concertina time and in my head, that January was cold every day. The world certainly wasn’t perfect, but the weather was.