The Ardalanish Tweed

When I found out that my friend Antonia had only months to live, I scrawled Jack Kornfield’s words on scrap paper with a fat marker—The trouble is, we think we have time— and stuck it to my kitchen cupboard.

Antonia had lived in the States since leaving Oxford in 1995, and although we’d seen each other every year, I hadn’t visited her home in Indiana until that final week in 2018. I reorganised my lectures, arranged for the kids to stay an extra week with their dad, and left room in my suitcase, as instructed.

Besides her students and her cats, Antonia had devoted her life to her intense passions: her friendships, her family, her rose garden, her music, her sewing. I met the cats, then the West Lafayette friends who’d organised a support network as soon as she’d received her diagnosis. Her music was a form of pain relief, she said, alongside the opioids, and I listened from my bed in the darkest part of the night as she stepped into its stream. We planned her funeral, we talked—or wrote notes to each other, when talking hurt her chest—and on an unseasonably warm February afternoon, Antonia got out of bed and led me round her garden in her silk kimono and soft wool cap, introducing me to her roses, one by one. She showed me her sewing room—windows on two sides, rainbows of cotton reels. She’d taught herself to make her own clothes—properly tailored garments with tucks, hidden seams, lining, buttons—on Sunday afternoons while listening to Radio 4, cutting patterns on the huge oval table.

Antonia had asked visiting friends and family if we’d like to choose an object from her house to take away with us, and if we found it too difficult or upsetting, she instructed us to imagine she “was moving to a smaller house,” not dying. I chose a red enamel teapot, and because I’d told Antonia that I wanted to learn to sew, she also gave me what she considered to be beginners’ sewing patterns, and fabrics from her stash: small floral scraps for dolls’ clothes for my stepdaughter, an untouched length of cotton printed with perky owls in mint and chocolate, and ‘a very special’ soft, light, sea-green tweed. Antonia loved the Hebrides and usually folded a trip to Mull into her visits to the UK. The tweed came from Ardalanish; in the words of Antonia’s mother, Lucy, ‘a wonderful place in the south of the island, where they not only had sheep of different beautiful colours, but also some old-fashioned weaving looms, set on a remote farm right by a beautiful little cove.’

Four years after that week in Indiana, the tweed was still untouched on my shelf. I’d used some of the smaller pieces of fabric as a makeshift curtain in our shabby camper van, a Zoom backdrop to hide the mess, but nothing that required actual sewing. During lockdown I’d practised my visible mending and learned to darn functionally enough to revive holey socks. But the tweed was different. The tweed was Very Special. To do it justice, I needed to learn to sew properly: straight hems, no bunching, no accidentally sewing the inside to the outside. It would take a lot of effort, probably a course at night school, but I would do it. One day.

But when I turned fifty this March, something shifted. I’d been dreading the impending five-oh, measuring myself against conventional markers of success I don’t even believe in, and finding myself woefully deficient. I told myself that aging was better than being dead, but when your brain is locked in rebuke mode, you can turn any thought against yourself. (“Oh my god, you’re lucky to be alive and you’re still wasting it!”) My friend Karen, compassionate, pragmatic, and utterly bullshit-free, told me that your fifties are the decade of letting go. I listen to Karen. She was my teacher on a mindfulness course years ago, and I’d relay her teaching to Antonia on our transatlantic phone calls. In my final days with Antonia in West Lafayette, I drew on what I’d learned from Karen about paying attention to the sensory experience in the moment, and noticed my breath as I made myself look directly at the cancer that was killing my friend, and noticed the feel of my friend’s skin as I held her hand and drew patterns on her palm.

This past month, I’ve let go of the idea that one day, my sewing skills will be worthy of Antonia’s Very Special tweed. This ‘one day’ is seductively but insidiously anti-life. It has no substance, no weight, neither warp nor weft, but it seduces me into forgetting that I am going to die and that I only have this moment. There’s a great poem by Jo Bell, ‘We All Believe That One Day We’ll Keep Chickens.’ We do, in fact, have chickens in our little suburban garden, but only because my partner called the rescue charity and bought the run. If it were down to me, I’d still be reading about chicken-keeping, or more likely, procrastinating about reading about chicken-keeping. But I no longer believe that one day I will have a walled kitchen garden or a small flock of sheep in the Welsh borders, or that one day I will rehab my knee so I can run a half-marathon. I am sad about this, but clearly not sad enough to do squats. There is no magic that will transform me from bodger to confident dressmaker, when I’m still baffled by reloading a bobbin.

I’m still working out the difference between letting go and chucking stuff away. In difficult times, I don’t turn to G&Ts, but to Before & After videos on YouTube: minimalism, Marie Kondo, Swedish Death Cleaning. If I could, I’d go through everything I own and stamp it with a date by which I need to pass it on. This is how I tell what’s decluttering and what’s letting go: if you can pass it on with no pain and no sadness and no sense of loss, you’re just having a clear out.

I have let go of my social media accounts. They were, for me, a factory pumping out bespoke, intoxicating One Days, and I’ve wasted too much time longing to be different, to be better, to be anything-but-me, so I deleted them. I am trying to let go of anything that dislocates me from the here and now, from drawing vines on a friend’s palm, from smelling the roses.

Since I was five, I wanted to be a writer, but I could barely write a sentence before the inner critic crossed it out. I first finished something in my mid-thirties. For a while, I was an author: my name—my old name, before I let go of my marriage—is on the spine of a book. (I have let go of the fantasy that LAIKA will buy the rights to my novel, rescuing it from obscurity and turning it into a Boxtrolls-in-the-Black-Country stop motion masterpiece. Even after years of encouraging students to write what Anne Lamott calls ‘shitty first drafts,’ to play on the page, to get past the deadening pressures of performance and perfection, the stories I was planning to tell are like the bolt of Very Special tweed; material I don’t feel skilled enough to use, in reserve for when I’m good enough.

Since I turned fifty, I have deleted hundreds of thousands of words—ten years’ work on an abandoned novel, scenes from a lukewarm memoir, a mean-spirited draft of a radio play, scraps stored up for quilting into something warm and cosy. I have recycled several reams of work-in-progress. (Paper is heavier than I thought). What’s left is a slim file marked USE OR CHUCK. I’m tempted to shred it for chicken bedding and see what happens next.

I am no longer a writer. But I am still here.

Letting go can feel like freefall. I could blame plummeting oestrogen levels, lockdown, my older son leaving for university, losing my sense of usefulness when I chose to leave my job and turn freelance. When you step out of the roles you’ve always occupied, everything shifts. But it’s more than that: if I let go of not just phantom future Better Me, but who I’ve always been—the people-pleaser, the good girl, the smoother-over, the fixer, the rusher-in, the rescuer, the perpetual-tidy-upper—then who am I? What am I for? This can render you unravelled, unrecognisable. It’s uncomfortable and baffling for other people when you let go of being who they thought you were. It’s more than disconcerting from the inside. Letting go can, I suppose, be like releasing a rope so that the burning boat can float off across a mist-shrouded lake. More often, it’s like stepping off the edge when you can’t see the bottom. I’m not surprised it’s taken till I’m fifty to get started.

But if you don’t let go of what’s already lost and will never be, how can you make space for what’s here now? How can you greet whatever life brings to your threshold, knowing that you are one day closer to your death?

I told Karen about the Ardalanish tweed, and how I didn’t want to hoard it, and how I wanted to find a good home for it. She told me about her love of textiles—she’d even taken a textiles degree on a career break from nursing, so knowing she’d make good use of it, I posted the tweed to her. It arrived, coincidentally, on the fourth anniversary of Antonia’s death.

And now that I am learning to let go of what I’ve held on to, piece by piece, there is room to write new words, and let them go, too.