This Is the Place

I Love Durham

Find Gillian: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

I never planned to live in County Durham. It’s not somewhere I knew much about growing up and, when I arrived here in 2014 thanks to my husband’s job and with a toddler in tow, we assumed it would be ‘just for a couple of years’. Nine years later, with two children and now no husband, here I still am. Almost nothing has gone to ‘plan’ in that time but I am learning to favour presence over plans.

I confess though, coming from the beautiful landscapes of Scotland, I couldn’t help but compare the dramatic wildness of the glens and lochs to the quiet dales of County Durham. I missed the coastline deeply. Who would have thought you could miss seagulls? For a long while I didn’t know what I was supposed to do here and felt like an outsider. I’d never moved anywhere before without a deliberate personal purpose. I will always prefer real interactions over superficial ones, but that level of depth can take years to gradually build when you are incomer to a place.

I spent the first several years here in ‘temporary mode’. I didn’t hang pictures on the wall, never fully unpacked because I expected to be packing up again. We had a couple of bad landlord experiences that saw us moving from house to house a few years in a row. Several attempts at settling into something went awry; jobs that went nowhere, a studio rental with a catastrophic flood that forced me back into home working. It all felt a bit rootless.

We joined everyone else in being restricted to home in 2020 and beyond and then, just as the dust settled, health temporarily took away my driving abilities. For the last year, life has consisted of walking the children to the village school, walking home to work at the dining table, picking them up again and then back to the same table to serve meals and stay up late working more.

I won’t pretend that I’ve always taken this restriction well (Who among us coped all the time with lockdown?), but a transformation has taken place. Exchanging ‘plans’ for presence has allowed me to breathe the Durham air until it feels like home. The dust of the red bricks that most home are built with here, the dependable earth of the farmland, the bluebells in the wood, the corvids that visit the garden, the ubiquitous scruffy working ponies that are as beloved as the children in the family… all of these things have become as much a part of the landscape of my soul as the North Sea and the lochs and glens. I never though I could feel the poetry of mud as much as the sparkle on the sea, but Durham brings this out in me. It is a place of deep feeling and warmth, full of stories of both tragedy and ingenuity, of artists and everyday familial love.

And it shows in my work. Durham has this rich depth, a hundred shades of earth that stir your heart, especially in the golden hour. It has people who are rooted in a place and rooted in spirit. This rootedness has given me too a chance to be planted and grow, to be still and go inward, to stay in one place and learn what it feels like to experience the kind of gravity that makes the occasional flight of fancy a safe and joyful thing one can return from. I love that, just as in Scotland, there is culturally no chance of getting away with having a too-big ego in a place like this.

And so, I find myself making a more intentional commitment to County Durham. This is the place. This is my place for the foreseeable.

The moment I felt my insides shift and settle into life here, things began to blossom. You know, there are people I love who are full of flaws (as of course am I) but when I make my mind up to see them as a miracle, they become so beautiful. It’s a bit like that with places. When I decided to really LOVE Durham, I began to see beauty everywhere and it just happens that drawing is how I love and see things.

I’ve also got the absolute best neighbours now and have been drawing the people around me. I try to memorise at least one person from the school gate each day to scribble later and I’m spending the whole year with the local primary next year as artist-in-residence. Drawing is a way to really just see and appreciate people and places, to study them in the kind of detail where you can’t help but love them.

I’m now quite excited to see what comes of a future of intentional place-making. I imagine what might be possible when one makes a commitment to just love and serve your local patch. I love hearing stories, knowing the neighbours, finding out about secret talents and longings, knowing where the good spots are for a river dip. I might be here a short time or I might be an 80-year old woman one day talking about how I never really meant to stay, but place is important and presence is the key.

With love, a Scottish woman in Durham x

_____________________________________-

Speaking of place, I was really lucky to be supported by Durham Placelab recently to throw a bookish party for anyone working in or hoping to work in children’s books in the region last week. My co-hosts, authors Pete Wells and Victoria Downes, were amazing and we heard from them as well as illustrator Kathryn Ann Gander and artist Kim McDermottroe. We had illustrated cake, balloons and hungry caterpillar party bags, because you’re never too old for any of those things. The enthusiasm resulted in the formation of a new peer-support gang called ‘Caterpillar Collective’ which you can find here. I’m very passionate about the talent in the north and about widening access to learning about the various ways to make a book, so an open-handed peer-to-peer approach felt the most rich; a thing we all own and take responsibility for and a broad mix of backgrounds, experiences and stages on the journey. Yay for real life friends!