While the rest of the country and most of the world is grimly foretelling disaster – a tornado of fascism billowing in on the wind that isn’t properly connected to the grid, birth rates plummeting so fast that even immigration can’t keep up, twenty percent of our population on anti-depressants and AI about to put us all on the dole, I want to make a case for celebration.
Happiness is…. Remember those Snoopy posters from the eighties? Happiness is in fact living in Teignmouth. Despite the multitudinous vape shops, ice-cream-swiping seagulls and the closure of the lido, there is something about this place that is breathtakingly magical. What a privilege to gaze out at the vast horizon, watch the changing mood of the waves as they shift from glassy calm to a towering battalion overnight, one moment caressing the sun-drenched sand, the next slamming into the groynes and hurling themselves over the sea wall, gulls feasting on the debris of shellfish when the storm has passed.
But most of all it’s the people – intensely alive, involved, dynamic, and very quirky. I just popped into Spyglass gallery, or tried to pop in. He’d locked the door but let me in when I knocked and proudly showed me his avocado plant grown from – well, an avocado, and fertilised with Stew. A second plant stood alongside it, not looking nearly as lively. ‘That one hasn’t had Stew yet, but I’m going to do it.’ While his expression goes all dreamy with the thought of his new venture as plant-food manufacturer, I scurry home for a meeting of Teignmouth Writers. This group sprang up out of nowhere from a message I put out on a Facebook page and they have turned out to be the most inspiring, entertaining, creative bunch you could wish to meet – poets, academics, novelists, all of them committed to supporting each other’s literary endeavours and improving their craft. This week one member reveals she used to write steamy romances, and asks whether anyone would be interested in a breakaway group for some of that. Some jaws fall open while other members suddenly find they’ve dropped something on the floor.
Then there’s the (admittedly rather tamer) creative writing workshop I run for the U3A, (which by the way is not just for old people – just free people). This week it’s vision boards, cutting and sticking life-affirming headlines and snippets of feel-good articles onto canvas boards and staying way beyond home time because it’s such fun. There’s something about losing yourself in a craft activity that really calms the mind and lifts the spirits.
My third literary pursuit in this seaside idyll is book club – a whirlwind of enthusiastic, up-for-anything vibrant women, who in between devouring novels and teaching huge classes of spirited teenagers (so many teachers!) can be found sea swimming in bikinis in the middle of winter, rowing halfway down the coast in a gale and volunteering for the Samaritans. I have been humbled by their zest for life. I offer to host a meeting, and they rock up clutching all sorts of salads and puddings they’ve rustled up in the twinkling of an eye to accompany my measly dinner offering. We discuss the French resistance, the history of Cyprus and the concept of inherited trauma. They work hard, play hard and think hard. It’s exhausting, but it’s fantastic.
Sometimes it feels like going against the grain to bounce around saying isn’t life great, but it doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to the suffering of the world. The women sitting around my table last night had plenty to say about all that, but the world going to shit doesn’t bring them down or even slow them down. They get up every day and go to work, volunteer here there and everywhere to make their community a better place, run around after ageing parents and adult children, and for some reason I can’t fathom, still insist on shunning wetsuits for their daily dips.
That should be the end and it is, but I just wanted to add a little something, in case you’re not a mermaid and have to do a boring office job…
The French philosopher Voltaire said in Candide ‘chacun doit cultiver son propre jardin’ (everyone should cultivate their own garden – in other words do your bit, however small) which wouldn’t be a bad motto for getting through the dark times. There have always been and will always be dark times, but my new home has shown me how in our own little ways we can bring light to the darkest corners of the world, and with enough lights on, who knows? The whole planet might look a little less gloomy.
