Blue Diagonals by Lucy Holme - read an extract

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Dec 01,2024

We present an extract from Blue Diagonals, the new essay collection by Lucy Holme.

Blue Diagonals is an intimate and powerful exploration of love, loss, and healing. Holme's evocative prose draws on personal history and memory to illuminate the fragility and resilience of the human spirit.


From A Spring Of A Fruited Olive

— travels with 'Olives' by A. E. Stallings and the Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago

In 2006, the Portuguese Nobel Laureate writer José Saramago brought with him on an aeroplane an olive branch grafted from a tree in Alentejo, his birthplace. The hessian bag between his feet represented a slice of home and memory, which he intended to replant in the leafy grounds of his refuge in the hills of Tías, Lanzarote. He had chosen a plot in front of the house in which he had lived in exile for the last eighteen years of his life. For Saramago, his fiery imagination was stoked by memory, and as he settled into old age with his third wife, Pilar del Rio, the young green sapling he planted in front of the building that now houses his enormous library of books grew into a strapping tree, one of the finest on the island.

I am visiting the island of Lanzarote, that ubiquitous winter sun destination so beloved of British and Irish holiday makers, a place that seems to me, after I have visited it, to be hiding its beauty in plain sight. It is a desolate and austere landscape which keeps its history tucked in close. White low-level buildings are scatter- gunned across the volcanic terrain (no high-rises are permitted). The scorched earth stretches for miles. The burning centre in the Timanfaya (or Montañas del Fuego) district is etched with the wreckage of hardened lava and sits as if stunned, nestled into sporadic curves of bright jewelled bushes. In silhouette, groups of khaki-green olive trees huddle into the undulating hillsides.

In the cold blue light of a morning hike, I follow a countryside trail up and away from the highway and into the hills. My phone says it is 5km to Saramago’s house, which I intend that day to visit. I have left my family slumbering in the finca we are staying in for a week and this feels like such a longed-for luxury; to be on my own, going to a museum I know would not appeal to my partner or my three small children. In no time, I am off the beaten track, in the middle of farmland, with only a distant view of the sea on the horizon. I pass rows of striped squash nestling in pićon- schist grooves. The earth, though black, shimmers with quartzite and other minerals I can’t name. I listen to a podcast about the intangibility of recollection and the voice of Colm Tóibín floods my ears, reading from his collection of poetry, Vinegar Hill. He explores the idea of travel as translation and how it can be transformative, whether forced or undertaken voluntarily.

I think of the flights I have taken solo, the buses and trains. Of the car-rides hitched and strangers solicited for conversation or insider tips. I doubt I could count the number of situations I found myself in when I did not fully comprehend what was happening because of a lack of adequate language or experience. Memory can be like that, reduced to only those occasions where we can express in words the vignettes that flit across our brains like wisps of cloud. As Tóibín puts so simply in his poem ‘Object on a Table’, ‘memory walks towards us / half beckoning.’ Without the items that remind us of catastrophic times, of meltdowns, of transportation by a kiss or devastation by a thoughtless gesture, some events remain nebulous and out of reach.

I mentally list objects associated with my travels, conjuring the glistening skins of fat nocellaria olives and greenish-yellow Vermentino di Gallura wine from Sardinia, crushed paper packets of Marlboro Lights bought for $1 at the Soggy Dollar Bar in Sint Maarten, a Tiffany Atlas wedding ring long since sold for scrap metal to a goldsmith in Hatton Gardens.

A farmer appears in a dusty laneway and stands watching me as I ascend the gentle hill. I get that familiar primeval prickling on my neck, the sudden realisation of both isolation (of oneself) and proximity (to somebody possibly unsafe). He tips his cap as I pass and hollers mucho calor guapa mucho calor, which makes me smile despite myself. It is something about the word guapa. I was expecting Señora, maybe. It is only when I round a bend in the road that the irrational fear of being followed or accosted enters my brain.

It is not him — what he looks like or even what he says. I am just reminded of the many times I walked alone in my early twenties in Panama, Nice, Antigua, San Diego, Mexico, Vancouver; in the well-lit Sunday afternoon places and pitch black witching hour places. The late nights and early mornings where my only protection from undesirable attention was the thick imaginary blanket of alcohol I was wearing from the night before. I still drink now, but my consumption is diluted by my responsibilities, my freedom curtailed by the weight of knowledge I now have about travel and exploration, things that would never have occurred to me as I wove my way around the world on a string of yachts under the guise of a career.

As I walk, I am composing lines in my head which planted themselves the day before, on a walk around the circumference of one of Lanzarote’s largest moonscape craters. I take note how different, how valuable, this experience is to me now that I do not have the time or independence (from my children) to travel solo any more.

After I retired from yachting in 2012, I had three children in quick succession and there were years where writing became something I willingly sidelined. I felt I had nothing more to say and no opportunity to use my brain in the way I had before — when I believed everything in my imagination to be fresh, amusing and of great importance. As I approach Casa Saramago, I visualise all the struggles of working at sea, the gruelling labour, cleaning, ironing and waiting on selfish and demanding billionaires I believed were taking me away from my vocation, but instead they’ve provided me with the raw material for a writing life.

Blue Diagonals is published by Broken Sleep - find out more here.