The Tidal Zone

by Sarah Moss

You get extra points for using mobile phones and social media, regardless of the probable audience; there seems to be an idea that Young People Nowadays will flock to cathedrals if promised an experience involving the use of selfie-sticks and Twitter,

the beige-clad pensioners who do in fact come off the tour buses and up the ramps two by two do not want a geolocative media app but a knowledgeable guide in a silly hat and a nice cup of tea in the café afterwards.

monstrously egotistical book about how when I go for a walk it’s a profound moral and spiritual experience that makes me a better person than you, but when you go to the same place you’re just a tourist messing things up. I read the extract in the Guardian, it’s a pile of bullshit about how he’s weighed down by sorrow for my generation, only not like normal adults are because we’re being badly educated for jobs that don’t exist in an economy that condemns us to poverty and homelessness at levels not seen since before the First World War but because we can’t tell the difference between the lesser marshwort and the – the flowering marsh grass which all goes to show that we’re losing our vital and precious sense of being at one with the natural world, rather than for example showing that the world’s moved on and by the time we’re grown up two-thirds of the global population will be living in cities and not actually giving a fuck about the lesser marshwort

Interesting critique of, I guess, Robert MacFarlane. I loved The Old Ways but I find Lost Words very uncomfortable

Books that mattered were too demanding and books that didn’t were too trivial

perhaps we should buy one of those, perhaps if we lived on a boat we would be happier and more free.

if the grown-ups want to stop teenage girls going off to be terrorist brides they should be thinking about what the girls are running away from as well as towards.

When Yugoslavia came apart, there were villages where people nailed their neighbours’ children to their own front doors.

I hope this is not true

Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy.

We all live in patterns we do not see.

Middle-class socialists, we won’t pay for private schools or private healthcare but we will storm anyone’s office and insist on our rights.

try this: if you could know what is going to happen, if you could know the lives and deaths of your partner and your kids and yourself, if you could know their loves and losses, triumphs and failures, sicknesses and last moments, would you? No. You think you want a story, you think you want an ending, but you don’t. You want life. You want disorder and ignorance and uncertainty.

I am reminded of Sebald’s account of the troupes of entertainers drifting through the warmer parts of Europe in the late 1940s, concentration camp survivors who danced and made music and had nothing to say to anyone who had not been where they had been.