Our street is lined with blackthorn trees. As blossom goes, it’s not the most glamorous (spiky, small-flowered) but it is the first of the season to pop. And when it does, often as early as February, it is bittersweet. Blackthorn petals polka-dotted the pavements during the disappearance of Sarah Everard and the discovery of her body; I can’t see them without being reminded of that time.
Sarah was killed within walking distance of my home. For 10 days we opened our curtains to see her smile on posters on the lamp post outside. The country was in the grip of yet another lockdown; I was in the midst of working on a book borne of isolation. I was desperate to sit in a booth in a pub with my girlfriends, to feel the warmth of their bodies and conversation over some cheap white wine.
That book was about women, their stories and the things they buried with the soil. And the combination of it all - of the isolation, of the lockdown, of Sarah Everard, of thinking about women and women’s bodies and stories and the things we bury - was heady. One morning I found myself scrabbling around for diaries I’d shut 12 years earlier to get some clarity on things my own body had been subjected to.
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