I love stories.

I love to read and watch and hear all kinds of tales. I love the sway and swoosh of words, the almost-not-there creak of the turn of the page. I love the sing and dance of stories in my ear, suspended in a world that, for a moment, only I can feel.

I spend much of my time with stories, – writing, listening, watching TV.

Often while knitting or cooking the dinner, stories follow me like smoke, drifting to the corners of the ceilings, waiting for me to gather them or, with a broom, swish them away.

I am at my best, most story-telling-ness when I am out with the dog.

I know I said last week that he is doing my head in, and he is, he does. But if you didn’t love all the things that did your head in then you’d never love your kids, your family, people.

And I do love Bertie, for his own annoying self and for the fact that he drags me out into the wilds with him every single day.

I am lucky enough to live surrounded by hills and fields and woods and the river. Of course, using a wheelchair out and about makes many of these places inaccessible, especially in the autumn/winter. Finding the wild from the path is at first a little sad.  The taste of summer still hanging in the air, I hunker down, resentful of the constraint. But you can’t stay like that forever, so something has to give.

With this in mind I started to record my daily dog walks. Just a photo and a few words on Instagram – Like, Follow, Subscribe!  My walk is now framed with a new perspective, a new connection to the landscape that, in a world the exists mainly of me and the dog, I find nourishes me as the days grow darker.

Each weekend I share photo’s on a theme. Sometimes its things of a certain colour, sometimes things of a certain shape. Merging the wild with the manufactured, I find myself searching out new ways of looking – my own personal story hunt. And stories are always found.

Red and Yellow things this time of year, is an easy tale to fall upon. Triangles I thought would hard, but suddenly appeared everywhere, unseen on walks I do every day, they now dance wherever I look, like a secret code only those in-the know, care to find.

There is a quiet joy to this game, and it is a game, like the ones we used to play when we were kids. Or at least I did. How many round stones could you find on the way home, how many feathers? Stepping stones to the imagination, stories would form of stones, left like breadcrumbs to lead the curious and brave to strange and dangerous depths, filled with sleeping knights and giants and battles lost and found

I still tell those stories, in my head, out with the dog.

Going slow to grant him sniffing space, I mull over knots in my current work, or nurse the tiny seedlings of new stories waiting to emerge.

Is it childish, do you think, to still make up tall tales?

I don’t care.

Our whole lives are stories, all the things we have done and said, and she did, and he said, and then… On and on, all of the ways we imagined who we would be, what we would do, stories full of joy and pain and sorrow and laughter.

Maybe we don’t grow up or maybe the secret to growing up, is to hold onto to our stories.

Maybe the secret is to see the magic and the stories in the everyday of our lives, even the tenderest lonely parts. Maybe our stories help us hang on, somehow, for days when even in the darkness we can still see the light.

As ever to quote from one of my most beloved of tales,