A Cambridge Adventure and Amy Liptrot's 'The Outrun'

I am sitting in the Library on my day off, surrounded by nineteenth-century books and at a desk covered with paper, notebooks of various shapes and sizes and, lurking behind my laptop, my very distracting phone. This morning I am working on job applications.

Except right now I'm not - this blog post is a generous helping of productive procrastination. Which is definitely better than scrolling endlessly through Facebook and admiring the reflection of my earring in the laptop screen. Since I energetically (and tipsily) hammered out another relaunch of this blog as a haven for my thoughts on books, libraries and reading, I have produced precisely no posts to back it up; so here you go.

Last week I went on an adventure, travelling to Cambridge for a job interview at the library of one of the colleges. I'd never been before, and was struck by the incredible atmosphere, conjured by beautiful gothic architecture, colleges and churches wherever you look, every shop and boutique the upper-middle classes could dream of, bicycles, bicycles, and more bicycles, and a general impression of high intelligence. I seriously doubted my own intellect after nearly being mown over by several bikes, then misreading my map and wandering a bit lost through the many austere courts of the college looking for the HR department. There were, of course, no signs anywhere, so one was expected to divine their way around, and if they got lost, it must be because they were too thick to be there. A porter in one of the lodges kindly informed me I'd overshot the office by quite a long way and oh, also, that it was on the first floor, a fact neglected on the map. The interview itself, once I'd found it, was my first of the kind and nerve-racking, though I did enjoy it. Seriously. It turns out I do mostly know my stuff when it comes to libraries and, well, myself, and I'd been doing power poses in my room in the B&B before I left.

Afterwards I headed to Heffers,  a huge bookshop in the centre of Cambridge, the shopfront of Blackwell's and, I suspect, a site of pilgrimage for bibliophiles. Dragging my little suitcase behind me and tottering - fairly wearily by this point - on the high heels of my fabulous purple ankle boots, I immediately wished I was wealthy and could load my free arm with new acquisitions (that's library speak too, don't-you-know). There was a stand of books on medicine and medical history, which is one of my greatest interests, and as many bookshelves as could be crammed into the space. The special clothbound editions of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series called out to me, and so did many more across a dizzying range of genres. I eventually took Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and a canvas tote up to the till, where I struck up a slightly hysterical conversation with the nice stranger lady about the interview I'd just come from. "At least if I don't get the job, I came away with a book, right?!" The lady smiled warily and said good luck, and that staff got a twenty per cent discount in the shop. Ahem. Once I'd done that and strode around Cambridge a while longer, it was time to hop on the train again and flee home.

In the midst of all this, I've been reading The Outrun by Amy Liptrot. She's coming to the Library next month as our Writer in Residence, and her book's been getting an insane amount of media attention (I should know, I recently had to collate it all for the Library's social media accounts), so I decided to read it myself. The book is a memoir on recovering from, and living through, alcohol addiction, but it's also a fantastic work of nature writing, a genre to which I'm entirely new. It isn't a trite, linear, and-then-I-got-better type of addiction tale, as usually depicted in books and films, and neither does it wallow in the darkness and misery of such situations. I get that some people have to write in this way, and that it is their style and the best way they can portray their experience, but these are nowhere near as fascinating to read as The Outrun.

From the wild and bleak viewpoint of Orkney, where Liptrot is originally from and returns to in the book, she describes her sober life while looking back to her childhood and her years of alcoholism. Nature plays a vital role in the narrative; the birds of Orkney swoop through the prose as they do across the front cover, and we follow the author as she drives along rural roads at night, stopping to listen for the call of the elusive corncrake, and as she hops on her bike to find the Northern Lights. We stand next to her as she gazes up to star-glittered black skies, looking for Jupiter and Venus. The story gets uncomfortable at times but that's only a good thing - the matter-of-fact and thoughtful way Liptrot describes her experiences pulls you along for the ride. One of my favourite parts is when she describes her sea swims. I find myself longing to plunge into glacial waters myself, remembering all the times I've swum in the Cornish sea growing up, staying in the water until I went numb, then emerging when the cold started to hurt.

"One morning, the sky is reflected in the flat water and I'm swimming in the clouds."

I don't read much nonfiction, but I keep thinking back to parts of this book, and it's so wonderfully written that it should appeal to many kinds of reader. 

Time to get back to my applications. New lights are being installed in the Library and I should make the most of the little gaps of silence between hammering and crashing. Also, I have far too much experience of flirting dangerously with deadlines, so if I can finish this today I will be happy, and can run off to Chester after lunch for wandering the Rows window shopping, a manicure and picking out a new pair of specs. Library interns really know how to live on their days off...