‘God bless the great indoors” sing the Lemonheads in “The Outdoor Type”, recounting an ill-fated attempt to impress a new partner by lying about a passion for mountain biking and sleeping under the stars.
Though it might not win your lover’s heart, spending time outdoors is officially good for your health – scientists suggest exposure to green space reduces the risk of disease, stress and premature death. Writers have charted the mental benefits for centuries, and even involved them in their creative process.
I can’t think clearly unless I take an idea out for a run or a rock climb in the parks where I live in Sheffield or the gritstone edges of the Peak District. Some of my first novel was scribbled in a cave on Stanage Edge. Reading outdoors can be a memorable experience too, the book overlaid with the landscape.
Everyone knows that food tastes better outside. Edwin Morgan’s delicate, yearning poem “Strawberries” captures the sensual joy of eating al fresco and of being in a loved one’s orbit (“your knees held in mine, / the blue plates in our laps”), describing Scottish sunlight, sweet air, urgent kisses, summer lightning. It finishes with a note of pure abandon: “let the storm wash the plates”. It should be packed in every picnic basket.
Dreams of escaping the city and taking off into the wilderness can be the stuff of literary cliche. But in Philip Connors’ memoir Fire Season they form understated, poignant material. Connors narrates five months as a fire lookout in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness, the first designated wilderness in the world, a far cry from his previous job at the Wall Street Journal. He follows in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and changes his relationship with time: “Every day in a lookout is a day not subtracted from the sum of one’s life,” he writes.
The laconic, eccentric characters that populate M John Harrison’s cult classic novel Climbers also yearn for transcendent experiences, and try to reach them through the adrenaline highs of rock climbing. When Mike’s marriage fails, he leaves London for the NorthYork Moors and is soon immersed in a world of pain, fear and excitement. But there’s pathos in the way the climbers are often stuck in their lives, how they “seem to hang there forever … like photographs of themselves, before they begin to fall”. You don’t need to care about climbing to find this book compelling.
Since Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, there’s been a profusion of interest – both practical and literary – in wild swimming. Within this, Elizabeth Jane Burnett’s Swims is as refreshing as the first shock of cool water on skin. Her book-length, shape-shifting poem begins and ends in Devon, moving across the waterways of England and Wales from urban ponds to the sea. A record of swims that she undertook with words scrawled on her swimsuit, the poem is also part performance, part environmental act.
Anyone who ventures outdoors in the UK will be familiar with water and its unexpected intrusions. Melissa Harrison’s Rain: Four Walks in English Weather is a meditation on wet landscapes, the intimacies of weather and much more. These essays take in the pastoral and the points of crossover between rural and urban landscapes. There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable literature. Praise the rain and its subtleties.
• Black Car Burning by Helen Mort is published by Chatto & Windus. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
