Taking Notice

Almost every day, I walk my lovely labradoodle, Fidra, along the canal near where I live. It’s an ordinary enough route: down the path behind the house, down the hill, over the bridge, and onto the familiar stretch of towpath that curves like a thought I’ve traced a thousand times. But it’s never the same walk. The seasons keep rewriting it.

In late summer, the light grows thick and golden, dripping through the trees like syrup poured from a jug. Soon it will be winter, the world silvery and cold, sparkling with frost; sometimes the canal freezes hard and the entire landscape feels suspended, holding its breath. Right now, in November, the air carries the smell of damp leaves and something still faintly warm, as though summer is lingering in the undergrowth, unwilling to go. The plants have turned copper and russet. Berries flash bright red, punctuation marks on bare dark branches. The canal turns over its colours the way a writer turns over a sentence: slowly, then suddenly, then all at once.

The towpath is busy in a quiet sort of way: walkers with and without dogs, long-distance hikers with serious boots, midday striders, runners, cyclists, rowers gliding past. Wildlife appears and disappears at will: ducks and little brown hedge birds, squirrels and swans, cormorants, a buzzard now and then, the local otter if you’re lucky: and once, I saw a kingfisher, blue as flame. It’s teeming with life, but always peaceful.

I don’t go looking for details. They just seem to reveal themselves, as if they’ve been waiting for someone to stop and say, I see you.

One afternoon, walking that same path, I saw a coat snagged on a low branch. Nothing dramatic: a child’s waterproof, bright blue, probably dropped by accident. I walked past it at first. But something about it lodged itself under my skin: Who had worn it? Why hadn’t they come back?

A few days later, the coat had been lifted carefully onto the wall, positioned so its owner might spot it. Then, after about ten days, it was gone. Not long after that, a pair of glasses appeared in the same spot. Those two small scenes: a coat left behind, glasses neatly placed on a wall: became the spark for a short story I’m toying with, about loss and belonging, that which is unintentionally left behind. The canal setting has long drifted away from the story; it’s becoming something stranger, a place where lost objects materialise with their own quiet logic. (If you want to steal that notion as a writing prompt, please do: I’d love to know where you take it.)

But here’s the thing: I’d walked past that coat several times before I actually noticed it. For a long time, I believed that writing fiction meant constructing things: plots, themes, characters: like I was assembling flat-pack furniture. Efficient, structured, deliberate. But over the years, as life has deepened and complicated itself, I’ve realised my stories rarely begin with invention. They begin with noticing the overlooked, the ordinary, the nearly-missed. The art lies in letting something small tug at you until you realise there’s a thread worth pulling. And once I have the thread, the questions begin: What if this happened next? And then? And why?

Noticing is the cornerstone of my writing. The overheard café snippet (surely all writers love the texture of a busy café?), the way someone hesitates before answering, the shift in light across a leaf  these tiny fragments can all be woven into the narrative.

Every morning (well, not every morning, but as many as I can!) I do seven minutes of daily writing. It used to be a brain-dump. Now I start with noticing. The smells on my early morning walk. The quiet hum outside and the quality of the morning light. I try to sit with it long enough for the edges to sharpen. It’s a kind of meditation, I suppose. A breath in the day. A moment to say: Look again.

Because the world is full of stories we’ve tuned out, walked past, stopped seeing.

Fidra prefers to notice all the smells of the canal!