Sunflowers, split plums and acorn-cup boats: Bringing Shadows & Reflections season to a close a little later than anticipated, site editor Diva Harris shares a few pages from her 2025 diary.
Scanned elements from inner diary cover: antique paper scrap; modern stickers and foil-backed Dresden trim
We find ourselves wrapping up this annual series roughly a month later than usual. For me personally, life over the last few months has felt like being repeatedly bucked off a rodeo horse, no matter how desperately I hold onto the saddle. It’s hard to stay on top of things — emails, days of the week, hours of the day, whether you’ve brushed your hair — when you are not even on top of the horse.
I’ve been trying to use it as a way to reconsider my attitude to time. Though of course there is a natural propensity towards reflection that comes with a year ending and another beginning, I don’t personally feel that our contributors’ thoughts on 2025 became redundant as soon as the month ticked over from January to February — much as the ideas in a book don’t stagnate as soon as it’s no longer the month of publication. In fact, I think we’ve run some of the most powerful and important responses to the S&R brief in the last 3 weeks; I encourage you to read back through them, if you haven’t already. And of course, as is often alluded to in Shadows & Reflections submissions, we’re living in a world where the very meaning of seasonality becomes ever blurrier. Did the last flush of pieces come as blossom began to froth, daffs trumpeted the opening notes of winter’s end, because I’m moving too slowly, or they’re moving too fast? Who’s to say.
As has become accidental tradition, I’m sharing a few excerpts from my 2025 diary to bid goodbye to Shadows & Reflections 2025-6. I write my diary semi-often and by hand. I don’t use journalling prompts or force myself to write something if I don’t have anything I want to say. I don’t tend to read it back.
I like how the blue-black cartridge ink sinks into the sugary paper. I like using my brain and my hands (sometimes just barely, and sometimes a lot). I don’t care if I have to cross something out or if a robot would have been able to improve it. That’s not really the point.
It continues to be the privilege of my life to run a platform that is hospitable and conductive (or so I hope) to the rough-hewn, the instinctive, the human and the in-between; to be able to get up each day and make and re-make the rules with my excellent colleagues; to be able to put our energy into releasing positive and creative and interesting things into the world rather than spewing out more plastic, generative slop, noise, excess. To maintain a writership, and a readership, that seems to feel the same.
In the remaining 10 months of 2026 I wish for more tenderness, more tactility, more ink blots in my notebook. And a calmer horse.
*
New Year’s Day, barnacle-tongued
Window as clock, cedar incense
Time does not seem to exist in the bathroom where I forgot to brush my teeth this morning, so do them twice at night, sitting on the toilet lid and reading a perfect book — Isadora Duncan, daggers concealed in pompoms, dancing toy horses…
When I sleep I dream of sunflowers.
10th January
I hold a silver strand of hair up to the silver — quicksilver — dog, and tell her I’m starting to look like you. Perhaps we are locked in a slow meld — wolf-woman lurking just around the corner.
21st Feb
I must tell you, at a house around the corner from ours, they have ripped out the Victorian pine doors, dumped them out the front, ceramic doorknobs and keyhole covers and all.
28th March
In times of historical horror did people still try and orient their diaries towards the poetics of dogs; ceramic doorknobs; sandwiches thrown over the garden wall, rather than look the horror in the eye?
There are so many minute decisions and interactions and transactions we make on a daily basis — so many of them on autopilot, with no conscious thought — that are tangled in a web of governments, weapons, environmental crisis, stolen land, murdered people. The horror of knowing that a comfortable, convenient life relies on webs of corruption and exploitation and death.
Lunchtime, 1st April
The dog is having her cracked tooth extracted, and I try and send my heart to her telepathically.
Luck on tooth
Pearl on tooth
Radioactive wave through tooth
Drill on tooth — bad root, pulp exposed
10/04
An antique box of plaits for sale, tied with ribbon — just like my own plaits in the collar box under the bed. I am wearing a deer-hide jacket a lot these days, that B found for sale at the end of the road. When I ask him about the identifying properties of deerskin, he says that it is both soft and very strong — something to aspire to, I suppose.
16/04
The swans in the park have two nests. They alternate between them: a clutch of eggs in one, just a dog’s stray tennis ball — a neon imposter — in the other.
17/04
Night, again. The dog asks to go out but then just drags me to the gate to look out at the moor. I take a time lapse photo with my phone that looks like a Victorian postcard of the stars.
On Easter Sunday, I lose half of an antique egg-shaped charm and later find it in my underwear, the tiny chick that was inside presumably forever surrendered to the orchard.
The cuckoo cook-coos — a rare herald of spring — and the woodpecker burrs, the bird sounds punctuated by the crack of a rifle. Perhaps, suggests B, someone is out shooting rabbits.
30th April
Empty my dog-walking bag, much overdue, and get more than I bargained for:
Fetid dog treats, maggots
Dried out woodlice and a shrivelled conker
A parakeet feather
The bottom of an old clay marmalade jar
Tile sherds painted with clouds
Clay pipe stems
Like ritual objects, or those found by a parent in the pockets of their child.
Force myself past bodily disgust (at the maggots, the writhing) to think about the functionality of decay; the futility of using a bag designed to hold blood, scales, feathers, merely for nice clean indoor pursuits.
8th May
Spider silk on my jumper
The dog rolls on a long(-) dead fish.
A hairband with a tangle of my mother’s hair
Sea cabbage
Wood pigeon ocarina
Swallows
Rosemary
Radishes
Foxes skitter around the washing airer
Courting each other, romancing, with a delicately carried mohair sock.
Very hot June
Remember the kiss of supermarket aircon
24-degree nights
Dog lured to tub with sausage, where I soak her feet and mine in cold water.
Very hot July — lists that are supposed to turn into entries and never do —
Two ticks in my leg
A vole
Fizzing
Voices and bells
Old flasks that make tea taste like crayons
July, but later — still hot, same story —
Tattoo me with the words CAR TROUBLE
Jazz radio station one minute, stranded on the forecourt of a Newbury petrol station the next.
Hedgehog and badger
Rainbow above the woods, as if to say don’t go
Ermine moth and a looming, smiling moon
Circa 25th July
Plums split on the pavement, wasps
The house is dark when we get home, and the dog is listening to an unfamiliar radio station.
Sunday, 3rd August
On the train on the way back from the car boot, overstimulated, tears and panic at the gratuitous amplified sounds of a child playing a shoot-em-up, his parents either side of him also blankly staring at their phones. Tinny gunfire, screams, spatter of bullet through body, crumpling. Cannot help but think of real human bodies, real guns at the American/Israeli “aid distribution centres” in Gaza. B tells me that the US armed forces invest heavily in the gaming industry; use the guns in cyberspace to train their troops for 3D violence.
Later, when B is in the garden, he calls me out to see the parakeet which has inexplicably fallen with a thud from high in a tree. Beautiful but all wrong on the ground.
Weds 6th August
On a busy road through the New Forest, a young doe flashes across the windscreen of the car my dad is driving, is hit by oncoming traffic on the other side. She came from nowhere the text says, Surreal, like a scene from a film
Perhaps she was an old god, the spirit of the forest incarnate. Perhaps, like a sacred hart, her death would have been a harbinger of doom. But he watches her in the rear-view, three cars stopped behind her in the lane, as she shakes off her daze, and springs back into the forest as quickly as she came.
Thurs 8th August
A very drunk man at the pub mishears the dog’s name as “Naples” and proceeds to speak to her exclusively in Spanish. Buenos noches he calls when he leaves — and then from half way down the road, realising his mistake, Oh! Buona sera!
Saturday 10th August
The dog and I are almost mown down by a teenager on an unwieldy Lime bike, phone clamped between shoulder and ear, old-fashioned paper party hat at a jaunty angle.
30th August
Early on a Saturday morning, an elderly man rings the doorbell, looking for someone who hasn’t lived here for years. Our previous upstairs neighbours had told us their fitted kitchen was brand new at the beginning of their tenancy, because the man who’d lived there before them was essentially off-grid, haunting the big draughty Victorian rooms with no central heating, no kitchen and a city of stacked newspapers. He was also a repeatedly unsuccessful self-funded UKIP candidate, and if you look back far enough on Google Maps, you see not only the closed down Chinese takeaway and derelict Victorian shop where there are now smart terraced houses, but also a scourge of UKIP posters and stickers in the upstairs window of the house.
The elderly man is quite persistent, but I can’t help him.
“Everyone used to laugh at him when he’d lose his deposit every year, but I thought I’d try and track him down now UKIP are doing a bit better!” he smiles, as if things are looking up.
1st September
Unexpectedly discover I can snip chains of people from folded paper, reveal them like a magic trick, arms linked — the way I always longed to as a child, and never managed (the people falling away from each other, breaking hands, upon the reveal.) It reminds me of an old CND badge I found on eBay recently, people paperchained across it with the slogan Arms are for linking.
2nd September
Bats in the park at dusk. By night, our hands in front of lamps, we make shadow puppet bats on the bedroom ceiling.
3rd September
Moth rescue mission (indeterminate species, brown) pinging round the tub, leaving powdery impressions of wing as it tries and fails not to get stuck to the wet surface. Thick antlers and legs, eyes that glow fluorescent orange. Didn’t really realise you could look into the eyes of a moth. Rescue it with a shoe horn and brush my teeth in the dark.
4th
Find that same moth from yesterday caught in a cobweb just outside the bathroom window, being eaten by a spider.
15th sep
Text my family with a photo, leaves but no fruit:
am I mad or is this a tomato plant growing out of the concrete?
they all say looks like it!
My mum suggests it’s probs from the remains of a dropped kebab or sewage!
I cannot fathom how it has managed to take root here, wedged into the asphalt between the kerb and a parked car.
20th sep
Burr-barb in my finger
I pick up some apples from a box in the street and they are delicious
See a child run into the busy road in slow motion, scream as if it is coming from someone else’s mouth
21th
Toddler pushing 2 pints of milk strapped into a doll’s buggy
Fall in someone’s metal-detecting hole and drop the new eggs
6 of the 12 cracked
So I have to make a flan.
It’s my grandmother’s birthday. I see a picture of her I’m not expecting and weep.
22nd sep
All the errant plants on the side road are neatly lopped by a council worker with hoe and spade, swept into plastic bags whether they are bittercress, chickweed, bronze fennel, or a miraculous asphalt tomato.
23
Meet with a writer from the site; pleased to notice half a sycamore seed lodged in the stitches of their jumper
25th October
Sweet chestnuts, horse chestnuts, burdock burrs, galls.
When you are with small children, everything is treasure. We make acorn-cup boats and race them down the river. We wash our hands with sand, and dry them on moss. We pocket particularly big or spherical galls. Splosh in the river with gay abandon — if your socks get wet, someone will hand you new ones. Sensory feedback, crunching, crisping. Throwing rocks into the river, and speculating what noise they will make. I think this one is going to go THUNK. Little love thinks it will go BLOSH.
A mast year in the orchard. We get to use an antiquated lopper. Snip and thud into the net.
Fast-bowling apples to the dog who catches them, takes excited bites
Windfalls to the three white ponies who stretch their necks over the gate like muses, graces, witches.
Back in London we fill boxes and string bags with russets, deliver them to neighbours’ doors and to friends on train platforms. No one can take enough of them off our hands.
A fox takes a cartoonish chomp out of one of my good walking boots, stupidly left outside the back door. It’s welly season now anyway.
December
In the waiting room at the vets, a man produces an injured robin from a cuckoo clock box.