I am so sick of Zoom meetings, I need a cure

A new anthology about nature and the environment of Scotland provides relief and inspiration, says Laura Waddell

Is there a cure for Zoom nausea? Ninety minutes into a work call looking at eight small screens besides my own face mirrored, I could feel the descent of a headache as heavy as the rainclouds on the horizon. There’s something about video calls in particular – in principle about connectedness but in practise unexpectedly draining – that sucks the fresh air from a room and fills the brain with crackling over-stimulation.

I thought about the soft grey heron I’d earlier spotted standing in the rain like a furled golf umbrella, elegant and alien on a grassy verge beside the tarmac’s pothole pock marks. All I wanted was to close my stinging eyes for a moment and let cold droplets wash over them too.

Our relationship with nature has changed under lockdown. Being aware of just how far we were permitted to roam caused many to take the gambit and do so, looking with more purpose at the outdoor spaces immediately nearby, making discoveries about other species as well as ourselves.

Birds, centre stage as traffic noise dwindled, appeared to sing more loudly. We were noticing what was already there. There was a rush on seeds; not just from experienced gardeners tending to carrots and cabbages, but lured-out newcomers. Some tenement dwellers wholesomely pitched together to turn neglected shared gardens into welcoming places. Others felt the lack of their own accessible green space strongly; cooped up and frustrated, without the health and sanity benefits of outdoors access. That feels deeply wrong, deeply unfair.

Many books are born into the pandemic without meaning to be (I know this intimately – my own, Exit, is out next week). We will reckon many times with what Scotland’s land means to its citizens as the climate crisis worsens and politics evolve. But it was with a newly tuned lockdown mentality I opened Antlers of Water – billed not as “nature writing” but as, precisely, “writing on the nature and environment of Scotland”, a new anthology edited by Kathleen Jamie.

I sometimes struggle to relate to a concept of nature writing in which boundless skies seem to emerge from an author’s abundance of time, travelling solo to remote locations by car which I lack, and rattling off subspecies. Some of this is a kneejerk reaction to the genre’s least generous stereotype, rather than its modern reality. Perhaps some of it is also resentment of train prices.

What I do like are interior journeys; navigation of the natural world which is curious and welcoming of the unexpected and unknown, and willingness to share some of the learning around. There is much of that open-hearted spirit in this anthology. As Jamie says in her introduction, “In a time of ecological crisis, I would argue that simply insisting on our right to pay heed to natural landscapes and non-human lifeforms amounts to an act of resistance to the forces of destruction.”

Nethertheless, I found myself gravitating to the few pieces which contemplated nature within working and urban settings. I liked Malachy Tallack on taking breaks from work, and how each time a walk is repeated, its meaning deepens. During lockdown, I started to shake off each day’s anxiety by the mid-point of my own circuit. Perhaps there’s no bad time to walk in the woods. As poet Em Strang writes, “But don’t wait thinking you need better boots or a waterproof that’ll keep out the rain. / It won’t. Don’t wait.”