The Well is a substance recovery organisation based in Barrow, on the coast of South Cumbria. People come here and live, sometimes for a year or more, and face their demons every day, and try to make a new start. It’s one of the biggest and most arduous human journeys imaginable. To take yourself out of addiction and try to break back into life, reborn.
This is our first day of Bellwethers. Julia and I have come to The Well with paper, pens and a whole host of ideas.
The biggest idea is the simplest. It’s that we compare the lives of people who are taking part in the project with the landscape, the environment that surrounds us. Both the people and the landscape, and all creatures, are full of examples of both fragility and survival. We’re going to find points of connection in as many ways as we can Between the people and the world that we sit in, which so often is ignored.
Cumbria is famous for the Lake District, for Wordsworth, for being beautiful. But if you live here, you’ll find out that there are many hidden stories with nothing to do with daffodils, or hiking up famous mountains. This is also a place where people are struggling with substances, with homelessness, with what is sometimes called “precarity” — simply managing to eat and managing to stay warm is difficult.
I’m struck by the energy in the room, a kind of intense chatter, a lot of teasing, a lot of jostling for position. It’s a room in which nobody seems still, everyone’s got their own agenda and they don’t quite fit together.
The space itself is a bland office, a big whiteboard on the wall for a register and timetable, three mismatched tables and round the edges of the room many chairs. It will be our job to bring everybody together around these tables, to make poems together and to turn those poems into sounds. We say hello to the group and they say cautiously, hello to us. And we talk a little about what I’ve just outlined above. And then we get started – and within 15 minutes they’re making their first poems.
