I have written before about the places and landscapes that inspire me, the drive across the beautiful Yorkshire Wolds to Bridlington, the churchyard at the end of our road in Headingley and the cliffs at Sewerby stretching all the way to Bempton. Yesterday I was meeting a writer friend and having lunch in the main room of the beautiful Leeds Library, a Georgian marvel hidden in the historic centre of Leeds.
I had cycled into Leeds down Cardigan Road, onto Burley road and eventually past the Town Hall and Art Gallery along the newish cycle paths that thread the city and make cycling a safer pleasure.
I arrived, locked my bike opposite the entrance to the library [suggestions for future blue plaque, ‘James Nash minor poet of the 21st century occasionally tethered his bike here’].
Using my library card I accessed the new lift which whisked me to the first floor. I unpacked the picnic lunch while waiting for my friend to arrive and looked around me. There in the window is the chair I promise myself every time, but have never sat in yet. And next to me the spiral staircase to the upper galleries of books… I fall into a dreaming state and a poem I wrote three or four years ago comes to mind. You can find it in ‘Notes of Your Music’ [Valley Press. 2025].
This place is ballast to my soul
This place is ballast to my soul, it rights
Itself in seconds of being here
It promises peace and calm, it excites
The tiny muscles in my eyes and ear.
I sit an old table and sip tea
Looking around at what I know so well
Books in all their variegation I see,
The desk where I once studied, the spell
Still captures what lingers and remains
After this slow erosion of my very self.
I am a barely covered bag of old bones
Who limps while still looking from shelf to shelf.
Everything changes that we know
This place not so much somehow.
