fog is weather that becomes a space

Field Note no. 10 | guest post from Laura Pashby | writer & photographer

This week’s post is a wonderful share by writer and photographer

Laura Pashby

Laura is the author of the non-fiction book Little Stories of Your Life and her second book Chasing Fog will be published by Simon & Schuster on August 29th. It has been selected by The Bookseller as an Editor’s Choice non-fiction title for August and has received brilliant reviews already…

I love how Laura frames experiences and writes about simple, intimate moments with depth and candour, whilst also managing to capture them with such beauty through her camera lens. So when we started chatting and the idea arose of her writing something for beauty & bone on her love affair with fog, I was delighted.

In this edited extract from her upcoming book Laura explores fog as a liminal, transformative space. I hope you enjoy as much as I did!

Fog is weather that becomes a space – somewhere that is neither here nor there, a temporary, liminal fissure.

To me, fog seems to open up a rift in reality: when I walk in the fog, I step out of everyday time and into a cool quietness – a locus of latent magic. In fog, the landscape becomes a swirling, changeable space and time feels porus, flowing. My body awakens, and I am outside of myself.

There is one particular foggy place in which the landscape itself exists as a liminal place that is simultaneously land and water. It is a region that connects countryside and sea, where the boundaries between earth and sky become hazy and blurred, and the topography of the past haunts the people of the present: the East Anglian Fens. This is familiar landscape to me: when I was in primary school, a change of job for my father led us to relocate from Devon to East Anglia, moving hundreds of miles from a house by a castle on the edge of Dartmoor to a cottage in a Suffolk village and later – in my early teens – to a town just beyond Fenland borders called Bury-St-Edmunds. There, I lived under that same endless, painterly sky that fades to a flat horizon and, while I don’t remember how I first heard the stories, I grew up knowing, as if they had seeped beneath my skin, old tales of the mist-entangled Fens, inhabited by boggarts and will-o’-the-wisps and haunted by the cold touch of ghosts.

Image by Laura Pashby

Although they were not far away, the Fens – a haunted land, a marshy in-between – seemed completely other to my own comfortable hometown near the Fenland edge. I myself was living in liminal time – those strange years of yearning and learning that fall between childhood and adulthood. I was preoccupied by the moon; perhaps all teenage girls are? Sleeping in a tent in my best friend’s garden the summer after our exams, we saw the crescent moon rise – it was a time of wishing. On nights when the moon was full, I watched its gentle glow spread across the wooden floorboards of my bedroom at the top of the tall, narrow house. Reaching out my hand, I touched silvery light with my fingertips, and felt the pulse of possibility. I looked on the moon with love, a love that I found reflected in Fenland folklore.

At night — or in a fog — the Fens were dangerous. If you could not see clearly, it was easy to lose your way and slip from the path into marsh or mere. You might easily (grasping in vain for a branch to catch hold of) drown. Moonlight was protective and lifesaving and so in the foggy Fens — that eerie liminal landscape — the beautiful moon was revered. I walked through those in-between years in blue dungarees printed with crescent moons. Around my neck, hanging on a leather thread, I wore a tiny silver moon charm.

This is an edited extract from Chasing Fog by Laura Pashby, published by Simon & Schuster on 29th August 2024, and now available for pre-order. Did you know that pre-ordering a book is a really great way to support writers, giving them an all important boost of sales on the first day of publication?

Laura is doing a brilliant Substack ‘book tour’ so if you like what you’ve read here, check out her visits to

Charlene Storey

,

Penny Wincer

,

Claire Venus

and

FogChaser

in the coming days!

I’ll be taking a two week break now from beauty & bone, returning on Sunday 01 September with your monthly Joy Jumble.

While I’m away, feel free to browse my writing in the archive.

Layla x