For the longest time, I thought writing was a retreat—a thoughtful flight from the world, its calendrical preoccupations, and its material restraints. From the body too, its leaky neediness put aside.

A drop of sweat hits my brow.

The sun is setting over the Norwich skyline: the light hits the spires in a particularly luminous way this evening, and the temperature is exactly 95 degrees Celsius. A young woman holding a thermometer says so. Her friend moans. She prefers the milder warmth of the communal sauna over this little hot box hidden on the roof of an unassuming apartment building overlooking the busy Norwich shopping streets. Their conversation turns to a cheating boyfriend, and to their detriment, they ignore the presence of a prowling writer in the seeming intimacy of this enclosed space. One who may indeed be lying unremarkably still, but whose ears are very much open to the world. Their bikini-clad bodies (I will never get used to the British custom of attending saunas in a tacky swimsuit) slowly turn the lovely pink colour of roast beef. As does mine.

In the one writing class I ever attended, the teacher spent a good twenty minutes condemning the body as a vile distraction with the intense hatred of an old-timey priest. A cumbersome beast, he called it, in need of feeding and being taken out for walks, interrupting the long hours at a desk that finished novels are made of. I wanted to tell him about my friend Piet, who only dared to finally start writing poetry because his disabled body denied him the vigour for long-form essays. I wanted to tell him about me, and the fact that I would probably not be writing fiction at all if the vagaries of my own disabled desk-eschewing body hadn’t led me away from academia. I wanted to tell him about the time-honoured crip, sick, and mad tradition of writing in bed, in the streets, in the hospital, in the woods, anywhere but at a desk. But I didn’t.

I can feel my resistance to the intense heat of the sauna building up, and my slippery legs start shaking until I finally give way to the most delicious melting sensation. My mouth opens, dry but soft, and from the puddle of my discarded striving emerges the scene I was struggling with writing earlier: full-grown, ready to be put to the page. I make a promise to myself there and then, that from now on I will let the rhythms of my body, of this city, take me. To take seriously the crip skill of writing not in spite of the body and its needs, but because of it, through it even.

Only a day later, and my jaw is already tensing up again.

One of the signs that it is time to leave my laptop behind. I ignore these aching muscles for a good while, trying to shake the notion that I should first get some writing done before I can reward myself with a walk. It’s nine in the morning, you see. A time for desk work, not for wandering. But I hate the notion of rewards. ’You can try and push your writing further,’ my body is telling me, ‘no good will come of it though’. As my old foraging teacher used to say: ‘You can’t make a plant grow faster by dragging it from the soil, you will only destroy it that way.’

And even though I do not want to lock myself up in a room, or perhaps because of it, I end up wandering into the cell of Julian of Norwich. In my pocket, a dusty hazelnut that I’ve taken from the bowl on display in the church where she once was an anchoress. I sit down in the remains of her long-lost anchorite cell, roll my illicitly begotten hazelnut between my fingers, and I contemplate most writers’ paradoxical urge to both retreat from the world and to greedily, rapturously drink it up. In the 14th century, a hazelnut must have been the most mundane of objects, then even more so than today. I imagine Goodwife Julian, before her days of writing down her visions, returning from a walk on Mousehold Heath, opening up her knapsack to reveal all she has foraged. She takes the small knife from her belt and chops handfuls of hazelnuts to top the nettle soup she will brew in her hearth, or the stew she will make from the last of the small sour crabapples she was lucky enough to find out there.

For her to hold one of those little hazelnuts in her hand, years later, when she found solace in her cell, after she had survived a sickbed that should have killed her, when she was turning herself into England’s first known visionary woman writer, and then to ask that most writerly of questions:  “What may this be?” and to write down such an answer. “It is all that is made.” Centuries before William Blake saw worlds in grains of sand and heaven in a wildflower.

I put my headphones on and listen to an audiobook version of Mother Julian’s “Revelations of Divine Love”. She whispers in my ear as I hold two of my characters in the palm of my hand and ask of them: “What may this be?” Their relationship has been puzzling me. They should be lovers, they are, but I’m missing out on something that turns them from a generic pair of paramours into a particular one. Then an insight strikes me, so clear, I have to run back home to jot it down in the notebook I forgot. Their love is not just romantic; it has a tinge of the devotional to it, a manifestation of unconditional motherly divine love.

Wandering the Norwich lanes is its own way of thinking and writing, not despite the distractions the city has to offer, but through them.

For writing is as much a way of feeling deeply as reading is.

And sparks of divine inspiration hide in the smallest of spaces.