At University, when I’d finally handed in my coursework at the end of a semester, I'd get the same feeling of freedom and release as having an unexpected day off school. I’d go straight to the basement of the University Library - not to the upper levels where most of the Literature books were - but to the low-lit basement, with its car-boot assortment of books. I would take whatever I wanted from the shelves: Egyptian Cryptography, Child Psychology, table-sized atlases - anything that I knew nothing about and felt excited by got tilted off the shelves and stacked in my arms. After following reading lists for months, and being so focused on a text or question that it felt microscopic, it was like entering a clearing - to be able to read anything at all, after such a long period of dieting and abstinence.

In 2012, I organised a large Poetry Festival for the Olympic celebrations,  called Poetry Parnassus. Reading, sourcing translations and researching thousands of living poets, rappers and spoken word artists had been my life for over a year. After the festival was finished, I moved to Norwich. I had no internet, no 3G, no wifi, no TV -  just a small built-in library overlooking a magnolia tree. I spent the summer evenings sitting in that library on my great-grandmother's chair, at my grandmother's writing desk and did nothing but delight in returning to and being able to read dead poets again. These poets became my new life: Anna Świrszczyńska,  Marina Tsvetaeva, Rolf Jacobsen, Czesław Miłosz, Anna Akhmatova, Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Vasko Popa...

Libraries make me feel at home everywhere, and constantly make me happy. Amongst London’s expense and hyperbole, it feels like entering a temple, to wander in, and sit in any of these spaces - peaceful, safe places for families, the homeless, students, teenagers, readers and writers - where nothing has to be bought or paid for.  One of my favourite poems, Suntan - by British poet and Librarian, Lorraine Mariner got me one of my first jobs, working with libraries for The Reading Agency, a favourite film of mine (about reading) is Studio Ghibli's: Whisper of the Heart (Mimi wo Sumaseba); and one of life’s delights, is ordering book takeaway from librarians and waiting for the text to come in that it's arrived, or have one of your favourite writer's handwritten journals, letters, or diaries brought to your table.
 
I am dyslexic and struggled with essay writing when I was studying,  especially in exams. I have the reading comprehension of an 8 year-old and am not able to see basic mistakes I make, so have to re-read through things many, many times. Whilst I was doing my undergratuate degree, I got support from a writer as part of the Royal Literary Fund's, Fellowship scheme. This same writer was a lecturer, and told me they’d had to change the system once I’d graduated: I'd managed to shape my path through the system enough that I had all coursework and no exams for my degree, and had (accidentally) done more Creative Writing modules than any student in the history of the University of East Anglia.
 
After I left University, I developed a similar reading process in public libraries - a kind of scavengers’ banquet: whatever books are left on the table or desk I choose to sit at, are my reading material for the afternoon, or morning. It is a good way to get out of fixed reading habits. I can’t help wondering about who has chosen and left each selection - what they are like, where they’re at in their lives - those about to go travelling, those teaching themselves how to grow their own food in a cramped city, those who are learning how to be happier than they were when they first pulled the chair out. 

I have also found some of my favourite books in this way. One of them was The Sweetness of Life - Le Sel de la Vie, written by an anthropologist called Françoise Héritier and translated from French by Anthea Bell. It is a glorious, life-affirming list really. I buy it for everyone who works too hard and lives too little. That’s what I was doing  when I found it. Sometimes I’ve thought I’d love to be friends with whoever left certain assortments of books. One of my best friends and I, Richard Scott, the first time we hung out, went to England's National Poetry Library and chose three books for each other that we thought would be unfamiliar.
 
Libraries, are public places, but also private: a chance for us to sit and read anonymously - without anyone familiar to us seeing what tangent we're following, or what we wish to alter, understand or enhance about ourselves. I see so many wellbeing and mental health books left on desks. Not taken out to be read in front of others, but read here.
 
Today has been a little like a day off school. I was meant to be sitting a diving exam, but it’s been canceled, so I am translating a Latvian poem instead. It’s by Vizma Belševica, with a translation by Inga Gaile - and is part of the open and incredible work of Modern Poetry in Translation magazine. It’s an online, free workshop, that can be done at anytime. A much better puzzle to solve than a crossword or Sudoku. The literal translation is there, with notes, tempting and waiting for me - so I am going to set to.

One of the world’s greatest writers, by some beautiful fortune, chose the sea as her subject. In her acceptance speech, when she won the National Book Award in 1952 for The Sea Around Us, she said:

Today, I got to kneel in loosely blown sand on the oceanfloor and write. I knelt in front of a Pink Smith Damselfish: a dive slate on my wrist, a flounder beside my knee, wet book and stubby pencil in my hand. One of the things I hadn't thought about before learning to dive was holding hands. Sometimes I feel we adults can talk a little too much with an empty space between us and no connection or understanding. The dives have been mute, and yet so full of dialogue, there's been so much laughter under the water, reassurance, affirmations, touch, eye contact that felt more like conversations, physical slapstick, support, and most of all, us all holding onto each other and not letting anyone twist off course, be lifted by the current, or float up too far. It was my friend's turn to be the balloon today and I the kiteflyer, whose hand reached up and caught hers. The level of contact is the kind you give and get when nursing and caring for someone. I felt held all day: by the water and one another.

Whenever I write poetry in the sea, I think of Rachel Carson. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, she thought of the prose she wrote as poetry, and was called the scientist-poet of the sea. Because we know land better than water, she is more well respected for Silent Spring, her final book, but it is her sea trilogy that I’ve taken into my heart and think is her most evocative writing: The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and Under the Sea-Wind. She once told a friend that after her death, she wanted to be re-incarnated as a tern.

In her life, she only got to dive once. From her writing, you would think she could only exist underwater. She made the quiet sea crackle for me when I read about and listened to the seafloor through archive recordings that she'd described - which had just been captured in the 1940s. I think often of how much the oceans need her hope and sense of wonder now, her voice.

The first breath you take underwater is a miracle. Having been hiking, backpacking, travelling and moving excessively, since I left home as a teenager, I have carried many heavy things on my back, but never breath. Never my own air. You feel how much weight water holds: when you stop wading out and fall back into the waves, then go to your knees, as if asking for forgiveness or marriage and look up at the molten, rocking surface far above you.
 
Yesterday, I went to the bottom of the sea. Not for moments and glimpses. Not for as long and as far as a single breath. For almost an hour I skimmed the bottom and sank and mistakenly surfaced and sank again and swam through the traffic of fish. I felt as slow and deliberate as a paintbrush. We were children all afternoon: myself, my friend and our two dive masters. Both of them have the presence and delight of people who have found exactly what they want to do in life and found a way to do it. One instructor, Jack is an equanimous man with exceptional taste in loud shirts, who recently set up his dive college here in Tenerife. Our other trainer, Lee - is tattooed from ceiling to floor, painted with the sea, his body is a dedication to diving and marine life, with inked octopus tentacles twisting around his arm from elbow to wrist. Both are full of kindness, consideration and mirth, and have a deep respect for the sea and how its inhabitants should be treated - not as tourist attractions or circus shows to be petted or fed - but as autonomous creatures who are not there for us to witness, or interfere with, but who we can help protect. They are my kind of people: Peter Pans on this Never-Never Island.
 
This evening, I have been mostly at the surface instead - snorkeling around some of the coast, diving down momentarily and dangling upside down, bat-like to get closer looks at adult lizard fish, splayed star fish and crabs nibbling and circumnavigating a buffet of rocks. Lots of naturalists have a patch, a beat which they survey and walk throughout the years. I feel like this about my little stretch of coast - I note the seasons under water, what’s abundant when and where. Sometimes the water is almost greasy, sometimes foggy, sometimes foaming with spume - tonight, it was as if someone had just cut their lawn after a long absence: strands of sea grass clogged the surface. I swam a little further out to avoid them, to where the rocks look more like they’re covered in ash and the water gets darker, colder, deeper and my kick stronger. I was rounding one of the peninsulas when I saw something large heading toward me. My autonomic nervous system choose fright. I stopped, breath held, statue-like. It was swimming higher than the stingrays I’d seen in this area. As it got closer I saw what it was: Caretta caretta - a Loggerhead Sea Turtle, tortuga in Spanish - with its griraffe-patterned head and flippers, its slow, undulating motion, as if brushing the water away from its sides. It is the first time in my life I have seen one underwater. It is not an area where I’ve ever known divers see them. They are a vulnerable species here, endangered and threatened elsewhere. Watching it made me think of the advice shared with David Lindo in The Urban Birder, which I have followed ever since I read it: to look at everything that moves, to look at it intently - even if it seems familiar to you and to not have preconceptions of what you will and won't see in the field - simply to go out expecting to see anything.

I grew up and spend some of the year near Wenlock Edge and Robert Hart’s Forest Garden. The last time I was there I saw a lone fox pausing beneath his orchard trees. It was the first time I’d seen a fox in the wild. At the time, I was living in London and was used to seeing foxes almost daily: peering in at me through the front window, asleep under a hedge in a council estate, walking on railway lines before the first morning train, next to honking roundabouts in Westminster. They often seemed to occupy liminal places and times. To see them in such a manicured city was always a great, wild gift.
 
Each time I see Robert Hart’s abandoned garden, I feel a sense of grief at what once was. He was a visionary and his garden was a hopeful place, a garden of possibility, showing what you can do with any land, of any size, anywhere. When he was still alive, my mother had come circle dancing here, in and around the trees. I wish still that his garden could live and be restored. I have no doubt it would be a mecca, a touchstone that people could come to and see what their own hands can do. Robert was a fascinating person, he was a soldier and code-breaker in World War II, a vegan, he compiled some of Ghandi’s teachings for Reuters and made his garden to create a nourishing, healing space for him and his brother, who was born with severe learning disabilities.
 
Yesterday, I spent the morning in a forest garden, a small farmstead on a mountain called El Roque, in the south of Tenerife. From it, you can just glimpse the top of El Teide volcano and hikers’ routes, from Roque de Jama, pass at the end of the lane. It seems to be on the stage of a vast amphitheatre of silence and birds, with mountains surrounding it. Beneath grapevines, almond, peach, pomegranate, fig, lemon and custard apple trees - potatoes, corn, cabbage, lillies, fennel, dahlias, onions, lemon grass, lemon verbena and parsley grow; yellow cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and squash are bound up with physalis, like tangled USB cables. The garden is about 600m above sea level. As I harvested, a relief of calima breeze blew in from out at sea. Each time it came, I stood for it as if in church and as I was weeding, the scent of lemon blossom and fennel surrounded me. To pick hot fruit from trees, vines and low on the ground - to feel their soft, orb heat, then to peel back the dry lanterns of physalis, or twist off orange tomatoes, or knock your forehead into grapes, then press them to your mouth is one of the greatest sensual pleasures in life.
 
After working the garden, I returned to sea-level for a phone meeting (with the wonderful Poetry Translation Centre). I am working on a poetic translation of a war poem full of anger and hope, by Somali poet Amran Maxamed Axmed. The poem will be part of an anthology to be published later this year. For over an hour with Erica Hesketh, Edward Doegar and co-editors Said Jama Hussein and Bill Herbert, we looked at the poem like scientists and philosophers, questioning and weighing each word against another, against the original poem’s sound and force and the literal translation’s imagery and meaning. When finished I filled my belly with pressed grapes and went to San Blas beach to feel the cloth of the sea. I wasn’t even three metres out when I swam into a huge, lime-hedge-like school of sweetlips. Over 200 silverish-white fish, flashing their yellow fins as they circled around me. I held my breath in the centre of them as if in the nucleus of a massive bird's nest.

I have just flown to The Fortunate Isles. As the plane flew down alongside the coast, I found a new pleasure in being able to identify and name the places we passed: Corona Forestal, Punta de Teno, Los Gigantes, Montaña Amarilla, Montaña Roja. Their names are way-markers, directions: Forest Crown, The Giants, Yellow Mountain, Red Mountain. I’d felt a similar pleasure when, as an adult, I’d found a hand-drawn map and discovered the names of the fields and woods surrounding the house I’d grown up in.
 
Descending through white to the blue-blues and brickish reds, I admired the patterns and tracks we humans make on the earth, and how, from the sky, the volcano, El Teide, looks like the lips of a mythic fish puckering at the surface. The corona forests surrounding it, are the foothills that Alexander von Humboldt trekked through to climb Mount Teide, and this is the island that Charles Darwin dreamed of coming to.
 
An astonishing book was published three years ago: Andrea Wulf’s biography of Humboldt, The Invention of Nature. In it, she captures this place, what it meant and means to naturalists, geologists and scientists, as well as the circle of thinkers, artists and polymaths that were fusing ideas through meeting, or reading each others work: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir. Humboldt spent six days here collecting samples. A young, seasick Darwin travelled here on the Beagle, but an outbreak of cholera in England meant they weren’t permitted to go ashore. Captain Fitzroy wrote of that day: “This was a great disappointment to Mr Darwin, who had cherished a hope of visiting the peak. To see it -- to anchor and be on the point of landing, yet be obliged to turn away without the slightest prospect of beholding Teneriffe again -- was indeed to him a calamity.”

In his journal, on January 6th 1832 whilst sailing into Santa Cruz, Darwin wrote:

I think if he had been able to dock, this island would have another chapter to its history, a key part in his theory of evolution and book On the Origin of Species.
 
I have never experienced nature as it is here: heather the size of trees, waka-waka birds that glide above you in the dark and sound more like practical jokes, fire-resident pines, blue chaffinches, plants that I’m used to seeing in pots, are forests with eagles roosting in them, and other plants seem so unreal, you’d think you were hallucinating them. All my life, I was so used to seeing wild animals in single figures, so when I swam for the first time in a volcanic reef, with a vast herd of fish, I forgot I couldn’t swear underwater and flooded my mouth with sea. There are many species where the only place they exist on earth, is here, on this or adjacent islands, in the snowy bowl of the volcano, in sub-tropical cloud, or laurel forests. They carry their place names: Teide Violet, Canary Island Pines, Tenerife Blue Chaffinch.
 
After leaving the airport, the first thing I did was go to a local harbour and leap into the water. As I was getting changed I saw two children snorkeling. One lifted her head and said something to the other. Manta was the word the air caught - Spanish for blanket. They were following a stingray. When I was over in the spring, on my last day, I finally got to swim with one: an Eagle Ray, with its dolphin-shaped head. I had almost given up on finding them, but two rowdy men were getting in at the harbour steps, so I thought I’d wait a little longer. I turned and put my head back down and there it was, with me in its wake for the next hour. They move in the water as if blown, and seem to fly more than swim.
 
The modern name for these seven islands is Las Islas Canarias, but I prefer the romance and abundance of the ancient name for this archipelago. It’s how I feel when here.