Roger Deakin
Roger Stuart Deakin was an English writer, documentary-maker and environmentalist.
Educated at Haberdashers' Aske's and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read English, he first worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director.
In 1968 he bought an Elizabethan moated farmhouse on the edge of Mellis Common, near Diss where he lived until his death from a brain tumour, first diagnosed only four months before his death.
Deakin was a founder director of the arts/environmental charity Common Ground in 1982.
In 1999 his acclaimed book Waterlog was published by Chatto and Windus in the United Kingdom. Inspired in part by a short story by John Cheever, The Swimmer, (Burt Lancaster was in the film), it describes his experiences of 'wild swimming', swimming in Britain's rivers and lakes and is both a campaigning work and poetic odyssey. Wildwood, appeared posthumously in 2007 and in November 2008, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm - a collection of writing taken from his personal notebooks was published to high critical appraisal.
“The real wages of potters are in the daily silent appreciations of each of their customers as they pour the morning tea from their teapot, or drink coffee from their mug, or eat dinner off their plate. To be this involved in the daily lives of people who appreciate and admire your work enough to buy it must bring deep reassurance. It is a kind of immortality you can enjoy while still living. The same goes for the woodworker. You are part of the community.”
“My house was once an acorn.”
“At night you write out of guilt, but in the morning you write out of hope.”
“To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed.”
“I need someone to fold the sheet, someone to take the other end of the sheet and walk towards me and fold once , then step back , fold and walk towards me again .We all need someone to fold the sheet.Someone to hitch on the coat at the neck .Someone to put on the kettle. Someone to dry up while I wash.”
“All of us , I believe , carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there :places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem'We are seven' ,our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened.By way of returning the compliment , we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far from them.”
“There's more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don't need permission for them. There's more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we're just passing through.”