Ines Jeveons on her tumultuous relationship with Mother Nature
I loathe the outdoors. Absolutely despise it. Like a vampire fears a sunrise, I fear the elements; and I’m almost certain Mother Nature hates me too. It’s difficult to be a wildling when your formative years were surrounded by concrete and stone. I was born in London and lived in the south-west of the city – a place where nature is spoon fed to locals with perfectly cropped shrubs, boxed floral displays and concrete pathways through any stretch of grass. Perhaps as a consequence of this environment, I didn’t like so much as a hair out of place. Imagine my shock and horror when, aged six, my parents told me I was to be uprooted from my cobble-stoned path and planted in the North Cotswolds.
I had a whimsically-minded mother who grew most of what we ate and was almost always found in our garden. Unbeknownst to her, elbows deep in the earth unrooting red onions in her Bradley’s gardening gloves, her daughter – refusing all foraging activities – was festering inside and cultivating a reading appetite that consisted of Alexandra Shulman’s Vogue and little else. Reading horribly materialistic things, yearning for my safe metropolis, I shunned the possibility of a relationship with nature – it felt too forced. The slightest morsel of dirt beneath my fingernails was intimate enough for me.
Now I’m older, I appreciate the idea of being outside, and regret my resentment towards that idyllic childhood. I can tolerate observing nature, but the idea of being in the far-stretching, broadbandless open elicits a dread of being lost and never found.
Nature is a trend I can’t ignore. I have recently fallen victim to a certain brand of Tradwife TikTok where mostly American Mormon women use home-grown produce to make everything from ‘scratch’. The deeper I fell into the rabbit hole, the more alluring this content became. Four hours into a Ballerina Farm deep-dive, I suddenly became resentful that my mother hadn’t Kris-Jennered her earthly impulses too. Our organic Burford Brown eggs, sold via an honesty box on the side of the road, could never compete with Hannah Neeleman’s $70 million revenue.
So, like an eighteenth-century woman diagnosed with hysteria and prescribed sea-air, I jetted off to Nice in search of my natural homecoming
Cottage-core started to dominate my feeds and mutated into UPF-fearing propaganda: I must be eating sea moss, but only from cold-water environments, and adding at least thirty plants to my diet will help me avoid an early death – that is, if the seeds I eat are Egyptian. The problem was, I failed to recognise any of this as propaganda. Why had I missed all those chances? I could have at least ten-years of extra life, guaranteed, if I hadn’t been such a homebody. I had to go back to my roots, and fast, but how could I force myself to finally connect?
Like any savvy Gen Z Londoner, instead of meeting my fears at their root I consulted a witch. She sympathised and read my horoscope. As an Aries sun with a Libra ascendant, I respond spiritually to the watery elements of nature. She recommended that I take inspiration from Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, which chronicles a couple’s trek from Somerset to Dorset along the South West Coast Path. Given that the author is presently engulfed in a scandal owing to allegations of fabrication and dishonesty, I felt this was more an omen of trickery than the divine reawakening I was looking for. I also don’t own any walking boots, obviously.
Dissatisfied with my prophecy, I trudged out of her Shoreditch cave, only to receive what can only be classified as some sort of divine intervention. A friend was calling to ask if I fancied a ‘reset weekend’ in Cannes, which sounded like a palatable dosage of the elements – at last. So, like an eighteenth-century woman diagnosed with hysteria and prescribed sea-air, I jetted off to Nice in search of my natural homecoming, which was surely lurking somewhere on the French Riviera.
It would appear that the architects in Cannes had designed a paradise for the morally and naturally shallow. I spent the weekend in a gilded cage, writing and smoking cigarettes without dipping so much as a toe in the ocean. Even the most buttery of croissants could not distract me from the guilt of evading the task at hand. Sea air is not so cleansing when it is diluted with yacht petrol. Exhausted from a weekend of emissionsmaxxing, I was back on the plane to dreary England with nothing but failure under my belt. I had to face myself. I called my friend Imo – equally hooked on that same vein of consumer-based, performative wellness experiences – and suggested we actually go outside.
Had I overcome nature? Had she overcome me? Was everyone else on an Ayahuasca trip we didn’t know about?
The following week, I dragged myself up to a private woodland in Norfolk for a ‘retreat’ booked by her (retreat remains in quotation marks because I could not actually imagine anything less relaxing). Expecting something akin to CBBC’s Raven, what we arrived at was, astoundingly, even more unbearable. She, also a performative outdoorsman, had been hooked by a topline and booked the first thing that promised her the authentic outdoors: a skating retreat for adults.
I disbanded any hopes of R&R as I prepared to face a weekend without basic sanitation, and saddled up for a dose of Katniss Everdeen designed for virgins who rollerbladed at school. After encountering our soon to be pals for a fire-making tutorial, we were shown to our ‘glamping’ cabin – fully kitted out with a bucket. We sat on our temporary cots in silence, mulling over her monumental fuck up. Or at least I was. I hope she was too.
The outdoors waits for no one. At 3am, we were woken for an introductory kidnapping. We were marched first to the camp’s main bonfire – not to be sacrificed at the stake, but instead to be blindfolded and made to endure a Reiki session conducted by our skateboarding campmates. I don’t know how Reiki does what it does, but I’m quite sure it’s not through nocturnal ambush. Reiki, for those as anti-spiritual as me, is a Japanese, non-invasive healing technique where practitioners use light touch or hover their hands (thankfully the latter, in this case) to guide ‘universal life force energy’. Its aim is to reduce stress and promote deep relaxation. I felt close to what a homing pigeon must have felt flying over the Battle of the Somme. We returned to our hut promptly in a state of complete shock, and were told to go back to bed without another word.
The next morning, we woke for our scheduled introduction, and seeing the kneepads and helmets laid out for us on our breakfast bench prompted some sort of aggressive mental breakdown in my once robust and fearless friend. I didn’t recognise her in this unwashed, Reiki induced state. Barely twenty-four hours into our journey with Skate Wild – is this what happens? An exorcism wasn’t explicitly advertised. Without saying anything, she took my hand and shot me the most bewildered look. We could voyage no further. She stood up and left the breakfast camp without uttering a word – I followed with a spring in my step.
We didn’t speak for the whole drive home. I basked in the smug knowledge that I was not the first to break. I would have hurled myself on the motorway before spending another night with our skateboarding friends. Had I overcome nature? Had she overcome me? Was everyone else on an Ayahuasca trip we didn’t know about?
This is not a tale of resilience. I am not a reformed woman. I hated every second of it. I never want to set eyes on a skateboard ever again. I took very little away from the experience, besides the impression that overly-engineered ‘immersive experiences’ in nature are absolute horseshit. That eighteen-hour woodland trip was the most removed from nature I’ve ever felt. I retreated to my bucketless tower with glee. After all, nature is a feeling that can’t be bottled – or so I’ve been told.