1.

In the introduction to George Monbiot’s No Man’s Land, I read: “Humankind was born on the road. Our brains…are those of the migrant. The restlessness which, in one corrupted form or another, is felt by every human being on earth, is incurable.”

We’re far from Africa and we’ve lost our roots, but there’s still an everyday restlessness, corrupted by centuries of evolution and years of education, skulking in the dark corners of our consciousness.

Friends of ours have just bought a boat to live on. They like the idea of portability; their boat gives physical form to an unspoken desire to periodically migrate. They can float up and down the Thames with their possessions and their love. It’s more a metaphor than anything – in rainy England, confined by villages and narrow rivers, by family homes and local pubs, we’re hardly the Turkana, traversing inhospitable desert lands, setting up temporary camp after temporary camp – but I’m not immune to the temptation of just…picking up. And going.

Why do I like the idea of a floating existence, the ability to suddenly pick up my life and simply shift it elsewhere? The reality of it – the friendships lying fallow, the swapping of time zones, the stress of every mundane detail – is not romantic, and an anxious person is not naturally suited to rootlessness. But still.

In 2007, during the floods, we helped a man called Rob prevent his houseboat from running adrift. It was my first summer here, I had just met the Man, and everything looked bright and strange. I was surprised by the power of the river, swollen and purple in its malleable banks, but I understood intuitively what it is to have one’s home threatened by a force bigger than oneself. Years of fretting over the smell of fire in the California hills had taught me to respect the fragility of a man-made structure; I still had dreams (nightmares?) of choosing, methodically, ruthlessly, which possessions to flee with. That boat was Rob’s home but it could as easily be carried away, or “dash’d all to pieces”, as Shakespeare’s Miranda put it, on the rocks.

Later, we sat in the boat and shared a bottle of wine. We felt a million miles away from Port Meadow, which glistened in the murky twilight, a galaxy away from Jericho with its cocktail bars and boutiques. Rob’s self-sufficiency (he even had a set of solar panels on the roof) captivated us completely, and when we did eventually meander back into town, we sat in a hot pub stunned by the brightness of the lights and said very little.

A few weeks ago, a friend emailed me to say that, almost exactly three years on, Rob had passed away. This will go down in history as a hot summer, a happy time during which the sky burned blue and children ate ice cream and young people got slowly drunk on champagne as they punted down the Cherwell; no floods this year, no boats needing rescue. And when we next visit that spot on Port Meadow, what will we see? Not Rob’s boat, moved a hundred times since we sat near the fire in its belly, hungry for warmth and company on a cool midsummer evening, now ownerless, adrift in spirit. No; the landscape changes constantly.

2.

So you could say that maybe it is not as easy to be at home somewhere, anywhere, as it might seem.

We wander down long roads towards manor houses. I read that the English have this fixation on the home; and maybe these vast estates were built, I think, to allow their owners the illusion of wandering – a harrowing journey down a dark corridor, a flitting between huge empty rooms.

My home is more the man I live with than the walls around us; it’s my books, not my post code. But for us, the constant movement of the summer has made me crave a period of stillness. The backstage passes, the train journeys, the forays into the exotic, the picnics and punting. It’s been a kaleidoscope period, a beautiful whirlwind.

Now we’re housesitting for friends on the edge of the Cotswolds. And what I feel here is maybe the opposite of Monbiot’s corrupted restlessness. Late in the afternoon, after too many hours with my legs folded up against a wooden desk, I go for a walk with the tiny brown terrier who has attached himself to me like a miniature shadow, who follows me from room to room, who curls up at night beside us. The sky is full of puffy clouds, a grey mist on the horizon (I’m caught a mile from the house at the point at which it evolves into a downpour). I walk down bridleways, past fields of wheat edged with a lace of white flowers.

In the evening we go to the pub for our dinner, or else we roast a chicken and eat it sitting in the lounge watching an unexpectedly good film starring Helen Hunt and Colin Firth, with an appearance by Salman Rushdie as a obstetrician. We drive to the train station and back in a big green Land Rover; I feed the pigs in red wellies, denim shorts, one of the Man’s old button-up shirts. I tell the dog not to pee on the poppies that grow in bunches by the fence, though I don’t know why, as I’ve let him pee on every hedge between here and the next village.

A frail rain falls; the sun comes out.

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On the 17:36 to London Paddington. We keep passing those ubiquitous self-storage units. I associate them with trains now. Or perhaps it’s the other way round – I associate trains not with rolling countryside but with sprawling industrial amenities.

How can there possibly be so much stuff in the world that needs storing? Who rents these units, and for what purpose? It seems to me that once people become disengaged from their things, they cease to need them. For awhile I toyed with the idea of having some things in Oxford and some in California, but it really was pointless, and after a season I’d re-acquired everything I wanted but had left behind. The rest was duly carted off to the Salvation Army. What we own means nothing without us, not the other way around.

There’s a man who stores his furniture with us. No one really knows where he is anymore (Canada? Australia?) and it seems he has no thoughts for the things which gather dust in our house, though money continues to appear monthly in our account, like magic. Recompense for nothing at all.

So whenever I see those self-storage places I feel like I’m looking at these vast empty spaces. Even if they are full, even if people do use them – what’s the point? What’s inside is just abandoned stuff in its own abandoned world.

But back to trains. Air conditioned trains on a hot day, which always remind me of the summer I spent commuting from Goleta to Santa Ana. I was interning at the Orange County Transportation Authority (is there irony in the amount of time I spent transporting myself for those three months? Oh, yes!), spending three days down there before returning home for a long weekend. And on Wednesday evenings I’d buy a sandwich for dinner and change out of my suit and I’d catch the last train back.

Between Santa Ana and Los Angeles I’d watch the hot, pale sunlight turn into a Southern California twilight, and in that twilight we’d rush past the other side of things. People’s backyards – plastic toys, dirty pools, beer bottles. The tired backs of buildings, the places where cars go to die, the places where trucks go to stock up on goods. Warehouses and factories. A Spearmint Rhino with a neon sign and a mournful countenance.

But mostly self-storage places. They were everywhere – a part of the landscape, like rolling golden hills and stunning sea views.

You never really saw any people on that journey. A few stops out of L.A. it would suddenly be dark and you’d have to turn your eyes to the seat in front of you again, and outside there would be nothing but flashing lights.

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This time Fez is much less about us and much more about the place itself, the people here. Now I think it extraordinary that we came here when we did – only six weeks into our relationship, the future (our future, that is, he being English, me being American) only a cloud through which we could not even imagine passing. But we trusted each other completely here, and lay on our hotel bed taking photos of our sweaty, hairy, unclean selves.

Now we are staying with friends. But it is also different because three years of living together has made it so. It is lovely but also, weirdly, lonely. If you are no longer getting to know each other in such an active way (now I can make jokes about his past and he knows the geography of my history and there is much less exclaiming over a tajine: ‘oh, I didn’t know you’d done that!‘). It is sometimes almost like travelling with oneself. If he knows, now, that I like to wash my hands more than strictly necessary, and I know without thinking about it that he will smoke almost twice as much here, then there is little (nothing!) to try to hide, and even less to be grateful for the revelation of.

And this is such a sweet thing, but also scary – suddenly here we, this one thing that is a “we” but also an “I”, are, in a foreign country. Perhaps in a way this is why I slept badly last night – for, in spite of him being beside me, loving, handsome even in sleep, smelling and feeling more familiar than anything, than even myself, I felt a sense of being also alone. And perhaps also this is why people (eventually) have children – I had this thought yesterday, as we were discussing the merits of trans-national relationships: that at a certain point you become so close that you almost need someone else – who will be like him and like you but different and constantly, forever, surprising – again. Is that a strange thing to think? But then, everything is strange here.

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The problem with Sundays is the inevitable slow march towards Monday. You can feel each moment sliding past like an adder at your ankles; dangerous, slimy, fickle. Hang the laundry to dry outside and already you are halfway through the day before you’ve even begun it (or so it feels). It always starts with such promise and then suddenly you find yourself deeply asleep on the couch while the sun beats down hot outside, too weary from the effort of trying to preserve each instant and enjoy it to stay awake any longer.

Today I find myself in just this position – prone, one arm flung across my forehead – when the Man walks in. I find myself shooting up through the black waters of sleep and am unexpectedly awake-but-not-awake. And in this tiny space – only a second, really, perhaps two – I find myself thinking how funny, or maybe how extraordinary, that there is another person who lives here (not just here in this house but here, in my life), who says as I sit up with my face creased and my eyes full of terror (the way I pop up like this reminds him of a meerkat, he sometimes tells me) not to worry.

Yesterday we did summer things. It was a sweet, slow day. We went to the farmer’s market and bought eggs, a free range chicken, vegetables, an old copy of an early P.G. Wodehouse novel. We sat in the shade drinking homemade elderflower cordial and snacking on lemon cakes. Later we did the thing which we often do on Saturdays – we have brunch (salad, sausages, flatbread, orange juice, coffee) and read the Saturday Guardian (I read aloud Tim Dowling’s column to him, he reads Lucy Mangen’s to me). Then we went out into the garden and picked cherries and watered the potatoes and sat in the grass and I tried to do the crossword but gave up on it. We ate brownies and raspberries in a pool of sunshine.

We brought the cherries to the pub and I had more homemade elderflower cordial, this time paired with champagne, because, well, why not? On the way home we stopped by Sylvesters and impulsively bought lavender and rosemary to plant in the garden, and some ropes with which to hang the hammock. I had half a nap on the couch and we heated up some pizza before going into town as darkness settled to listen to some music. At midnight we sat upon the hammock, the two of us, limbs folded, watching the star-drenched sky until some neighbors called us over, so we brought red wine and glasses and climbed the fence and met them for the first time, and a few hours later we were in bed with the heat of the day still palpable in the walls of the house.

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25.06.10 Fez, Morocco (Café rooftop, near Bab Boujaloud)

I.
Morning clouds are burning off. Or perhaps they aren’t, perhaps they’ll stay all day. But at any rate something’s burning – plumes of white smoke coming from a small chimney, a smell which reminds me of London. I have to reach for the memory, but slowly, through the Moroccan morning, it comes: I’m 12, it’s my first time in England, we’re at the Imperial War Museum, moving through artificial First World War trenches. They have replicated (and softened) the moans of wounded men and the boom of guns; it’s dark, there are flickering lights that illuminate plastic statues of officers bent over their plans, casualties lying still on stretchers, rats at the feet of a nervous recruit. But mostly the have put a smell into the room – a smell of soft, warm burning. A smell like this smell here, now, in the medina.

Three years ago we came to this same café and sat just as we are today, on the rooftop, with our tea. He made a sketch of an elaborate iron lampshade, which took him nearly two hours to complete, and I mostly watched him, occasionally making notes of my own. It was hot, I wore a veil of sweat over my face, large black sunglasses obscured my eyes.

Now the mint tea is finally cool enough to sip. Sunglasses? I can’t decide. On, off, on, off, oh, well. Maybe it’s better to squint anyway – to meet the haze with half-closed eyes. Alice says it gets cold here in winter. Today I’m willing to believe that; it’s so cool, with the overcast sky and the breeze and the soft air. I see it’s not all dry dusty heat. Nowhere, not even England or Africa, can be defined by weather alone.

II.
There are cats on the rooftop (a cool tin roof!). Mean, skinny strays – a whole pack of them, moving towards us as a hungry phalanx.

III.
Bab Boujloud was only built in 1913. And the cherry festival, at Sefrou, is the oldest festival in Morocco after only 90 years. So you see, it’s strange that what seemed so old can be so new and yet things here – or at least the outline of things, the basis for them – are ancient. Medieval and often seemingly frozen in time.

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