So I know no one wants to hear about my illness, but the fact is, it’s the most significant thing that’s happened in my life over the last few days and I can’t help it if it colours my perspective.  More importantly, I have eaten, since Monday, a bowl of cereal, a tiny tub of yoghurt, two bowls of plain pasta, a bag of lightly salted crisps, and several slices of toast (sometimes with butter, sometimes without), so you’ll have to forgive me if I seem to be fixated on the trite, but I want to bring up a few things today, in no particular order:

1) First, let’s discuss men who wear sweatbands (I mean the ones that go round your wrists, not the ones round your head, though that would be weird on a whole different level) whilst doing something ordinary and untaxing–say, walking down the street eating a pack of crisps.  Wearing a perfectly respectable shirt and jeans.  And flip flops.  Not trainers, but flip flops.  (Did you ever see anyone play sport in flip-flops and look anything but silly?  Come to think of it, did you ever see anyone play sport in flip-flops period?) Because I just don’t understand this one.  Maybe in the 1980s this was cool (it made you look preppy, sporty, ready-f0r-anything?), but in 2009, it just makes it look like you’re either a) suffering from worryingly overactive sweat glands, in which case why is that crisp Jack Wills polo so miraculously dry? or b) strangely concerned with dripping sweat into your crisps or indeed, c) both.  So I guess what I’m trying to say is, boys, get a grip: either on a tennis racket, in which case, please feel free to wear wristbands to your hearts’ content, because Roger Federer does, and it seems to work for him; or on reality.  You look silly.

2) Shops.  Let’s talk about shops for a moment.  I don’t mean the high-street, high-fashion variety, or the second-hand charity kind, or anything in-between.  I mean, I sometimes don’t know where to go when I need to get something very basic, like, say, Vogue (just this once, don’t ask the inevitable “need?” question–remember, I’m ill).  Not either of the two corner shops within a stone’s throw of our house, certainly–though I can go to either if I need the basic ingredients for a meal, and one or the other if I’m short on newspapers or booze.  Not the Co-Op down the road, either, apparently (I stuck my head far into the magazine rack to check, but all they had was Cosmopolitan and about a billion tabloids, so I bought the Cosmo and spent a furious half hour on the couch wondering how the editors get away with it all and, if they really know all the secrets to success, happiness, self-confidence and a sizzling sex-life, why anyone bothers to buy the magazine anymore–shouldn’t we all be out fucking and shopping?).  I struck gold at the newsagent across the street from the Co-Op, unsurprisingly, but here’s the thing that gets me: the newstand seems to carry just as much food, and as many household odds-and-ends, as the Co-Op.

I always thought that newsagents, like newsstands, were temples to the printed page, where glossy magazines and dozens of newspapers in dozens of different languages stood proudly on display, while cigarettes and the occasional bit or bob hid behind the counter, but this is obviously and vastly untrue.  There’s even one on the Cowley Road with a post office and, allegedly, a dry-cleaning service.  I’m just not sure that in the US, there’s a comparable complexity of shops.  Sometimes I want to pop into Boots, which I’ve had a hard time learning is not, despite appearances, synonymous with CVS, to buy something I think I should be able to get there–a magazine, a house-cleaning product, laundry detergent–only to be whisked by the crowds past baby clothes, expensive perfumes, women standing idly at designer perfume counters, seven aisles that encourage you to shampoo-condition-colour-moisturize-stylize your hair, and a thousand other things I didn’t know I could use to improve my appearance.

3) On a similar note…when I’m sick, there are two things that I crave invariably: lots of love and attention, and an infusion of brand-name artifical American goop.  The former has been bestowed well and kindly upon me by the Man, who has been nothing short of angelic these last few days; but the later has proven far trickier to get hold of.  Specifically, I want Gatorade, I want PowerBars, and I want saltine crackers.  The first and the last I can more or less find replacements for, but there is not, I don’t think, in all of England, a single PowerBar.  Ordinarily, fake food shot up with vitamins, made chewy and artifically flavourful, wrapped up in shiny plastic, would not particularly appeal to me, and I certainly wouldn’t mourn its absence in a country which has given me so many other good unwholesome foodstuffs, like Jaffa Cakes and Curly Wurlys (they do know how to name things here).  But PowerBars are like comfort food for times of physical woe, and when I’m sick I get particularly irrational about this.  Obviously.

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I’ve been trying to rewrite the beginning of the book for the last week or so. I’ve already re-written it so many times it hardly even seems real to me, but I’m comforted by the fact that this time, it’s more of a re-organization.  At least I’m fundamentally at peace with the words, the ideas.  I dream of coming up with something perfect, something snappy, but the truth is, it is what it is, and at a certain point we have to leave it.  I was never much of an artist, but when I was younger I enjoyed making sketches and pictures, and I would always ruin the image at the last minute by trying to do too much.  It seems like simple enough advice; but I’m trying to weave Flaubert, Oxford, cab drivers, mythology, Max Beerbohm, and Agatha Christie into something elegant, and surprisingly enough, this is proving to be rather difficult.

In other news, the Man and I watched “My Fair Lady” earlier (I’ve been ill, and he’s been nursing me back to health, whilst simultaneously nursing his own football-induced wounds, so we’re a bit of a pathetic pair at the moment–picture me on the couch at midday, holding a teddy bear and sobbing at the happy ending of “Beauty and the Beast”).  And I have “all I want is a room somewhere” stuck in my head.  Lucky for everyone I’m not much up to singing, at the moment.

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For the past few weeks, I have been reading–by which, in this case, I mean something more akin to swimming in–W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.  This is, as Jonathan Raban writes in the TLS, “the finest book of long-distance mental travel that I’ve ever read,” and so is something which, like any long-distance journey, requires periods of rest to succesfully get through.  The closer I get to the end the more I feel myself to be in some strange shadowland, an overlap between Sebald’s mind and my own, with the unfamiliar geography of East Anglia as backdrop and the eerily blurred black-and-white photographs scattered throughout the pages of the book, always fuzzy at the edges, always just vague enough to imply that they might be anything and anywhere, should we want them to be, as ghost-like guides.

This feeling came to a head last night when I had a haunted sleep, in which, first, I was running down a series of narrow and gritty alleyways, pursued by the unknown and ominous chaser from one edge of a city built, it seemed, entirely out of channels between buildings (no doorways, wide boulevards, sudden squares or tree-lined parks).  Then onto a series of trains, which rushed along in an open-topped tunnel.  When I disembarked there was a field, and a rally, and beyond the crowd, the silhouette of a forest.  I knew myself to be on an island, in an archipelago; and as I raced towards the forest, I unfolded a map, which in old-fashioned style told me nothing of importance but gave me the shape of the islands: long and thin all, craggy like the outline of coastal Greece.

Exactly why I woke and felt immediately that this was a dream I would not have had if I wasn’t, in the moments before falling into slumber, reading Sebald, I do not know.  But at some hour shortly before dawn, I stirred in my wooded hiding spot and then woke, and felt convinced beyond measure that this was a dream akin in feeling to what Sebald describes during a harried crossing of a scrubland near Dunwich: “If one obeyed one’s instincts, the path would sooner or later diverge further and further from the goal one was aiming to reach…Several times I was forced to retrace long stretches in that bewildering terrain…I cannot say how long I walked about in that state of mind, or how I found a way out.  But I do remember that suddenly I stood on a country lane, beneath a mighty oak, and the horizon was spinning all around as if I had jumped off a merry-go-round.”

When I had rolled over, felt the Man snoring lightly beside me, drifted back into a half-worried sleep, I dreamt more overtly of the book.  I was discussing it with someone and, in that way of a dream where the familiar is all wrapped up in the foreign, the discussion was taking place via the interent, at a pub, and as I played with a sticky beermat a message appeared on the screen of my computer.  Specifics in dreams are never so spectacular when translated into waking life, but it had to do with hope in the book.  The first line (read the message), implies the tone that is followed throughout: one of desperation, obession with human frailty and transience.  But I disagreed; yes, I wanted to write back, it does–but it also powerfully evokes a sense of hope, with a single word.  What this word was I can’t remember; but now, in looking at the un-spectacular actual first line of the book, I see that Sebald writes both of “emptiness” and “hope”.

In the thick, knotted pages (each one nearly black with tightly-knit words, no paragraphs, no natural space to pause or breath) there are constant reminders of things coming to an end–it is hard to read something like that quickly and harder still to escape the way the mood (heavy, grey) crawls into your head at night.  But there are evocations in the strange and haunting light of springtime, too (I start to go a little wild, to feel recklessness, which I thought to be dead, stirring in my toes)–what I’m saying I guess is this is not a book I’d like to read in winter.

But then, seasons cannot explain everything, can they?  Today as I was running along the edge of Christ Church meadow, and the bells of Magdalen College were crying out for Sunday joy, I paused for breath at an artifical spot, a spot of my own choosing, half in the shade of a low-branched tree, so that I could perceive the new green that has flushed the area.  And I thought: this is a sign of summer, this new green, these fragile shoots and delicate blossoms, but for seventeen years of my life the signfier of summer was the drying out of grassy hills; green bled from the earth, not springing from it.  In a short period indeed I’ve managed to revise my internal understanding of the world, so that the growth that for so long meant the heavy rains of winter now means sunshine and rare warmth.

(I’ve been interrupted now too often; if there’s a flow between thoughts here, I hardly see it–but then, maybe that’s long-distance mental travel.)

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I came home yesterday in the silent hour between late-night and last orders.  I’d parked my bike near the pub where the Man and I first met and as I unlocked it, and a pair of pub-goers drifted past me and around the corner, the whole world paused for a moment around me.  There were the strange spikes and unlit windows of the Bodleian, everything still against the shimmery ivory sky; and the uneven streets, the inky alley behind New College.  I went down that alley.  No sound but the din of my own breath, the occasional whisper from my bicycle wheels.  Everything quiet; everything misted.  The damp settling in frail, tiny beads.  Then vague and ghostly sounds as I approached another pair of pub-goers; I chased their voices around corners until, nearly at the High Street, I met them, passed them by, came out onto the black strip of evening activity.  The hum of a kebab van and the frantic high-heeled steps of girls going to nightclubs. Cars on the roundabout gliding from lane to lane.  The Iffley road deserted.  In honour of a friend of ours, who is moving back to her home country after a long time, I went down Denmark Street.  Then onto our own street, which had gone to sleep already, it seemed.  Maybe it was a magic mist, conjured by Puck to send lovers into healing slumber.

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I have this memory of a 12-year-old-me, in torn blue-jeans and muddy riding boots.  It was a stormy day, mid-December, the sky dark and heavy, and I don’t know why, what made me think this, but I remember with alarming clarity looking down at the dirt road, leading a horse back to his stable, and thinking, I can’t wait for school to be over so I can just hurry up and become a lawyer.

Where exactly this aspiration went, I couldn’t tell you.  All I can tell you is this: when somebody asks me these days what I’m planning for September, which seems to be a suddenly-approaching deadline of indeterminate enormity, I panic, look around and flap my hands, mumble, er, um, well, panic some more, change the subject, and then spend the next few hours deeply engrossed in my own powerful anxiety.  To be honest, just about the only thing I can probably tell you for sure is that in spite of all odds, in spite of what the 12-year-old me would have told you, the one thing I won’t be in September is a lawyer.  They haven’t yet invented a word for a freelance (maybe)-writer-who-wants-to-do-a-PhD-but-can’t-afford-it-and-has-a-manuscript-but-no-money-and-just-wants-to-curl-up-until-success-strikes, you see.

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