We start at dawn. Still dark, though the clocks tell us it’s high time to be up and about, starting our business, having our coffee. Breaking our ritual nightly fast.

At the bus stop, in a thin drizzle, we wait. The morning lightens but does not brighten; all the world’s covered in grey mist.

On the train we pass through a patch of snow. Beside us the Thames is thickening. A heavy brown mass; no longer the sleepy stream it always seems at Oxford. Then we diverge from the path of the river, sipping our coffee at 60 miles per hour, still half-asleep, reading our books without paying them proper attention (my mind, for instance, has already wandered to what I will write about this moment, on the train, sipping coffee). We observe the backs of business parks; strange architecture, engineering for a world built around cars and a certain kind of lifestyle, religious in its regularity. Even running away has become a bureaucratic nightmare; form-filling, proof of identity, proof of residence, pounds paid dutifully for administrative costs that no one will ever actually incur.

Then we rejoin the Thames, wide and wild now. Half-following the river into the city.

I say I like the grey austerity of London Paddington. I say I like the way the light comes in; I like the curved industrial metal. He says, Really? Disbelieving as we pass a Burger King and a W. H. Smith. But I’m looking up, past these things which are a marker of our confused time, to what once was. I see steam, trapped pigeons spreading their stained wings, the light catching dust above our heads.

(On the way back, I think: There’s nothing quite like a good long train journey to clarify, liquefy the thoughts, so they come flooding in like snowmelt in a mountain stream. I threaten to hop on a train to Penzance. But what would I do when I got to Penzance? I wonder aloud. What would you do? He says, again mildly disbelieving. Find a pub, I decide, which is as good an answer as any, and in this grim mid-winter weather, probably the most truthful I could give.)

I have my photograph taken by a cheery chemist who asks what it’s for and then, when I tell him it’s for a visa application, asks where we’re going. When I tell him Kenya, his smile widens, but he doesn’t say anything, not at first. He shows me my photo on the smudged screen of a digital camera. I look wary, my cheeks flushed by cold, my eyes bright, my mouth crooked where he told me I could smile, if I wanted, they won’t mind, it’s not like getting a British passport. My hair, which I tried to tie back in a messy, self-contained bun, has come loose, and a long strand hangs past my left ear. I’m not displeased with the photo, though. Something in it, maybe the nonchalance, appeals to me. I tell him it’s fine, and as he’s printing it from a machine mounted on the wall, he tells us he was born in Mombasa, and then asks where we’re going in Kenya. There are good flowers there, he tells us when we name the place. Beautiful flowers–you’ll see. I pay him in cash and he tells us to enjoy our trip, and goes to help a woman pushing a pram, rummaging through the cough medicines.

At the embassy, which is like all embassies–serious, hushed, full of patriotic images and metal detectors–only in miniature. We sit and fill out our forms in a narrow room. The whole affair is much more casual than I had anticipated. I’m comforted by this. It’s not like standing in my own embassy, surrounded by armed guards, being asked to relinquish my mobile phone, my iPod, my freedom for hours on end.

We hand our passports over. And there I am: a stranger in a strange land, without any proof of identity, without any means of leaving. For a moment I feel panicked; then I feel free, and lighter than I have in years. Separated from my history, my birthplace, my future plans, my work permit. Forced into the present; and he, too, beside me, parted from his paper identity. For once we are are of equal, or same, nationality; that is to say, none. Into the wet droves we emerge, dodging puddles. We head back towards the station, the train, the river, the other city with her fair spires.

Our train out had been crowded, steamy, but now, at midday, it’s as if nobody has the impetus to travel anymore, so we are as if alone in this carriage. A stray human or two, also caught on this slow passage from London to Oxford via every imaginable village in between, flips the pages of a newspaper. Someone has left a window open and the cold air comes rushing in around us each time we gather speed, but we do not protest, nor do we make any motion to close the window, for the motion of the train has already lulled us into that magical half-sleeping state of transit. The irony is that we’re now too complacent to cross the narrow car and close the window, while all that keeps us from slipping away into a heavy doze is that fresh air.

So we’re suspended by our own actions, our own inactions, our understanding of inertia.

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I’m reading another book I don’t like. It’s something I do; it annoys the Man, he can’t understand why, when we’ve got so much high quality literature at our fingertips, I would deliberately choose to plough my way through something that makes me visibly angry. But a part of me likes the sensation; I’m an arguer, and a reader, and if I can combine the two, I see it as an effective use of time.

So this time it’s Saturday by Ian McEwan. The critically acclaimed account of a wanky neurosurgeon in the throes of some sort of middle-class crisis. The objection I have is simple enough: that the book makes me feel stifled, that Perowne, the protagonist, and his lawyer wife, his successful poet daughter, his groovy blues-playing rebel son, are suffocating in their perfection, their carefully measured angst. They slouch through their expensive London house like a parody of the perfectly imperfect family, just off-beat enough. It makes a fallacy of the ordinary struggles of everyday life. These people, they don’t struggle. They glide. Everything has propelled them toward this life, towards the ownership of modestly luxurious things, towards the London life, the clean, comfortable London life. Not a manor house, or a vintage car, or even an esoteric loft apartment, but the old house that overlooks a tree-lined square. It’s all so ordinary, so alarmingly propagandistic–this is what happy people look like, this is what ordinary, talented, beautiful people do. They flirt with unhappiness, but it’s never a personal unhappiness. They gaze out windows and consider the state of the world with the same glib resignation that most of us reserve for a consideration of our outdated hairstyles or strained bank balances. It’s as if all the life has been sucked from them, replaced by a distinctly urbane imitation of the stuff.

So why read it? Because after all that, I’m impressed with the language. The precision of it. A quasi-imitation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway suits McEwan’s ability to describe a thing–a feeling, usually–specifically. Each moment of Perowne’s morning is outlined, amplified, enhanced by the way it is written. A dull man’s dull activities, explained beautifully. That’s worth something.

(Plus, I like a good rant, and reading something that agitates me allows me to do it on my blog. Win!)

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I remember a long time ago someone telling me about a girl he used to live with, who every single night without fail would blow her nose before coming to bed. He loved that about her. That was what he missed, now they weren’t together.

And I remember being impressed. I remember thinking, imagine knowing someone so well that you’re actually charmed–no, not charmed, something deeper than charmed–by their little human habits. The expulsion of snot, or some similarly banal act, becomes something to adore, something which reinforces the rightness of your union.

I also remember thinking, why? If you weren’t sick or allergic or a bit cold, why would you need to blow your nose every night? I remember thinking it sounded overwrought. Surely she didn’t. Surely he’d mis-remembered. Surely the whole thing was really a whole lot less sweet than I was making it out to be.

But now, some years later (not as many years as I’m pretending, maybe), I find that I’ve become someone just like that. Every morning I get up and go to the bathroom and the first thing I do is not to brush my teeth or relieve my bladder or study the pillow lines on my face and try to wash them away with cold water, but to blow my nose. I find that no matter how healthy I may be, or how mild the weather, I always have something in my nostrils to expel.

Perhaps it’s the effect of long-term intimacy. Perhaps we find routines, develop physical quirks, to mark each other out, to say, this one is mine, see, look, he does this funny thing and nobody else would know that and maybe he didn’t even do it before me, but now it’s a part of him, and so am I.

Now to the man I live with I am and always will be the girl who blows her nose every morning without fail.

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Here we are, arrived again at Christmas. I’m wearing new slippers and Xander’s shirt and considering the vast quantities of varied foodstuffs I’ve consumed today.

It starts with church. I don’t do church, really, but the English are under the impression that their version of church isn’t particularly church-y; that is, they seem to think that singing endless rounds of carols which proclaim undying love for Jesus has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with tradition. And of course the funny thing is that they’re right; nobody I’ve met sings those carols with pious intent, they sing them because afterwords there is mulled wine and mince pies and the unmistakable buzz of Christmas.

So I acquiesce to church in this case, and dutifully ignore the purple banner above the pulpit, emblazoned with a crown, which reminds us all that Jesus is “King of Kings, Lord of Lords.” We’re seated next to the orchestra, a motley but well-meaning bunch ranging in age from 10 to 90 (or so it appears). I’m directly in front of one of the young violinists, who scrapes her bow against the strings with both carelessness and great concentration, as if she can’t quite bring herself to commit to playing this instrument which is so clumsily slung beneath her chin, but knows she needs to make a sound. Then one of the flutists, in her early teens, reads a passage from the Bible with a glassy voice that would make the BBC proud (she read the same passage last year, as I remember, and seems to have improved her delivery). We sing some more. Perhaps the vicar makes a speech, but I’m overcome with a pleasing sensation of happiness and can’t bring myself to pay attention to whatever point he’s trying to make by unwrapping a gift in front of the congregation; if I listen closely, I might be made to feel guilty, and this mood doesn’t leave any room for guilt.

After, we glide over the ice to the car. The fog of the morning has lifted. Earlier a white mist, half-lit by the sun, had draped itself over the trees. Now, though warmth is spreading, there are patches of snow in the fields; Bing Crosby comes on the radio, and it’s the whitest Christmas I’ve ever seen, anyway.

We have coffee. We open gifts. We overeat, and circumstance persuades me to nibble on a brussels sprout or two although the taste is too acrid for my liking, almost maliciously acrid, I think, as if the vegetable is laughing at us all. We light the Christmas pudding and watch the blue glow; then we pour various kinds of cream over it and try to pretend that we’re still hungry enough to eat more. Then we have some dessert wine and play charades, which ends with me trying to mime the word “saving” by rescuing a crumb from some unseen plight. We nap; I have the feeling that I could sleep the whole night through, but at about 8 o’clock I rouse myself for some tea. I nibble on chocolates, pay a cursory amount of attention to the television, flip through books; we’re all only half-present, it seems.

We’ve forgotten what outside looks or feels like. In this insulated world the rhythm of the day is dictated by baths and naps and meals and snacks. It’s nice somehow, like disappearing completely for awhile, like holing up during a storm. We make plans to go for a walk tomorrow. Maybe there will be snow on the ground, I’m thinking.

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I’m intrigued by the Migration Advisory Committee’s review of the Tier 1 visa scheme. Am I surprised that money, in the form of previous earnings, is the most influential factor here–or, for that matter, that a higher degree of education counts for less and less? Of course not–the system has always been biased. Do I disapprove of the visa scheme? God, no–I wouldn’t be here without it. But do I think we should just start issuing anyone who makes upwards of £100,000 with an automatic, free, self-renewing pass to live wherever, and however, they like because they make so much money? At this rate, yes. Sigh.

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