It is true that the place-names make up a poem here. In foreign ports our minds are suddenly expanded to allow for the possibility that a name is not just a name. If you say things out loud like “Lamu,” “Malindi,” “Kilifi,” “Shela”, “Kijani,” it starts to sound as if you’re reciting a spell.

But this is the romance of the exotic, and often we make it up. Things which sound different allow us to create meaning in our minds, even if we are not aware that we are doing it. We all become storytellers when confronted with an unfamiliar city. Whatever the name actually means, whatever language, whatever word, it is transformed by our imaginations and expectations into something ripe and heavy with metaphor.

We’re at the coast. This is the furthest east I’ve ever been; and then we keep flying east, along the line of the equator, to Manda Island, where we catch a boat to Lamu. The heat has stolen my tongue and even with the fresh air from the sea I only sit quietly and stare. When we arrive we peel our sweaty jeans from our legs and change, donning looser outfits to fit our looser moods. We sit on the beach, put our feet in the sea, watch the donkeys and the lithe cats with their angry eyes. Behind us, a group of men are building a boat, a dhow, which will take them two years to complete. They don’t seem to be in any hurry.

We come from ice and austerity to this in a day. As if by magic. A hundred years ago this would have been a slow journey. Months, maybe. You would have to have committed yourself completely to the cause. You would cross oceans, deserts, would see every inch of the map between where you started out and where you ended up at what seems to us now to be a glacial speed. Then, too, it would have seemed amazing, though perhaps in a different way. By the time you finally arrived the act of arrival would have ceased to be such a miracle; you would be constantly arriving; at each new place, each new mile, you would accumulate a bit of journey, you would arrive again, and leave again, and arrive again.

But easier, then, perhaps, to grasp the magnitude of it. If you feel each part of a journey you can start to understand it. Now the journey, artfully, scientifically shortened over the years until it becomes this, this go-to-sleep-in-one-time-zone-and-wake-up-in-another, must be primarily in our minds. We must cause the shift ourselves, and that’s a harder thing to do.

I struggle as always with the speed of it. There’s a memory of a pint glass, slipping like a figure skater on the ice on a table, and I can still feel the cold in my fingers if I concentrate, and now someone brings me fresh coconut juice and a tiny lizard sunbathes on a wall.

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“It must be nice to be like that girl,” says the woman in the purple muumuu. “To have that…that middle class sense of security.”

She’s exhausted her extensive list of complaints against The Americans–we’re a horrid lot, unbearably arrogant, universally ignorant, though one of her primary objections seems to be that she likes to be able to ridicule them in Spanish, only some of them, it turns out, know Spanish, and that makes things difficult–and moved on to a gentler tirade against the middle classes. She is leathery, bordering on elderly, her hair bleached yellow-grey by sun and age; her voice is deep and stained by decades of cigarette smoke. She is loud, proud, angry, as if she has lost the ability to feel shame or humility or empathy.

“I was on the street until I was sixteen, of course,” she says, in an accent that would make the landed gentry proud indeed; Henry Higgins, I can’t help thinking, would approve wholeheartedly. And yet I can’t say I don’t, to a degree, admire her ferocity. I’m impressed by her vitriol, and the purity of her dislike of Americans and secure middle class girls. Her opinions are undiluted by ordinary human emotion; she does not think things, she knows them. An old purple tyrant on her wicker throne.

“I was wondering. You know that Indian girl?” she says presently to her companion. “Has she ever tried to convert you to Christianity?”

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I’m in Kenya. I’ve been here for a week now. We’ve been staying on an island off the coast and it feels strange to be connected to the world in a place like this, which is tiny and local and dusty and windy. There is a curious mixture of the sublime with the decayed; everything is frayed around the edges, everything is bathed in a golden sunshine. We drink beers at sunset and put our toes in the warm Indian ocean. I haven’t blogged, but I’ve written, and I’ll blog properly soon, but for now dipping for too long into the Internet-universe feels illicit, and anyhow, it’s dinner time.

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He says I nest. What he means is, when I come in the door and it’s cold, or I’m tired, or it’s been a long day at work, I crawl into the couch. The right-hand corner. Curled up, facing sideways under a suede and fleece blanket that was a Christmas present from my parents a few years ago. I like the curtains to be drawn back so I can see out the window, see the bare-branched trees and the house across the street.

It’s not conducive to productivity; I’ve lost hours like this, just sitting, staring, reading, half-asleep. But still, there’s something comforting about it.

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It started with white wine, a roaring fire, and a dawn that came too soon. Then there was that cold, austere part of winter when everything froze over, and I ran out of money, and took lots of long walks around Christ Church Meadow photographing the ice on dead grass. A new pub opened on our street and changed the way we interact with the city. It snowed so much that all transport to and from Oxford was canceled and I went in to work wearing wellies. I started the last semester of my MA. We went to New York City. I got older; then the Man got older. As the weather started to change we went to Wiltshire and circuited the standing stones at Avebury (I lost a boot heel there). Then finally things began to blossom. At dawn on the first of May we stood on Magdalen Bridge to welcome springtime, serenaded by a bunch of small boys in gowns at the top of the tower. The Man and I celebrated two years together and then went to Hay-on-Wye, where we bought far too many books and had to take them home on the train, which seemed like an appropriate way to mark our anniversary. My parents came to visit, and the three of us drove up to the Lake District and climbed a small peak.

Summer appeared suddenly, as it always does. A friend had her first baby, and I started a new job. I wrote the better part of a novel, went punting, sat in the garden and watched the grass grow long; we had meals outside when weather permitted, which wasn’t often, spent long evenings with our computers and our pints in the pub. I worked a lot, and summer disappeared, and I handed in my dissertation. We needed a break, so we drove south to Devon, where we drank strong cider, went for walks, played cards, made meals in a little cabin. This was all very refreshing; and then October came, and it was Autumn in full glory. I watched the turning of the leaves and the seasonal decay, and started to feel a bit lost, because now I was done with school again, and it felt so soon. We went to Dublin, where we drank Guinness and listened to traditional music in a damp grey pub.

Cold settled in around us. We hatched plans in pubs and bought tickets to New York, again. We went to New York, and fell in love with Brooklyn. I got to see my family, and some old friends. My MA results came. We planned a big trip. Oxford froze over, and we all slipped our way across town trying to prepare for Christmas. The Man and I spent the holiday with his family; we ate turkey and roast potatoes and unwrapped gifts in the conservatory. We slept in, took long naps, sat with our backs against the radiators.

Then the New Year came. We had a civilized evening with friends; we set off a firework; and in the early hours of the morning, we cycled back home, across the Donnington Bridge, over the calm black river. The streets were mostly empty and the wind was chilling, but also refreshing.

And now here we are.

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