Sometimes in my dreams I return to my elementary school, which in dream-form is large and strangely austere. It’s full of pillars and courtyards like a crumbling Roman house.

I’m ill again; and all day I slip in and out of sleep, and dream of locales, old haunts, childhood memories. As if illness causes a sort of temporary regression.

***

It used to be that people wrote books that tried to encompass everything. Histories of the world, of mankind, of the universe, of Europe or the African continent; encyclopedias, overviews of civilisations, tomes that chronicled every human accomplishment since the invention of fire. Now people write books of such amazing specificity: books on the banana, the pineapple, the sewer rats of Manhattan, biographies of little-known scientists and histories of obscure cultural practices.

Is this because we think we have a grasp of the big picture now, or because we’ve given up on it entirely? Sometimes I think it would be nice if we still had people who could tell us with such confidence that “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” If only so that we could shout no, it isn’t!, if we so chose.

***

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I’m older today.

I remember the year I turned four. I woke up early and climbed out of my bed and toddled to my desk (yes, even then I had a desk and yes, even then I used it religiously) and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and a crayon and took a deep breath and waited for a piece of knowledge–something I’d been missing–to come to me.

I put the crayon on the paper and I drew, and as I drew I realized that something was still missing, and so I toddled off to my parents bedroom and said, “I’m four. Shouldn’t I be able to draw a heart now?”

So they explained, as best they could, that knowledge is acquired; we do not wake up each year on our birthdays with our heads suddenly full of new things. The learning process is continuous, and age, funnily enough, has absolutely nothing to do with it. (Last night I met a man who had just turned forty-three; but in the last decade I’ve been a hundred, and I’ve been sixteen, he said.)

Over the next few days I practiced my hearts until I could form a passably symmetrical one in an instant; so in a way, turning four was the catalyst, only not in the way that I’d thought. And now, here we are again, in February, and I’m reminded of crayons and childhood by the book my parents send me. They say I’m Harold, drawing my own path with my own purple crayon, and I think they’re probably right, and I think I probably have been ever since I drew my first faulty heart on my fourth birthday, or even since before then. Since forever.

And it’s good to remember this because this morning, I woke up, and the Man brought me a mimosa, and as I sat there sipping it, preparing to struggle against the wind on my way to work, I caught myself thinking: do I know how to be an adult now? Hoping that the morning would magically imbue me with a belated understanding of adulthood (I think I’ve hoped this every year since I turned 18).

And of course, it didn’t, it can’t, I will never wake up and know how to be an adult, not today, not next year, not when I’m 43 or 100. So I guess I’ll just pick up my crayon and keep drawing.

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There’s nothing that pleases me more than a sense of belonging. I like when things overlap and I like when I’m at the centre of it somehow. It’s ego but it’s also human.

Take a day like this:

I am sitting in the Bodleian, staring out the window, towards the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, thinking how absurd it really is, that this is my local library, that this grand place is where I work, that on my desk are three volumes of magazines from 1908 bound together in such a fragile way.  And there I am, gazing blankly, mouth hung open in that expression of well-meaning vacancy, when who should stroll by but someone I know, who says hello in a frantic whisper.  Later I go downstairs to the Lower Reading Room and smile at a colleague as he looks up from his studies.  Rolling down Broad Street, another colleague passes, waves.  Now I’m sitting in a cafe listening to music made by friends of a friend, watching a local businessman, whom I happen to know, cleaning the upstairs windows of his restaurant.

Why does this please me?  Why do I persist in having what amounts to a village mentality, and why should any of it matter, anyway–these brushes with a sense of community, this six-degrees-of-separation thing? Why do we get off on knowing that someone out there knows us? Oxford is a great place for this; anywhere you go you’re likely to know someone, if only obliquely, or else someone is likely to know someone you know.

“The local,” William Carlos Williams once wrote, “is the only universal.” I guess that’s probably true. I guess in a way that’s why I like the overlap so much. Why, in the end, it’s so important.

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We’ve both got a cold and an attitude and an overdeveloped sense of winter angst. As we walk towards the castle I tell him that it’s sad, we don’t spend very much time in Oxford anymore, we’re always skirting around it, it’s almost like we’re afraid of it though really I know it’s only because everything we need–the pub, the office, our friends and family–are also on the outskirts. Every day I cycle to work and I manage, going from one far end of the city to the other, to avoid the centre altogether.

He says it’s only because of the weather, which is miserable and makes us like hermits.

I say that there was a time when if a shop closed down and a new one opened up in its stead I would know instantly; now it might be months before I noticed. I wonder to myself how many things have changed without me knowing. There are roadworks on the High street that make it almost impassable; I’ve avoided it for months, and now, for the first time in a long time, I take a moment to observe the mannequins in shop windows, the half-hearted early springtime displays, the canary yellow macs and peep-toed heels.

He doesn’t seem perturbed by it but I can’t stop thinking about how long it’s been since I sat on the steps of the Clarendon building watching Japanese tourists pose for photos and flush-faced American undergrads in groups, hiding under their new hoodies, watching women in heels and students in vintage brogues or else boots and tight skirts, toddlers tripping over the uneven stones. Our love was born here, doing these things, but that summer feels a very long time ago. Who was I then, with the time to waste on trivialities?

And who am I now, to think it might be a waste?

When we reach the castle we have dinner at a place I’ve never been before; it’s huge and dark and full of dolled-up girls with painted lips and high heels and a twentysomething-single-career-girl-attitude. I’m glad I’m not them but at least they don’t have a cold, I think. It’s a very American place, cavernous, full of booths and happy-hour menus and even the toilets downstairs trick me into thinking for an instant that I’m in New York or Los Angeles. I feel momentarily both homesick and repulsed.

It’s just winter, he tells me. We’ll walk around the city in spring, we tell each other, we’ll drink at all our old haunts and watch as many people as we like when it’s warm enough.

So until then I’ll spend time in my study, by the radiator, watching cats in the far end of the garden. There goes another one now, a new black-and-white thing, picking through the tangle of dead brush. And here I am in Oxford, missing Oxford. Humans are funny creatures, much funnier in a way than these aimless cats.

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In late winter I like to turn the heating on and then open the window and lie in bed pretending it’s summertime again.

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