It’s a bit funny, being temporarily separated from the person you love. I keep thinking of something that Heather Armstrong at Dooce wrote – I think she was traveling and I think she said something like, “it’s nice to miss my husband”, but I can’t find it now, so you’ll have to take my word for it. But it is nice. It’s nice to know that there’s someone out there thinking of you; it’s nice to collect thoughts and experience to share upon his return. It’s different from the time I had to leave for Boston and we didn’t really know when we’d see each other again and we had a massive time difference (and an ocean) between us. That hurt. I wouldn’t want to do that again.

On Monday he went to Scotland for a week. I was speaking to someone the other day whose girlfriend is in a South American jungle somewhere for six months. Next to that, Scotland for a week is pretty manageable.

When you live with someone, and you do all these daily-life things together, there’s an inevitable period of alienation when you discover that it’s evening and you’re home alone. How long has it been since you had a week of nights like this? Years. You cook pasta for one and watch something you know he wouldn’t enjoy – Gossip Girl or Foyle’s War, depending on your mood. You eat the sort of ice cream he might find boring (no bits of chocolate or cookie dough to break up the smooth monotony).

And the main thing is that suddenly you appreciate things you’d forgotten to appreciate, like your entire relationship, and that’s nice. That’s necessary, in a way.

You also remember important things. Like this: I remember that I do at least know who I am (as much as one ever can) apart from him. That’s always a worry with a man, but even more so when you’ve lifted yourself from your home country to reside elsewhere. The potential problem in this case is that you might allow yourself to be washed out by new experience – to become, in other words, a creature entirely dependent upon habitat, whose behaviour, likes and dislikes, daily life, is based only on The Man. What else would root you? – not childhood, or history, for in the eyes of your new countrymen, you did not exist before you came here, fully grown and adult.

But I’ve always cooked pasta and watched historical dramas that made me wish my hair was curlier and my dresses vintage. I’ve always liked walking to bookshops, spending hours deciding what to buy, impulsively stopping in at art galleries, eating lunch in parks. Nothing I do here is disingenuous. On my way home I keep running into people I know; and they know me although I am, at the moment, on my own. We still have things to say to each other. There’s chitchat, gossip, we make plans to meet up.

So in the end he and I discover that we miss each other’s company. It is not just habit or convenience or, worse, an unhealthy dependence, that keeps us together. It’s something much better. And for that, a week in Scotland is probably worth it.

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Sometimes it still seems strange to me that I live here. Take today for instance. Entering a shop on the Cowley Road. I’ve left my bike around the corner, outside the Hobgoblin. I’ve been sitting all day in an office feeling overheated, wilting (you never can tell what it’s going to be like when you leave the house on an August morning), but now it’s a glorious evening and I’m in shorts. There are friends, and parents of friends, which somehow makes things seem more real. There’s music. And then a summer storm. A proper summer storm – thunder, lightening, a giddy downpour. I put my cardigan on. I watch the cars slopping down the street. The rain lets up and I go outside and cycle home and change into dry clothes, and now the clouds are breaking apart, crumbling under the weight of a purple sunset. So I take the glasses we’ve unofficially borrowed back to our local pub. Four pint glasses; not so bad. They’re having a pub quiz. I don’t stay for a drink. Instead I carry on down the street to another pub, where someone has left books on the geography of home and the poetics of space for me to borrow.

Speaking of home, on my way home, as I turn onto my street, I can hear the pub quiz questions. What is aurora borealis more commonly known as?

The northern lights. Just the other day I was talking to my parents, who live all the way in California. We were planning a pilgrimage to see the northern lights. Only planning in a vague sort of way – apparently they’re going to be very good in 2012 – but still. Here they are again.

And then I come home, to this house. I feel I’ve been dipping in and out of other people’s lives tonight. Or maybe they’ve been dipping in and out of mine. But that is the luxury we have here – to wave hello, to pop in at the pub not even for a pint but simply an exchange of friendly words.

I make dinner, I find an unopened bottle of wine in the kitchen. It turns out to be good for sipping, especially with a chunk of cheese. Later I climb the stairs to the bedroom. The man is away in Edinburgh for a week but it feels no less like our house. As if we’ve both installed ourselves here, wrapped ourselves up in the Oxford duvet. We know people! We know people’s families! And still it feels funny, good-funny, that I am brushing my teeth over a sink in Oxford, opening the window to my bedroom, and discovering it’s silent outside – too late for the usual closing-time rabble – early Wednesday morning, nobody coming or going.

I open one of the books to a random page. “But countless other images come to embellish the poetry of the house in the night,” I read. And later on, a quote, translated from the French: “I shall see your houses like fire-flies in the hollow of the hills”.

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I’m coming to the conclusion that everything I write has its roots in the words of somebody else. I feel incapable of thinking anything worth saying without using another artist for direct inspiration. This is not a bad thing – look at Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel, for instance, or Tom Hodkginson’s How to be Idle, both of which rely at least partly on the presentation and then transformation of existing texts.

But it does seem a very internet-age thing. Intertextuality is everywhere; isn’t that what hyperlinks are a manifestation of? Even in the first paragraph of this blog post I’ve referenced, and linked to, two other websites, and two other books. The Internet doesn’t work without links; the web falls apart if we don’t constantly keep building it.

When Julia Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality” in the 1960s, she was using it to describe how “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” A few years ago I started writing a book which is based entirely on this idea; the words and the story were all mine, but they were nothing without the framework given to me by the excerpts and ideas of others, from Dorothy L. Sayers to Gustave Flaubert.

I use the internet a lot. At work, at home, in between. I exist almost constantly in the online space even as I concurrently exist in the physical world. And what I can’t tell is this: do I write the way I do because we’re in a digital era? Or do I so enjoy the digital era because it adheres to the way I think ideas should function?

Chicken, egg. Either way, I think that hyperlinks and intertextuality – whether online or in print – are what makes ideas come alive.

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