I haven’t been great about blogging lately (I haven’t been great about writing lately), but I think my life has actually gone mad, or else merged with someone else’s. I keep having the sensation that I’m swimming through my days. The water is viscous but beautiful; it’s a slow going and dreamlike route through the week.

Sunday, for instance. Which started with a church and ended with Blondie – from Mary to “Maria” in just a few hours.

We spent the morning in Christ Church Cathedral for a christening. I’d never been to a christening before. We were running late as always and my shoes had rubbed the side of my foot raw. Irrationally I fretted over the right way to behave. I worried the blood from the blister marked me out as an impostor amongst the Christian lambs. Churches always make me feel this way. I am awed by the architecture, the dark alcoves, the stained glass and the weight of history, but the rigidity of the ceremony – more than that, the implication of a shared knowledge – gives me the same anxieties that being at a party full of people I don’t know does. I don’t know what to do or not do, where to go or not go, and the insecure part of me is like a child who wants to be part of a club she doesn’t belong to. Everyone else is doing it so why can’t I?

We sang hymns. I can read music and I can read words but I can’t do both at the same time. I sing quietly because I still don’t know the rhythms of all these songs, can’t anticipate the collective extra breath that everyone will take at the start of a new line.

In front of me sat a little girl with long blond hair, a pink dress, and pink shoes. While the rest of us rose and sat like a bunch of finely-dressed, mad meercats, sticking our heads up to try to see the choir, then bending them in prayer, she pored over a book. Her hair spilled into her face and she pushed it back impatiently and got through several chapters of something by Enid Blyton. That’s a club I could belong to; but the funny thing is that for all the freedoms adulthood grants you, it also prohibits so much.

And then there was a sudden moment, like a breath between lines of a hymn, full of joy. Behind us were babies laughing and crying and toddlers squirming. Up ahead, as the deacon poured water into the bowl, our friends’ ten-month old son grinned before the entire congregation. He put his fingers into the water, miming the symbolic action. People laughed. Yes, okay, I thought. So we’re in a church but we can laugh. This is good. He was welcomed. He is welcome. (Later he sat on his mother’s lap, eating his mushy lunch, smiling broadly. I remember him as a 5-pound newborn, too fragile to hold up his own head, wearing a generic expression of sleepiness and hunger.)

We refused communion. “Oh, I’m hungry, but not that hungry,” we joked, the Man and I, quietly to ourselves – still reverent even in irreverence. Outside we stood overlooking the quad. That’s the fountain they kept putting Anthony Blanche into, I said. I walked up to the fountain, peered past its lily-pads, into the blackness. Dark fish, mouths gaping, came to the surface, disappeared again. A few bright orange ones flicked their bodies. No, I wouldn’t like to be dropped in there, not amongst the scaly bodies. So that’s fine; look up, at Tom Tower gleaming handsomely, coloured like a honeycomb.

***

Then we were backstage at a Blondie gig in Gloucestershire. Things I never knew: security guards smile at you when you have a special wristband. They look relieved that they are not going to have to tell you off for anything. One of them even gave me earplugs so I could sit nestled up at the base of the stage without losing my hearing.

Debbie Harry wore a black kilt and put the microphone up and 6,000 people sang the chorus to “Maria” with her. I remember the year that song came out and I remember buying No Exit and listening to it over and over again in my CD player. I particularly remember that I wore a blue jumper with a white stripe across it often then.

We drove back with Little Fish in their tour van. I had a cider and then, half-asleep, I sort of sat there just thinking: the more you look at your own history the more interesting it becomes – not in a self-obsessed, navel-gazing way, but in that suddenly you become detached from it. You can see it from an outsider/insider space, an overlap of perspectives. It’s both harder and easier to write about. Am I penning fictions every time I remember something on paper? Yes, of course, in a way.

We got back to Oxford after midnight; it was a hushed, special Sunday darkness. No one around, not even the drunks. We stopped for chicken kebabs. Hunger seemed inconvenient at such an hour but I had reached a point in the night where it was impossible not to eat. As if everything might be erased by sleep, unless sustenance was first obtained.

Nothing was erased by sleep and we woke up tired and smiling.

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• As you may have gleaned from this post, I’m leaving the admin job that’s plagued me for the last two years. As with anything, this is not as simple as it sounds. I’ve resented most of the work I do there from the start – photocopying, filing, playing with databases and excel spreadsheets – but the people I work with have made it bearable day after day, and it’s strange to be leaving such a strong community. But I’m moving on to do something more writing and communications oriented, which is what I’m trained to do and what I enjoy, so I can’t say I’m not excited.

• I won a scholarship to the Matador network’s MatadorU, an online travel writing course. I’m very excited about this opportunity to focus on my travel writing, especially as I flail around in the creative vacuum that is the first year post-MA. I’ll be blogging my assignments over at my MatadorU blog if you ever want to take a peek.

• The gorgeous Lady Who Lunches has given me an award!. I met the Lady last month , but I’ve been reading her blog for awhile and always look forward to her new posts. She’s a fellow American expat and writer, and I’m very honored to be included in her list of inspiring female bloggers.

• LV from Anglophile Abroad has featured me in her Major Breakthrough series over at Studentstuff.com. LV is a very talented writer and a good friend, and it was great to be able to help her out with this series, in which she interviews former students about the way their major in college impacted them.

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My life seems at the moment to be made up entirely of lists. To-do lists mostly but other kinds, too–grocery lists, mental lists, lists of people and places and times. So here’s a list of things-that-have-happened-recently, in no particular order.

1. My parents are visiting from California. We talk of the ranch and the weather. We go for walks, have pub lunches, eat pizza and watch television. When people visit me here, but particularly people I’m close to, I start to feel that time expands to include them. I cannot imagine what it is like living here without my family close by, though this is what I do, most of the time; their arrival, only a week and a half ago, seems like something very faint in the far reaches of an old woman’s memory (I met them on my bicycle and we ate Indian food, that day).

2. I had the pleasure of meeting the lovely Lady Who Lunches–and her charming boyfriend Jock–in real life. We had pints and burgers and talked about life in a foreign country. I forget, you know, that this life–my life is a life in a foreign country. The foreignness has faded and when you wake up and go to work and later you walk to the shop and wave hello at a few familiar faces and you pay your bills and you go for a run and have a shower it’s so easy to imagine that it has always been this way. Then every so often the sun glitters in a funny way and you remember that you’re not from here. And so it was comforting to have real contact with someone who had until then existed purely online; even more comforting to remember that my particular situation is not entirely unique. Read her write-up of the evening here.

3. I’m working a lot. This is good in one sense–in more than one sense–but bad in the sense that, in my enthusiasm for all these new tasks, I’ve neglected my book (and my blog).

4. A volcano erupted.

5. I started, as I always do this time of year, to suffer from hay fever, and now spend several minutes every morning sneezing.

6. I graduated. At least, I donned an enormous gown and hood and walked down an aisle and shook someone’s hand, and then stood in the sun playing with the billowing sleeves while people hugged each other and took elaborately staged photographs. I felt lucky; my parents were there, the Man was there. Privately we laughed at the whole affair, which was cheap and stuffy and full of obscure members of the Oxford Brookes faculty wearing ermine cloaks and court-jester-inspired hats, but I can’t pretend that there wasn’t a really thrilling moment when, for the first time, I caught a glimpse of myself in academic dress.

7. The sun has come out and the trees have blossomed and the garden is suddenly overgrown. I even wore a skirt with no tights, once.

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No matter what happens, and lots of things happen, there is nothing quite like the feeling you get when you look up at the Radcliffe Camera and it is late at night and the square is empty and the sky is patchy and the city is hushed, but full of possibility.

Other re-discoveries: I am after all my father’s daughter. I find that even the long, dull ride to work is made thrilling by putting extra speed into my pedaling. I like the wind on my face and I arrive wherever I’m headed breathless, slightly sweaty, full of misplaced energy. I can make even my beautiful, dignified, black Dutch girl’s bike with its four subtle gears go fast.

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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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