‘Well in our country’, said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

1. How to have a panic attack

The most important thing is not to panic.

Some people will tell you that panic is essential. Do not believe them. Sure, you could have a panic attack in the fast lane on the 405 freeway and have to pull over onto the hard shoulder, while traffic goes whizzing past and the misty LA light starts to fade. You might stagger into a hospital, gasping and wild-eyed. There might be tears, flailing, falling. These things might happen: but it’s just as likely to be slower, more subtle. Maybe you won’t even notice. Maybe years will go by before you identify the feeling as something significant.

Lie in bed, on your side, facing the wall. Maybe you’ve taken some yoga classes, maybe someone once tried to teach you to meditate, and you think you can trick yourself into feeling calm. Feel dizzy anyway, maybe because all those times you were “meditating”, you were really just napping in the presence of incense. Feel your heart racing. Wonder if this is what dying feels like. Keep wondering this. Tell yourself that you would know if you were dying, in the same way you know if you’re about to vomit or when you’re hungry or tired. But you don’t know. Worry that you don’t know: is it good or bad that you don’t know? Is not knowing the same thing as knowing?

Wake up in the morning pleased and surprised. Go to bed the next evening not knowing if you’ll survive the night. Repeat until something more interesting happens in your life: you get drunk for the first time, you get a C on a calculus exam and have a meeting with a stern teacher who expected more of you, you get into college anyway, you spend two hours after the prom making out with a boy you didn’t even know you liked, you go to Europe for a month, you move across the country.

2. How to talk to doctors

Go running every day. When winter sets in and it’s too cold to run along the river, start spending your evenings at the gym, which is in a humid basement with a sweat-stained carpet and flickering lights. Run fast, but never very far: your usual distance is four miles on the treadmill, and the funny thing about this is that even four miles later you’re still standing in exactly the same spot. Play your music loudly and try not to look at the television screens flashing news at you. Lift weights sometimes, just the lightest ones, in an attempt to tone your arms, which is something you’ve read about in magazines. Lie on a purple mat and do a few sit-ups and wonder when you’ll start to look like someone who goes to the gym.

Then, at some point, late one evening, begin to feel a pain.

“What sort of pain?” the nurse in the campus clinic will ask you, when you arrive for your appointment and tell her you think you’re going to die.

Tell her you don’t know what sort of pain. Pain, in your chest. That can’t be good, can it? She’ll take your blood pressure, say it’s good. She’ll say you’re a healthy young woman. She’ll want to know if you do any other exercises at the gym. Any weight-lifting? she’ll say.

Tell her: a bit. Not very much though, can’t you tell? You’ll think this is funny, because you’re still pretty scrawny, or at least your arms are. But she won’t laugh; she’ll just say, without missing a beat: well, you’ve probably just pulled something.

Tell her you don’t think you’ve pulled something.

She’ll ask if you have any other symptoms. You’ll say, restlessness, inability to sleep, palpitations – only you won’t know the word for palpitations, so you’ll just say, my heart feels funny. You’ll tell her about that time you went to the ER for something that turned out to be nothing and the attending doctor said he thought you had some sort of heart murmur, and that you should ask your family doctor about it, but you didn’t have a family doctor because you were not from around here and your insurance didn’t cover things like that, so you were asking her about it, now, months later.

She’ll absorb all of this. She’s in her fifties. Maybe she has daughters of her own, college-aged girls. Maybe she thinks you’re crazy. Start to wonder if you’re going to be late for your 3 o’clock class after all. Is this the sort of thing you can get a doctor’s note for? Imagine visiting your professor during office hours, saying, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to discuss Discipline and Punish, I was keeping an appointment to announce my impending death.

Finally the nurse will say, alright, fine, I can refer you to a cardiac specialist. He’ll probably do an EKG, she’ll say. But I still think you’ve probably just pulled something, she’ll add. You have no idea what an EKG is but you’re happy to be taken seriously.

Go home. Look up “EKG”. Start to worry.

Tell your boyfriend that they’re going to hook you up to a machine. A machine! But he’ll be asleep, so you’ll mostly be talking to yourself. A machine!

Arrive at the clinic wary but fully intending to go through with this thing, to find out once and for all what’s wrong, or not wrong, with you. Sit in the grim waiting room. Take stock: note the 70s brown carpet, the dirty yellow walls, the hazy late winter light trying to push its way through greenish-tinted windows. Note that nothing seems very clean, even though nothing is obviously dirty. Keep thinking: oh my God, I need to get home and have a shower. Wonder if heart disease is contagious. Reach for your hand sanitizer; rub the gel between your palms. Wonder if the people working here really work here at all, if the other people in the waiting room – quiet, like shadows – really exist outside of this space. Wonder if you’ll emerge as the same person, or if you’ll emerge at all. When the doctor calls you in, don’t tell him about the heart murmur or the palpitations (you still don’t know the word, and you can’t tell a doctor – a cardiac specialist, no less – that your heart feels funny), just that you’d had a bit of pain in the chest area. Play it down: say, my chest, maybe my shoulder. The nurse thinks it’s just a pulled muscle. The doctor will do some poking and prodding and ask a few questions and in the end he’ll say exactly what you want him to say: that he thinks the nurse is right, you probably pulled a muscle lifting weights at the gym. And because a doctor has said it – even a doctor with an incomplete picture of an incomplete problem, in a dubious clinic populated by ghosts and shadows – it’s okay. Buy a new pair of running shoes on the way home to celebrate.

A few years later, realize that you can Google all your symptoms. Learn the word “palpitations”. Feel immediately better: as soon as you find a word for something, some evidence of it existing, being a thing, it becomes easier to deal with. Visit your doctor. Try to tell him what you think is wrong without actually describing anything: say that you want to do something about the physical manifestations of your anxiety. He’ll think you mean diarrhea, so it will come as a big relief to both of you when you can laugh and say, no, no, heart palpitations, things like that. Things like what? he’ll say. Do you have any other symptoms? You’ll say, Not really. Well, dizziness at night. Sometimes nausea. Shivering, uncontrollable shivering.

Any shortness of breath? he’ll say.

No, you’ll lie.

Fill the prescription. Forget, for years, that you even have this problem. Let it become something that’s past: and forget about that Faulkner quote you once read, the one that says, “the past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” Forget what any of it feels like, so that it can seem new each time it resurfaces.

3. How to fool yourself into thinking you look like a grown up

Get a job, preferably one that you hate, though you could settle for one that you just find boring. Commute. Start to become one of those people who shouts at pedestrians when they walk in front of your bike and realize you’re not angry because someone could get hurt: you’re angry because you’re in a hurry, and you were going at a good clip, and they’ve fucked with your momentum.

Make photocopies and send emails. Become one of those people who distributes agendas before pointless meetings and uses the word “pipeline” regularly. On your lunch break, take a walk and wonder why everyone else looks so much happier than you feel. Catch a glimpse of yourself in the darkened window of a recently-shut shop. Think that you look pretty happy, actually, and that your expensive new haircut certainly looks expensive, or at least it looks expensive if you know how much it cost, which you do, because you paid for it.

Pay your rent. Pay your phone bill. Pay your other phone bill, even though you haven’t used a landline in about ten years. Pay your gas bill. Pay your electricity bill. Pay your credit card bill. Pay for your gym membership. Pay for your groceries to be delivered to your house in the evenings because you just don’t have the time during the day anymore. Go to the bank on a Saturday because you just don’t have the time during the week anymore. Discover that you’re not going to have enough money to pay your rent and your phone bill and your other phone bill and your gas bill and your electricity bill and your credit card bill next month, even though you have a job that you hate (or at least a job that you find boring). Start to dream about work: compose emails in your sleep, look for solutions under your wilted pillow. Wonder if you’re doing it right. See: 1. How to Have a Panic Attack.

4. How to actually be a grown up

Don’t.

5. How to not feel jealous of people who are fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you

You could try telling yourself that they’re not fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished or more interesting than you, but you probably won’t believe it, even if it comes from your own trustworthy mouth. Start to resent yourself for trying to deceive you: you don’t deserve to be deceived, even if everyone else is fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you. How dare you do this to you! How dare you!

Go to the pub. Sit in the corner. Have a drink and scowl at everyone. Feel marginally better, in an “I feel worse” sort of way. Go home. Go to sleep. Dream about something boring, like buying groceries. Wake up. Think about how everyone else probably has better dreams than you do. Slide into what’s commonly known as a funk, but know there’s nothing common about it: you’re the Queen of Funks, and this is the Funk to End all Funks, and if nothing else – if nothing else! – you can be a superlative failure.

6. How to get out of bed in the morning, even when you don’t want to

Find someone you love who loves you back and will make you a bacon sandwich but refuse to bring it upstairs, even when you say that there is no point in getting out of bed and you’d rather starve because frankly starving would be more interesting than not starving at this point. Wait a few minutes for the smell of bacon to climb the staircase and enter the bedroom. Decide that you’re still not happy with things, that you’re resolutely unhappy, in fact, but that you may as well go downstairs and have the bacon sandwich, as it’s there, because no one else is going to eat it, and it would be a shame to waste a bacon sandwich.

7. How to feel more productive

Stop reading things you don’t want to read. Even that. And yes, if it helps, even this. Also, add things you’ve already done to your to-do list. I know it’s cheating but it still feels good and it will always feel good, no matter what they say.

8. How to feel smug

Don’t own a television. Don’t own a car. Don’t tell people that it’s mostly because you can’t afford these things.

9. How to avoid awkward conversations

Don’t talk to anyone. Ever.

10. How to avoid feeling lonely

Talk to people. Often.

n.b. This originally appeared in GENE 01 last year. Some of it’s fiction. Some of it isn’t. Its alternative title, in my head, is, “It Would be a Shame to Waste a Bacon Sandwich”.

❧

Apropos of my last post, I received an email from my mother yesterday with the following photo attached, as proof that I hadn’t imagined the photograph of my father on a bicycle with a Christmas tree in his hand:

And just for fun, here’s ours (the lights aren’t that gaudy in real life, I promise):

❧

In November we spend a week in the countryside, looking after children and animals and a great big farmhouse. The bathtub is so large that I can’t comfortably read in it; I stretch out, my full length, and my toes just touch the end of the tub, while the top of my head brushes the other. There’s certainly no way to negotiate a way to hold the heavy issue of Vogue I’d planned to leaf through. I come downstairs and say, “the bathtub is too large!” I didn’t know this was a problem you could have, but there you are: a bathtub definitively built for two, not one – or for one much taller than me, at least.

We drive the kids to rugby practice (I stand on the sidelines, watching, trying to understand the rules; he brings me a cup of tepid brown water masquerading as coffee and stands beside me, trying to explain) and pick them up from school. The autumn colours are lingering; “This is the road with the pretty trees!” I keep saying; “This is the A361!” he replies, bemused. The garden is patrolled – or should I say owned – by an aggressive rooster who fears us a lot less than we fear him. Once I’m chased all the way to my car, and then into my car, and I sit helplessly as the rooster continues to peck at the side of the vehicle, and I wonder if I can explain to the rental company that I’m sorry about the dents but have you ever been chased by a rooster?

In the kitchen we’re kept warm by the Aga, charming if inefficient, and one night we sit outside at the pub, jackets pulled tight around us, the dogs on leashes yapping at every passing leaf. It seems odd that we are grown-up enough to be actually acting as grown-ups; that is, to be the people in charge, even when we don’t feel up to the challenge, even when we feel quite like children ourselves, wanting to be taken care of, to ignore the world, to succumb to the belief that if I can’t see them they can’t see me. Most of adulthood, if I’m understanding it correctly, is about this kind of surprised realisation of accidental, arbitrary authority. I am alarmed as much by the prospect of being in such a position as by our apparent capability: not that we are brilliant at being the only grown-ups in the house, or even totally competent, just that I had always expected that this was something you’d have to be meticulously taught, something that didn’t come naturally, something that only years of practice (and the kind of confidence you only get from having Done Something Substantial – started a brilliant career, had kids, bought a house, whatever) could equip you for. At one point, over-tired, I turn to him and say: “I don’t want to be responsible anymore!” But we are, irrevocably, and so we bear our responsibility responsibly.

It bothers me a little that we can’t seem to be this way just for ourselves, that we need to be needed in order to act our age; but then, I think, who can, really, who does act their age, except when it’s required?

***

Back at home, I read the proofs of my book and let piles of post and other work stack up on my desk. The rain is coming down hard outside. I look out at the almost-bare cherry tree, black against the bland grey sky. A few leaves still cling to the branches; they shiver violently in the wind and remind me of fish, suspended on hooks. A sinister image for a seemingly sinister day (a big black fly has taken up residence in my study; its constant buzzing causes me to feel overly anxious). But later the rain stops and the clouds break apart and there is just one fresh hour, before nightfall, when it is warm and radiant out after all.

***

One weekend in December we come home to discover that friends have brought us a small Christmas tree, from a farm in Wales. It smells cool and fresh and I find a pot for it and give it warm water. I have this very particular image of a memory (or memory of an image) which isn’t mine: my parents’ first Christmas tree, the first Christmas tree that they had together in the first house they lived in together, before I was born. It’s a photograph, from the mid-1980s, I guess, or thereabouts. Slightly faded, in that particular yellowy faded way that photos get, with thick white edges. My father is on a bicycle, in shorts and a long-sleeve top (this is California, after all), with the Christmas tree tucked under one arm, or maybe balanced in the palm of his hand. His other hand is on the handlebars. For some reason the poignancy of that moment, frozen arbitrarily by my mother’s camera, and the memory I have (which may not even be real) of being told the story of that tree, has instilled in me a sense that this is a very special occasion, this first tree. So I’m happy to have it, even if it’s extraneous. Ours is about the same size as theirs was, though I’m not sure I’m quite a confident enough cyclist to have been able to carry it home by bike. I buy a string of cheap fairy lights from the hardware store and tell everyone I know that after five Christmases together we finally have our first Christmas tree.

***

The shops are full and the streets clogged with people buying things, but at the same time it feels like everyone has evacuated the city. The houses on either side of us have gone dark and quiet. At the pool, I have a lane all to myself. I go to the library in search of a particular book, and even though there’s nobody else about, I receive whispered directions from the librarian; I turn the pages silently; I muffle a sneeze. While I’m reading it gets dark, and by the time I unlock my bicycle the stars are out. A fingernail-clipping moon hangs over All Souls. The Iffley Road, deserted, seems wider and longer than usual. I’m tired when I get home: I need to pump my tires.

***

The Saturday before Christmas, we drive up to Suffolk for a wedding. This is a crazy thing to do; I know it’s a crazy thing to do, he knows it’s a crazy thing to do, but we do it anyway, because this is what being young is all about: driving to other people’s weddings three days before Christmas. Someday the kids of the people whose weddings we’re constantly attending now will be having their own weddings and they will do the same sorts of things and we’ll laugh and say, “what a stupid thing to do!” and then, presumably, feel humbled by our own forgetfulness, our own antiquity. Anyhow I rent a car and we dump our finery in the boot (me: a silk merlot-coloured dress and a pair of diamond and sapphire earrings that used to belong to my grandmother; him: a black suit, reluctantly, after discovering that the jacket that accompanies his kilt has been decimated, since he last wore it five years ago, by hungry moths) and drive to Suffolk. Towards the end of our journey we pull over and change in the car, and then we drive for twenty minutes or so down narrow, flooded roads to this little old church perched on a hillside. There’s nothing else around; we’re not far from the coast, and there’s an edge-of-the-world feeling, or an end-of-the-world feeling, perhaps, even though the Mayan apocalypse was yesterday and we’re still here. I complain about the parking conditions (I drive the car up a steep muddy bank at the side of a field, like everyone else; he tells me I’m still sticking out; I tell him that’s tough, I can’t move, the wheels are stuck, we’re going to be fucked when we want to get out, if they didn’t want people to block the road they shouldn’t have chosen to get married here, blah blah blah). My high heels, and they’re very high indeed, sink into the mud as we walk to the church. We’re shown to pews and given candles to hold, and as it grows dusky outside the church window is stained bluer and bluer. After the couple is married we try to light Chinese lanterns, but there’s a strong wind and only a few of them take to the dim sky. The reception is in a school gymnasium, decorated with fairy lights and bunting. We eat roast pig and spend two hours ceilidh-ing; I take my heels off and develop a blood blister the size of Alaska on the ball of my right foot. I haven’t had a blood blister of any note since I was a freshman in high school, when I was on the track team.

We take about an hour to say goodbye to people, moving slowly around the room. Then we start driving again. At first it’s quite pleasant; we feel very adult, sober, leaving the party before midnight, driving away, chatting away. We turn the radio on, the rain has stopped for awhile, we take the gentle curves of the B roads smoothly, like in a car advert, passing through little villages, past trees, hedges, fields. On Radio 4 there’s a programme on about William Carlos Williams. Various people read out bits of his poems; I remember my mother reading me “This is just to say” when I was little.

“Forgive me/they were delicious”

“He was a doctor,” I remember out loud. (So was Chekhov, I’ve just learned, which makes me feel a little better about my own sort of double life, if also somewhat abashed). There’s this pleasing period where we’re just driving along on these British roads, listening to people talk about William Carlos Williams, whose poems I recognise from my own American childhood, who I knew was a doctor as well as a poet, and we remind me of what I imagined adulthood should look like during that American childhood: we become, briefly, the thing that no one ever really is. Then eventually we’re out on bigger roads, and the rain is falling harder, the visibility is poor, and the mood is tenser, because I can feel how little control I actually have over any of it – the car, the weather, the million little stresses – and because we’re both tired, and suddenly wondering if we’ve been a bit ambitious. The roads are virtually empty, though, and finally we get where we’re going for the night.

The next day, driving down the M11, the sun breaks through the clouds and I ask for my sunglasses, and there’s a moment on Desert Island Discs, just after Dawn French talks about her mother’s funeral, when Etta James is singing “At Last”, that feels particularly sweet. And when we get back to Oxford we have our little Christmas tree, and leftover beer from an impromptu party earlier in the week.

***

Since my pool is shut until the new year, I go for a swim at the community pool off the Cowley Road. I’m secretly hoping for Christmas music, like last year, but there’s just generic Radio 1-ish music coming through the speakers. At one point, about halfway through my swim, I recognise “Gangnam Style,” which I last heard in a grubby nightclub (is there any other kind?) in central Oxford on a Saturday night. The pool is basically empty: there’s a lifeguard sitting on the bleachers with his head in his hands, one man doing laps in the next lane over, pleasingly just a little bit slower than me, and an elderly man in the big slow lane, paddling doggedly up and down the length of the pool, looking disturbingly, desirably serene to me, with my pounding heart.

***

On Christmas eve, we take a bus into town and do all our shopping. It’s raining hard but it’s also unseasonably warm. In the covered market we run into some friends and pause to say hello next to a hanging deer carcass. Later we split up to buy gifts for each other and reconvene at the King’s Arms. I have half a pint of bitter; when I complain of hunger he buys us a pickled egg and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, puts the egg in the bag, shakes it up.

***

I like the long stretch between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, particularly when we’re not at home, are excused, for a time, from the daily indignities of responsibility (“What’s making the fridge stink? Is this broccoli too old to eat? Can I borrow 55p? I hope the postman didn’t notice that I’m not wearing anything under my dressing gown. I hope we remembered to put the right bin outside. I hope that red wine I just poured all over the front room won’t stain the floorboards.” and so on). One day, when everyone else has gone out for a little while, I go into the garage and use the cross-trainer for half an hour. It’s an old machine that someone rescued from a skip and it makes an awful creaking noise, like it’s too tired to go on, it wished we’d left it well enough alone so it could rot slowly in the persistent English rain, but eventually I get used to it, and my boredom transforms itself into exercise-induced elation. I listen to music and feel pleasantly, mildly high, even though in reality there’s little as mind-numbing as using a piece of gym equipment in the corner of someone’s else’s garage, with nothing to look at but stacks of old boxes and children’s bicycles, long retired, leaning up against the walls, and bottles of wine and vodka on wooden racks. I have a memory of being in college, using the campus gym, which was in a basement and stank of sweat but sure as hell beat running outside in the middle of a Boston winter. It was also a social thing, a bit of a game. I ran very fast on the treadmill and was always gratified to see someone I knew there, a friend from class, a boy I almost-liked, someone whose presence, whose acknowledgement of my presence, validated the efforts I was making. Otherwise I was just running in place for an hour, working up a sweat but going nowhere.

❧

I am sitting at my desk, like I do nearly every day, with a cup of coffee in an orange-striped Penguin classics mug (The Pursuit of Love). I am watching the rain fall on the rainforest garden, now so overgrown, so wild, that I generally avoid it, because to spend time there gives me anxiety: I think instantly and obsessively of all the things I could be doing, and am not doing, with that space. My old retired Dutch bicycle, chained to the garden shed by ivy (and, secondarily, an actual bike lock), rests where it has been resting for a year and a half now. I’m unable to give it up, although it’s not in very good shape, and it’s unusual enough that even the most ambitious repairmen seem to think that sourcing parts for it would be all but impossible. I keep thinking that someday, somehow, I’ll be the one to fix it up, but it was already well-used when I got it, and I don’t really know anything about bikes, even though I probably should (my father was recently inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, after all).

Anyhow, pretty much every day for the last year I have spent at least a few hours sitting here, doing this. Sometimes all I manage to accomplish is to stare out at the greenery (or, in winter, the bare branches, the cold ground). Since nobody pays me to do any of this, I don’t have to feel guilty if that’s all I’ve accomplished at the end of a day. When people do pay me to do things (not very often, to be honest, but it does occasionally happen), I do those things instead.

Writers are always talking about, or writing about, or reading about, how they work, or so it seems to me. Maybe it’s an avoidance tactic: because it’s related to the act of working, it’s almost the same thing as actually working. It’s tangentially useful. Maybe. But who was the writer who said you have to sit there at your desk no matter what, put the hours in even if you’re not working at all? That’s the other problem with all these writers talking and writing and reading about how they work: sooner or later they all blend together, become this one figure, The Writer At Work, who has all the traits and habits of all writers, even when they contradict each other. So I don’t know who said that, about having to just sit there. I do know that it was Hemingway who said the thing about always stopping before you’ve exhausted your supply of ideas and words – stop so that you’ll know how you need to begin the next day. I guess like how some food critic or chef said that the perfect meal leaves you wanting one more bite. Except that in addition to Hemingway saying this, someone else also said it, or agreed with Hemingway, anyway. Murakami, I think, though it could have been anyone. Other people will say the opposite. It strikes me that we read these little bits of advice and observation not because we actually care what circumstances led to the birth of our favourite books, say, or what kind of discipline our favourite writers have, but because we are seeking to affirm that we’re not alone. We’re always searching for reassurance that we’re not doing it wrong. We keep reading until we find someone whose methods or outlook match, more or less, our own, and then we breathe a sigh of relief, and stop searching quite so frantically, because our own particular habits have been validated. We’re doing it right after all!

Anyway, the writer who said you had to sit there at your desk no matter what would, I think, approve of the way I structure my days.

Anyway, what I’m thinking, as I’m sitting here today, on a Sunday, clocking in, putting in my hours, is that I want to start increasing the distance I swim each day. I don’t need to spend more time at the pool, I think; I just need to spend my time more efficiently. Often I take long rests so that I can watch the other, better, faster swimmers, to really think about things before I push off again. I think this kind of observation has helped me improve fairly drastically over the last few years, but probably it’s time to think a little less and do a little more.

I’m also thinking about how next week I’m going back to school for the first time in a long time, and up until quite recently all I felt was unbridled excitement, but now, all week, I’ve had this terrible sense of inadequacy: I’m sure I’m going to be found out, deemed unqualified even to begin.

Sometimes I interrupt my own thoughts to read someone else’s thoughts – an article I’ve been meaning to read all week, for instance, still open in a tab. I like to get all my tabs closed on Sunday, in preparation for a fresh week full of frantic clicking and saving-for-later and not-reading. Sometimes I discover that something I’d been putting off reading is not something I want to read at all, or is only a paragraph long. There’s a certain satisfaction when that happens, though I’m annoyed with myself for not taking the time to find out sooner. It’s like a certain amount of energy was reserved for that particular tab, that particular article, and now I have that energy spare, to play with.

***

Yesterday I spent a few hours in the front garden. Gardening is thankless work. I always enjoy it very much up to the point at which I straighten my sore back, wipe my muddied hands on my ripped jeans, and assess the results of my labour, and realise that nothing looks much changed or much improved. Sure, there are fewer weeds, the rose bush is no longer drooping over the wall and into the path of pedestrians, but essentially, everything looks the same, just a little bit tidier, almost imperceptibly tidier. If you didn’t know what I’d been doing and you walked up to our house, you wouldn’t notice anything at all, though at least you wouldn’t necessarily think, gosh, what a mess!

I know that’s kind of the point: gardening is an investment of time, like writing, for instance. But while I don’t have a problem with the way writing a book is – you’re always thinking, I’ve worked all day and I’ve made no progress at all! until suddenly, one day, you find yourself with a finished manuscript – I do have a problem with the way gardening is. I guess I want instant gratification sometimes. Which is probably why we’ve never managed to tame our garden, why we’ve never managed to really grow anything, in an organised sense (we’ve certainly been very good at letting the wretched ground elder take over, and the cherry trees have gotten substantially taller in the years that we’ve lived here).

But I do like doing something physically difficult, and I like getting dirt under my fingernails. The other day I painted my fingernails, for the first time in about two years, with some nail polish I found lurking on my desk under some papers. It’s a funny purple colour, and it chipped almost instantly, for which I was relieved: I’d like to be somebody who wears nail polish, but the reality is that it made me feel a little too much like not-myself. Maybe someday, I think, and idly chip some more away as I sit on the couch reading.

***

Sometimes whole days go by when I don’t talk to anyone. It’s quite easy to do: if the Man is in London and the postman doesn’t need me to sign for anything and I don’t need to go to the shop around the corner for milk or bread or butter, and I don’t have plans for the evening or money to go to the pub, who would I speak to? Sometimes people will come by trying to sell us things, or at least trying to sell us ideas. One day a man came to the door, wanting to tell me about how he could insulate our loft for free.

“I’m not trying to sell you anything,” he said.

“I don’t think you are,” I said, although it was obvious that I did think he was, and moreover obvious that I was not prepared to be persuaded to think anything else. I looked at the card in my hand: FREE!, it said. It had a URL printed across the front, too, but I knew I would not look at the website, even though our house probably could do with some more, or better, insulation. I leaned against the doorframe, as if to take up more space, to assert my place, and told him I’d have to ask my landlady. He promised he’d come back later, but he never did, I guess because he knew I wasn’t going to ask my landlady.

***

We have lunch and listen to The Archers. I return to my desk. It’s still raining. I haven’t been outside yet. I was planning to mop the kitchen floor today, but I think maybe the rain gives me an excuse not to, though I would no doubt have found an excuse anyway. I don’t think we’ll ever be tidy people, really. We’ll never have pristine white carpets or the kind of house where everything has its place and then resides, meekly, obediently in that place. Here everything is always spilling out, spilling over. I’ve spilled red wine on my yellow slippers from Fez. The sauce has bubbled up and stained the stovetop red. The books spill off the shelves, slip off the mantlepiece. When it hails, the hailstones come down through the chimneys, invading, transgressing. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the neediness of a house, all the things that need doing, maintaining, but today, and most days, this effort seems like a small price to pay for shelter and warmth, for being able to sit and watch the rain.

When I was growing up, I used to like climbing the hill beside our house. From halfway up you could look down and see the human face of the house, the jagged staircase-nose and the uneven window-eyes.

Rilke, as quoted in Bachelard:

(House, patch of meadow, oh evening light
Suddenly you acquire an almost human face
You are very near us, embracing and embraced.)

Akiko Busch, in Geography of Home:

When one of my sons first started to color pictures, the house he drew as an imprecise shape, between a circle and a square, with two windows hovering near the top and a door floating somewhere between them. The resemblance of this outline of a simple house to the human face was unmistakable. […] And it occurs to me that this primitive rendering captures the way we imprint ourselves on the places we live.

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Artistic discipline and athletic discipline are kissing cousins, they require the same thing, an unspecial practice: tedious and pitch-black invisible, private as guts, but always sacred.

Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies

1. The Winner

To have a winner you must also have a loser. Loss is implicit in the success of a champion. The gold medalist is only standing on the podium because he has beaten his opponents – hordes of them, over the course of his career, hordes of people with exactly the same dream and the same drive. But the hordes become invisible; you see this One Man, this One Woman. You see this kind of greatness as something somehow attainable and natural. It isn’t. It’s unlikely, like winning the lottery. We’re amazed by Michael Phelps and his 22 medals, and we should be – but here’s what we should be even more amazed by: all the people who finished second, or who never finished at all. All that relative mediocrity, which would be triumph enough for most of us.

***

When it’s particularly, painfully close, you find yourself thinking, why is it this way? why is it so unfair? How can something so minute – 1/100th of a second, two points – be so significant, so decisive?

“The drama of sports – surely lost in a coin toss – comes from pitting two well-matched people against each other and seeing how they fare. But in this case the match has turned out to be *so close* it reminds us how slender the notion of a winner can be – milliseconds, millimeters, tenths of a point awarded from a judge.” So writes Rebecca J. Rosen about the “dead heat” between sprinters Allyson Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh in the 100 meters at the United States Olympic trials.

That kind of closeness makes it all seem arbitrary: if two contestants are really so equally matched, what’s the deciding factor? Not skill, or strength, or speed, but a breath of wind at just the right (or the wrong) moment, an errant cry from the crowd, a superstitious ritual misperformed. So you, the remote spectator, start to earnestly wonder if you could actually affect the outcome of something which appears to be completely out of your control. Is it coincidence that when I change out of the rain-soaked jeans I wore throughout their confidently won first set, Andy Murray and Laura Robson lose the next set, and ultimately the match? In retrospect, surely my mild discomfort was worth enduring in order to ensure a second gold for Murray and a first for Robson.

Logically, of course, there’s no way I can own the disappointment of losing, or absorb any of the blame. I certainly can’t claim any credit for a win, much as I like to tell people, and only half-jokingly, that it was the way that I tapped the table three times at crucial moments that led the Red Sox to that historic victory in 2004. But the beauty of sport is the uncanny way it includes each and every spectator.

The act of participating in sport is a lonely, personal thing, even where teams are involved. Private battles of will and physical prowess – “private as guts”, to borrow Leanne Shapton’s phrase – are fought publicly. A race or a game or a gymnastics routine becomes the tangible manifestation of private doubt or private pain being overcome; it’s what’s invisible that counts, and the result is not really of this one contest but of thousands of hours of tedious solitary practice. And yet every contest also expands to become something not just relevant but urgent to the millions of people who have no connection to it at all, really, but who watch anyway, transfixed, transformed for an instant.

Think of it this way: you don’t know the athletes, and you likely never will. Unless you’ve placed a bet, nothing hinges on one pair of rowers being better than another pair of rowers, for you. You’re not even there, hearing the oars hit the water; you’re here, in your living room, hearing what some sound technician has decided an oar hitting the water should sound like. You’re seeing the event from a hundred different angles – the slow-motion close-up of the tennis ball bouncing in the sun, the water sliding down the shaved arms of the swimmer, the long line of runners stretched like hungry ants down Victoria Embankment – like you’re omnipotent. And when it’s over you’ll feel you’ve been part of something, even though you haven’t, not really: you’ve just been sitting in your living room, clenching your fists, pausing the live feed to get a glass of water (watching is thirsty work), listening to the comfortable patter of the commentators bantering. And you will get up from your sofa and proceed to the kitchen and wash a few dishes, the humdrum-ness of your life ultimately unchanged by what you’ve just witnessed.

(It’s obvious that by “you” I mean me, here. Maybe you do know the athletes. Maybe you are one. Maybe you were there, maybe you didn’t hear the oars but felt the roar of the crowd instead. And I don’t know if this changes things.)

2. The Viewer

The artificiality of watching sport this way – from a distance – makes it a simultaneously lonely and communal exercise. We’re united in our remoteness from the thing we’re watching. Maybe I’d be writing a very different essay if I had actually been to an Olympic event. As a matter of fact, although I live in a country that’s hosting the Olympics, I’m not at all qualified to tell you what it’s like to live in a country that’s hosting the Olympics. I haven’t been to London in weeks. I’d go, but I can’t afford it – or at least this is what I’ve been telling myself. For a few days I check the relevant website religiously, watching tickets become available. Just a few clicks, a few hours on trains and tubes, a hundred pounds, and I could be at the Aquatics Centre, I think: I could be at the center of things, part of the crowd I’ve been watching and hearing and envying for days. But where would I get a hundred spare pounds? Where would I get those spare hours? And so by the time I’ve mulled it over and decided maybe it is worth it after all, the tickets are long gone, the swimming’s been over for a week, the games are declared closed, and I’ve missed my chance.

So I sit at home, in Oxford, not very far away but also very far away indeed. And I watch things happen on my laptop screen.

***

“TV tennis has its advantages, but these advantages have disadvantages, and chief among them is a certain illusion of intimacy,” writes David Foster Wallace. One morning, I watch a two-minute video about filming the Olympic games. “The aim is to take the viewer where the athlete is”, the narrator says. I’m delighted by the way a camera on the end of a rope can follow a diver from the the board all the way into the water, or the way a camera on the bottom of the pool can show the swimmers from an angle you would never naturally see. But it’s not that these ingenious contraptions and unique vantage points are placing us where the athlete is – it’s that they’re placing us simultaneously with and distinctly apart from the athlete. We experience a sense of intimacy and a sense of distance concurrently. Like a childhood memory: you see your four-year-old self from the outside, looking in. You remember the cat lumbering into the room, scratching at your leg, drawing blood, but you relive it as an observer, not a participant, and so you become somehow both.

“TV sporting events are something we make, and they have a tension at their core: On the one hand, we want to feel as if we watched from the stands, but on the other, we want a fidelity and intimacy that is better than any in-person spectating could be. Our desire is for the presentation of real life to actually be better than real life,” writes Alexis Madrigal. And of course the oddest thing of all is that this is real life – I mean, me, sitting here, hearing impossible sounds, seeing these human forms in motion from an impossible combination of impossible angles: that’s how I experience the Olympics, that’s how I experience any televised sporting event.

***

Mainly, though, I am watching for the spaces in between. My favourite scenes are always those that occur in anticipation of an event or in the relief after. It’s nice to see the athletes in the moments before they compete: headphones on, jacket zipped up, eyes down. It’s nice to see them when it’s over, too. They smile and laugh together and slap each other on the back or hug or cry or look disgusted. You think: well, of course. They’re colleagues, compatriots, as much as competitors. I like it, too, when the commentators make mistakes or jokes; when they tease each other, laugh, get confused or excited, are as amazed as I am. These are the best moments because they take you out of the picture completely; you’re no longer split, half of you with the athlete, the other half hovering over the stadium in a hot air balloon. You’re you again, they’re them; this is the realest moment, no matter where you are, the coming back down to earth moment.

3. The Body

Often the competition hardly matters at all. It’s compelling enough just to watch limbs move. We watch a lot of longer events: the men’s 10,000m, the women’s marathon, the men’s 1500m freestyle, the women’s marathon 10km, the men’s individual time trial. I think, at the start of each: I cannot possibly watch this race in full. But by the end I’m riveted; I haven’t moved in ten minutes, twenty minutes, two hours.

The feet of the runners look like the spindly limbs of gazelles fleeing from a predator. I admire the apparently languid stroke of the swimmer who beats his own world record by more than three seconds; the gentle two-beat kick, the arm sliding through the water. The shots from below show these swimmers suspended, impossibly light and graceful, even after nearly a mile. The open-water swimmers sway and splash, glancing up occasionally to orient themselves; someone on Twitter says it doesn’t make for very good television, does it, but I disagree entirely, and I’m too absorbed to disagree publicly. The marathon runners, even two hours into their race, have perfectly composed faces. Only at the very end – the last push, the final few metres – does Tiki Gelana grit her teeth, belying the effort it’s taken to carry herself to the finish line. They all collapse as soon as they cross the line, but soon get back up again. Gelana jogs past the crowd, wrapped in the Ethiopian flag, like Bradley Wiggins gets back on his bike and cycles blithely back the way he came, in search of his family, looking like he might happily retrace his steps all the way back to the start of the race if he needs to and ride it again.

[N.B. These moments - the final moments of a long-distance race - are particularly astonishing. Something about the sheer distance involved, the investment of time, makes the conclusion more immediately poignant. For almost two hours I watch a group of women swim the Serpentine and yet when the end comes it's too quick and too soon. It's agony to watch them in the last stretch, British medal hopeful Keri-Anne Payne not quite able after all those kilometers to push herself into third place. The gap between her (1:57:42.2) and the bronze medalist (1:57:41.8) is nothing in the context of a 10km swim, but it’s also everything. The marathon is the same: hope is prolonged, dragged out, making the finish more bitter than sweet. For most of the race there's the sense that anyone could win it, or nearly anyone, at least, even though you know that’s not how these things work, even though you know the chances of anyone but the winner winning have been steadily diminishing since the starting pistol presaged the end. And then, suddenly, it's the same old story: just one winner. A dozen, two dozen people behind her who have all pushed themselves to exhaustion, and for what? A race that's over in 10 seconds is a shocking culmination to years of grueling training, but at least that’s only 10 seconds of waiting, only 10 seconds of footage to scour in the aftermath, searching for clues as to why it was someone else this time.]

***

David Foster Wallace again:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

Nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. This is true, isn’t it? It’s all about the amazement of seeing a body – the thing we all share, though we don’t all resemble each other, though we can’t all do the same things with the bodies we have. True there are plenty of sports that require animals or apparatus, but at the centre, still, is the human form. The dressage horse is magnificent, but so, supposedly, is the rider’s control.

The footnote to Wallace’s claim above, by the way, is this:

There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously — it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important — they make up for a lot.

I think of that giddy point in a run when you think, I could keep going indefinitely! And then, a few minutes later, maybe, you’re thinking, I can’t breathe, I can’t lift my legs, I can’t keep going even one second longer. But you keep going anyway, because you know deep down that this is not Pushing Yourself at all, that you haven’t even approached the gentle foothills of Pushing Yourself; you’re still on the plains of Taking It Easy. You’ve run four miles, which is nothing, and done it pretty slowly, and you’ll walk for a few minutes when you want, stretch a tight hamstring, skip through the songs on your iPod, searching for just the right thing.

I remember going to a track meet in high school and running the 800 meters, which was my preferred distance (for reasons unknown, since I wasn’t particularly good at it, and it was a pretty grueling race – you always had to run too fast for too long). I never won anything – in fact I quit the team halfway through the season – but I always had a strong finish. I always had plenty of energy to sprint the last 25 meters while the girls at the lead of the pack were crossing the finish line and collapsing. And I remember the coach suggesting, at this particular meet, that I should have run hard enough that I found it difficult to accelerate at the finish. That if I found it easy, I hadn’t done enough. Okay, I said, pretending to pay attention. But I never changed my tactics: wait until the end is in sight, I thought, then put the pressure on, not the other way round. I was too scared to find out what it might be like to reach that final stretch and discover that I had no reserves, nothing left, couldn’t go faster. I was curious, but not curious enough to actually discover the exact point at which a task becomes actually impossible.

So to watch others do this now, to see them testing the limits, pushing the limits, playing with the very idea of limits, both satisfies and provokes that curiosity.

4. The National Anthem

If it’s about being human, about the universal human experience of being in a body, it shouldn’t matter where the winner is from. But obviously it does, to some extent. We keep track of which countries win the most medals. We raise flags and blare national anthems. We want the country hosting the games to perform as admirably as possible. “Urged on by massive home crowds and a cheerleading press that defied predictions of Olympic cynicism, British athletes ran, cycled and rowed their way to their highest medal count since Britannia ruled the seas in 1908. At these Games, the United States and China might be coming home with more gold, but this country of 62 million roughly the size of Michigan reminded itself of its uncanny ability to punch above its weight,” writes Anthony Faiola.

But I don’t think of the champions as representing their countries so much as representing themselves, though their countries may well be part of themselves. Still, it all culminates in this moment of – what? Not national pride, exactly – this moment of acknowledging one’s roots, I suppose, of acknowledging one’s home (or adopted home, as the case may be). This is where I came from, this is the place in which I became the magnificent creature you see before you.

“You can follow the Olympics two ways,” writes Ian Johnson:

First, there’s the right way: you pay attention to the athletes and root for great performances. You see them cry and hug each other in joy or look away in disgust at a bad performance. You empathize with them as human beings and debate issues like whether Michael Phelps is the greatest Olympian of all time or just the greatest swimmer. [...]

Then there’s the way I watch the games: as a statistical survey of geopolitics and destructive public policy. Individuals matter, to a degree, but more as products of systems than as distinctive personalities. I admire Ye Shiwen’s performance but wonder more about why the country’s swimming coaches get paid almost as much as the central government spends on preserving the country’s dying folk culture. I think Phelps is a great physical specimen but wonder why Americans are getting fatter and fatter.

It’s irrelevant at times – there’s the camaraderie amongst athletes from different countries who train together, or the fact that it’s impressive to watch a young woman at her first Olympics blast past all the old favourites to take gold no matter where she’s from (what, for instance, does Johnson make of 15-year-old Lithuanian gold medalist Rūta Meilutytė, who trains in Plymouth?). But place still matters. Not just history, heritage, citizenship: setting, too. Here’s Jonathan Meades, writing in 2008:

The entirely despicable, entirely pointless 2012 Olympics – a festival of energy squandering architectural bling worthy of a vain third world dictatorship, a jobbery gravy train, a payday for the construction industry, a covetable terrorist target – will occupy a site far more valuable as it was. It was probably the most extensive terrain vague of any European capital city: the English word wasteland is pejorative and lazy. Further it more or less states that the place has no merit – so why not cover it in expressions of vanity.

I don’t think the 2012 Olympics are entirely despicable or entirely pointless – that much is obvious. But when I watch the games I know that I also willfully ignore political and economic implications. I pretend that I can’t understand because I’m not from here (if ever there was a lazy excuse, that’s one!). To watch the Olympics on a screen is one thing; to visit or acknowledge its (albeit temporary) place on the map, its corporeal form, if you will, is more complicated. I think of the Olympics as an idea, not an actual destination. And perhaps I have deliberately resisted the urge to visit the site. I claim a scarcity of time or money prevented me from going to London, but maybe it’s just that this way of watching – my way of watching – only works if “the Olympics” remains a sufficiently abstract concept.

(I watch the faces of the American athletes as “The Star Spangled Banner” plays; sometimes I can see their lips moving. Do they really know the lyrics, I wonder, or are they, as we have all sometimes had to do, just pretending?)

5. Look Away

And why am I so compelled? Why can’t I look away – or, rather, why don’t I want to, even for a second? Why do I feel bound to watch two and a half hours of swimming heats – not even semi-finals, let alone finals – accompanied by the soothing voices of Andy Jameson and Adrian Moorhouse, who I’ve come to think of as dear friends? Is it admiration, envy, desire? The spectacle of skin and muscle, the parade of flesh? Yes, probably. And it’s also for the narrative: how will I know who to root for if I don’t see the whole context, if I’m not wholly immersed? Why would I skip over parts of a story I’m so thoroughly enjoying?

There’s something compelling, too, about my own reactions. I’m surprised to hear my voice as Victoria Azarenka hits a ball into the net and I pump my fist and shout “yesss!” – to cheer for the negative, to celebrate the opponent’s mistake, feels like it’s verging on being unsportsmanlike, and moreover it seems to have been involuntary. Where did this visceral enthusiasm come from? And where does it go, where does it hide, during the daytime, during all the ordinary hours?

And then there’s the tragedy of sport. Simultaneous with the realisation of winning is the acknowledgment of an ending/a new beginning. You must either do it again or give it up, burn out or fade out. The achievement must be matched – if not by you then by someone else, someone younger, faster, better. The likelihood of a repeat performance, let alone one four years later, is difficult to gauge – who will you be then? How can you guarantee that the circumstances, the wind, will be right?

So these people – these champions, these almost-champions – repeatedly enact a kind of Greek tragedy. The exposure of this drama is like peeling skin back, revealing a roadmap of veins and sinew. It’s almost indecent, but we’re hungry for it. Show us what they feel so we can feel something too. Let us think that tears of joy are also tears, even if unconsciously, of mourning or of fear. When the games close, when the flame is extinguished, we arrive at the moment of understanding: the moment of knowing how small this is, even while it looms so large, how fleeting, how insignificant.

***

The question is this: is watching sport an exercise in great empathy or great selfishness? Am I watching and thinking, good for her, I enjoy this success vicariously, this is a just payoff for the sacrifices she’s made throughout her life? Or am I watching and thinking, if only it was me, but it will never be me, it can never be me? Here is a celebration of a human experience that very few will share, and yet I know as I watch her reaction that it’s my reaction, too, it’s everybody’s reaction. It’s a physical reaction, though we’re not sharing the same physical space, though she has just enthusiastically finished an 800m race while I’ve just enthusiastically finished a glass of wine. My shoulders shake too; my voice cracks too; I’m a mirror, a mimic.

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