Last night, probably because there was something much more pressing I should have been doing, I started rearranging books. I get this urge periodically, but I don’t think it’s necessarily symbolic of anything other than an ordinary human restlessness – “we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper…our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread,” as Alain de Botton writes, and our house is wallpapered mostly with books.

I started to think a change of scenery might be nice. I spend so much time in my upstairs study, looking down on the frozen garden in winter, the lawn overrun with elder in summer. But the last month has been a period of intense unproductivity, and maybe, I thought, there was an unfortunate bedspread in the room, derailing my sense of purpose (also, the chair downstairs is much more comfortable than the chair upstairs). So I started the shift to the downstairs study – another periodic compulsion of mine, and an obvious luxury of space. It takes me a while to move from one study to the other, although ostensibly my only tool is a laptop, because I have to arrange the space with great care: I need to make sure I have all the books I might want to refer to, the irrational little display of shells and pens, the candle I almost never light, the box of wax matches from Kenya with which to light the candle I almost never light.

Anyway, as I was arranging my most crucial books downstairs, I looked up, at this towering shelf, floor to ceiling, 9 stories high, and I was overcome with a fear that it would come crashing down on my head if I worked here. At first I thought the fear was arbitrary: I worry about everything from whether my teeth are stained to whether the world will end in a series of nuclear explosions, so why not this, too, plucked at random from the infinite list of possibilities? But it had infected my consciousness, and now I was imagining all kinds of gruesome scenarios: what if I did light that candle, and the shelf collapsed and the books went up in flames and the house burned down? Investigation seemed not just prudent but necessary for survival, so I climbed up on a stool.

The shelves themselves are just slabs of wood, resting on small protuberances which have been drilled into the wall, and my investigation revealed that the protuberances holding up the 7th shelf had come loose. There did not seem to be any immediate danger of anything collapsing, but I was nevertheless vindicated: I had averted disaster! I removed the books from the 7th shelf, set them out in stacks on the mantlepiece and, when they began to overflow even there, next to the fireplace. And now I am literally surrounded by books and only a little less afraid that they’ll all come crashing down on me.

It’s 2012 now. I didn’t do my usual end-of-year post to mark the transition. I started doing this a few years ago. I didn’t intend to make a habit of it, but I make habits very easily, by accidentally doing the same thing over and over again, and so it became a habit. I thought about it this year, after we’d had our nice Christmas with family and I had eaten a lot of turkey and nibbled at the Christmas pudding and taken naps and baths and read so many books in a short space of time that I was getting them mixed up in my head and was feeling ready to get back to making things again. But everything seemed too small to bother writing about, and simultaneously too large to even comprehend, too large certainly to fit in a few paragraphs – “time passed, or maybe it didn’t,” as Geoff Dyer writes. Last year, while time was passing, or maybe not passing, I worked. I went to Scotland and wore espadrilles in the rain and they didn’t dry out for weeks. We re-visited Wales, we re-visited New York. I left my job – “without one to go to!” as they say, biting their fingernails, but of course that was the point, to leave without having a clear sense of what came next. And I’m going have a book published this year, as a result of what happened last year when I had no clear sense of what comes next, and even so I still have no clear sense of what comes next, though that feels right somehow, that feels okay.

Anyway, instead of a chronological list of things we did last year, or things that happened to us, here’s a random assortment of things I (think I) learned last year.

- I go to a gig. I’m too short to see the band so instead I watch their shadows moving on the ceiling. I’m with a friend who’s very tall. He can (presumably) see the band, but later on we go to get fresh bottles of beer, and then linger outside in the hallway, where it is impossible to see but much easier to listen.

- One afternoon, as I am recovering from a winter cold, I listen to the rain. I write this:

The front room was glowing yellow, because of the strange, smoggy light that the sun was managing to give off from behind its protective layer of golden clouds. It was raining, quite hard, but in the way it rains when you know it will only rain for a minute, or a few minutes, maybe ten – a summer shower, it had the sound of a summer shower, and people walking past were bent against the falling rain with the same surprised faces you see in summertime – women in skirts who left the house on the tricky promise of a blue sky. On the horizon, above the low roof of the shed across the street, the sky was bright. We went to the window to observe; the rain was actually hail, stones bouncing forcefully off the bins and the garden path. Sometimes when it really hails here the stones fall through the chimneys and bounce out into the house, melting, covered in soot. But soon the hail turned again to rain. The light went darker; the clouds were ablaze now with sunset-yellow, pinkish, purplish, almost bruised in their centers, but light on the edges, like a depiction of heavenly clouds in a Renaissance painting.

Then I take a long nap.

- I fall asleep sitting up at my desk, engulfed in sheepskin, reading something. When I wake up it’s black outside, but, surprisingly, I have no crick in my neck.

- Because my usual pool is shut over the Christmas period I have to go further afield. I cycle to Summertown one evening; on the ride home I have the city more or less to myself. I pass the blackened lawns, the buildings shrouded in scaffolding and mesh. I make myself remember this – the blackened lawns, the buildings shrouded in scaffolding and mesh – all the way home, even when I stop at Tesco, just before it shuts, to pick up lettuce leaves and avocado.

- Later that week I try a pool off the Cowley Road, across from the police station. I cycle there late in the evening again, the road wide and empty. I insert a pound coin into a locker, stash my shoes, my coat. There is almost no one else around – a woman, a man, and me. The water is cloudy and green; I imagine that it feels a little thicker than I’m used to, smells vaguely medical – iodine, disinfectant, the smell of waiting and worrying. There is a library nearby and so the sign outside says “Swimming Pool Library”. I wonder if anyone else finds it funny, if maybe it’s a private joke in Oxford, the Hollinghurst reference in Temple Cowley. I wonder if I’m being undeservedly pretentious: I’ve never actually read the book. Does just knowing about its existence – even knowing, loosely, what it’s about – qualify me to share the joke, or do I need some deeper understanding?

When I roll my head to breathe, I can half hear the Christmas songs, playing through speakers in the big room.

- I’m obsessively but irrationally repulsed by the Christmas shoppers, their laden-down shuffle, their vulgar worship of Things. I don’t want Things, I tell myself, I’m already mired in Things. I spend what maybe adds up to an hour every day looking for Things, Things which are always obscured by other Things. But then again I want a new dress, new shoes, this, that. I only don’t want these things when I don’t think of them: and when I don’t think of them I feel free and am not sure what to put in this new space.

- I can’t remember, or maybe I never knew, which state Yellowstone National Park is in. I look it up. Then I look up the distance between where I grew up and there: about 1200 miles. Then I look up the distance between where I am now and there: “We could not calculate directions”.

- I wonder about the veracity of this, from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad: “I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.” And regardless of its truth, the important question is this: do I want it to be true?

- “I don’t know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to do it.” – Paul Auster.

1.

In my last year of high school, I took a photography class. I’d wanted to take one for some time – it was what all the cool kids did, snapping moody photos of each other between classes, disappearing later into darkrooms to develop their relationships. But I had spent the last three years distracted by a misguided devotion to music, culminating in the purchase of a pickup for my violin that only served to amplify my hopelessness, so it was only as a senior that I finally admitted a kind of interest in the visual arts.

For most of the year I used a big black Minolta SLR that my mother had given me. She had lugged it around Italy and carried it to parties and school functions and finally decided that, impressive as the object itself was, clear and striking as the photographs it produced were, it did nothing that a much smaller digital camera – a silver Canon, sleek, practically pocket-sized – couldn’t do. Unlike her I liked changing the lenses, the aperture, the shutter speed. I liked the bulk, the extra baggage. I liked the sense of control the camera gave me. I could choose to make a photograph blurry, to overexpose it, or, even more fascinating, to clarify a high-speed object, to freeze a runner, which was the most artificial thing of all: to suspend forever something that, in everyday life, was never suspended for more than an instant. Later in the darkroom were other opportunities to interfere with the image. By taking a photograph out of the developer too soon, you could create the illusion that the photographer had only been half-present, that her attention had been elsewhere; the foggy, not-quite-there quality made it seem like a dream, like a Renoir or a Monet, everything viewed through an impressionist haze. I liked the process of developing film (gently groping in a blacked out room), of making contact sheets. I liked the chemical smell, the faint glows of light, the clinical precision.

For my end-of-year project, I took photographs of things I found washed up on the shore. It was a short series – three, maybe four black and white images, each item (driftwood, half a styrofoam cup) alone, against a sand backdrop, quite close up, framed carefully. I printed them in the darkroom on 8.5” x 11” paper and matted them on foam board. The Minolta – built more to look impressive than to withstand the pressures of use – broke shortly before the project was due, so I shot the series on my grandfather’s old Nikon. This was a beautiful object: black and silver, simple, small but appealingly heavy in the hands. I took it down to the beach; I took my photos. It was a very bright sunny day. I shot just one roll of film, taking one or two photos of the sea itself, not for the series, but for personal context, perhaps. Context for the memory of the day.

The photographs turned out better than I could have hoped. I don’t mean that they were technically very great, or compositionally even competent. I don’t know about that. I am not and never have been a Photographer, though I am, as so many are nowadays, a photographer in some sense – a documentarian of my own life. What I mean is that these were the clearest photographs I had ever taken. Whether it was because the Nikon was made better than the Minolta or simply that the way it felt to handle my grandfather’s camera made me better at taking pictures, I don’t know. Either way, the photographs were, in their own austere, adolescent way, rather beautiful. I mounted them proudly; I don’t think I had been particularly proud of any of the work I had done that year, although I had enjoyed it, but I was proud of this series. You could feel the heat of the day, though you had no idea what sort of day it was really.

2.

On a recent family visit to New York, I read this:

“Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie. The most mindless snapshot tells the truth of what the camera’s eye saw at the moment the shutter clicked.”

It’s from Janet Malcolm’s profile of the German photographer Thomas Struth, which appeared in the September 26, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. I find it an unusually, almost disturbingly aggressive article – it’s as if Malcolm the interviewer is actually Malcolm the interrogator. At one point, describing his education with the artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, Struth says: “For example, a typical thing Bernd would say was ‘You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust.’” Malcolm responds:

‘”I don’t get it. What does Atget have to do with Proust?”
“It’s a similar time span. What Bernd meant was that when you read Proust that’s what the backdrop is. That’s the theatre.”
“Did you read Proust while you were studying with the Bechers?”
“No, no. I didn’t.”
“Have you read Proust since?”
“No.”
“So what was the point for you of connecting Atget with Proust?”
Struth laughed. “Maybe it’s a bad example,” he said.
“It’s a terrible example,” I said. We both laughed.’

Although it is a false image, I picture this conversation taking place in a tutor’s rooms at Oxford, Struth the student upon the settee, sleepy and hungover and possibly very brilliant but unable to overcome the vast chasm of academic hierarchy. “So what was the point for you of connecting Atget with Proust?” is the tutor’s way of inviting but not inviting a commentary, a way of curtailing freedom to speak by tempting it. Naturally the student nervously concedes the point, and they both laugh about it. I feel an automatic, undeserved sympathy with my fictional version of Struth and an even more undeserved animosity towards my fictional version of Malcolm.

Struth’s photograph of the inside of the SolarWorld factory outside Dresden has been reproduced for the article. ‘How will your pictures show that what is being produced at SolarWorld is good for mankind?’ Malcolm asks Struth:

‘”Just by the title.”
“So photographs don’t speak.”
“The picture itself is powerless to show.”’

I observe the image. It makes very little sense to me; I don’t know what’s happening, except, in a broad sense, because of the caption, that solar panels are being manufactured. The photo is quite small on the page, surrounded by thick blocks of text. It is industrial and futuristic; lots of horizontal lines, blues, whites, silvers. I feel virtually nothing when I look at it; but as I continue to look, I get the impression that I want to like it, and the reason I want to like it has nothing to do with it and what it means. No; I want to like it in spite of Malcolm, a woman I do not know who has written an article about a photographer I had not even heard of until today. I choose this reason arbitrarily, and it is no doubt influenced by external factors: I have had more coffee than usual, it is unseasonably warm for October, I am broke, I am a writer, searching for something to write about, I am on holiday. All of these things which have so much to do with me and virtually nothing to do with the photograph. A medium of “inescapable truthfulness” – but what kind of “inescapable truthfulness”, exactly?

3.

A few days later, I encounter the question of context again, this time in a midtown gallery. The exhibit – “Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker“ – is a selection of photographs that have appeared in the magazine, curated by former visuals editor Elisabeth Biondi.

“Every picture in The New Yorker, even a portrait, makes an editorial statement,” Biondi writes. “When published, the pictures are bound to the written word, illuminating and strengthening the context of the magazine. After publication, strong images assume a new life, beyond their original context.” Even this exhibition is not devoid of context, of course; someone has placed certain pictures in certain places, created an invisible narrative. But I deliberately do not take a copy of the guide, so that I can view the photographs, at least at first, without any extra insight.

I pause next to a portrait of Agatha Christie in her old age. My eyes are drawn to her thick, elderly ankles, juxtaposed with Amy Winehouse’s fragile-thin legs, bent under her as she smokes a cigarette on a hotel bed, in the next photograph. And there are the Romanovs (I have to consult the guide later to identify them) in a rowboat, seemingly quite adrift. And there is Gertrude Stein, at her desk, looking like she’s in an Edward Hopper painting. In some instances there is no context even to be offered by the guide: anonymous children in an anonymous park, blurred as they leap over a wall; men, women, rooms without names.

Later that day we visit the International Center of Photography, but I am all photographed out. I spend an hour on a bench, taking advantage of the free wifi, checking emails on my phone, sending tweets to friends I want to meet up with while I’m here. My shoulder hurts from carrying the extra weight of my DSLR. I have hardly used it; the only photos I seem to take nowadays are with my ubiquitous iPhone. And maybe that’s the fairest way for me to photograph things now: using the device with which I communicate, consume and create, often simultaneously, seemingly constantly. The real camera feels artificial. The photographs I take with it do not reflect my experience, only what’s there on the other side of the lens; they reflect back to me what, as Malcolm writes, “the camera’s eye saw at the moment the shutter clicked,” but what the camera’s eye saw does not always have anything to do with what I saw, just as what is there to be seen does not always have anything to do with how it’s understood.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had in the summer with a friend of mine, a skilled amateur photographer who finds the proliferation of high dynamic range imaging applications for smartphone photography a little disconcerting.

“It’s practically defying the laws of physics,” he told me. “A camera shouldn’t really be able to do that.”

“Yes,” I said, myself an avid user of just such an app, “Maybe. But sometimes – often – that’s the only way for me to capture what it is I am seeing.”

4.

Back home in England, I assess the contents of my memory card and realize that I forgot to take any pictures of New York. I apologize to people who I might otherwise have bored with a protracted viewing of my holiday photos. I say I was distracted, I was busy seeing my family and my old school friends and telling cab drivers that I was sorry I couldn’t give them directions, but I don’t live in Brooklyn, either.

But this is not entirely true. I did take photographs. I did not take the sort of arty shots that a person like me, who dallies with but has never had enough patience or passion for photography, takes in order to feel that she understands or at least appreciates the form. But I took a blurred photograph at Coney Island of family friends, arms in the air, mouths open in joy or horror, coming down a ramp on the Cyclone roller coaster. I took a photograph of my mother in a green field, bending over her father’s grave, holding a red umbrella against the grey sky. I tried to take a photograph of the deer running through military rows of little white cemetery crosses, but the deer moved too fast; they were not even blurry, they had simply left the shot by the time my finger had found the button. I took a photograph of a painting I liked at the Brooklyn Museum. I took a photograph of some fake-denim leggings (“Chic Style!”) for sale in a CVS, some fishermen on a windy beach in Montauk, a neon sign outside a café where we had BLTs and mugs of sickly sweet coffee.

5.

One morning I come across Andrew Motion’s review of Magnum Contact Sheets in the Guardian. Motion quotes editor Kirsten Lubben:

“The contact sheet…embodies much of the appeal of photography itself: the sense of time unfolding, a durable trace of movement through space, an apparent authentication of photography’s claims to transparent representation of reality.”

I often feel that I have devolved as a photographer, since those first heady days when I wielded my mother’s discarded Minolta and spilled developer on my hands and learned that patience and luck were as integral to taking a picture as a good eye. Then I was eager to explore the science and logistics of the art; now I cheat, I download applications to manipulate images that are being taken on my phone – my phone! – and upload the finished products to the weak and weary acclaim of my Facebook friends and Instagram followers. I have not held a physical photograph for years; I see my own images exclusively on screens, expandable, rotatable, contextualized with my own text. And I don’t know what process professional photographers use to select their images now, but I do know Motion is right about contact sheets – the advent of the digital camera made them “instantly obsolete”.

But then again, maybe my current camera of choice has, in its way, actually improved my photography. My photos are not and never have been very good – not very beautiful, not very interesting, not very thought-provoking, not very well thought out. But now, taken and stored as they are – impulsively, on a multi-use device – they are nothing more or less than a perfect record of my time unfolding, a kind of never-ending, interactive contact sheet.

6.

Now it is winter, or nearly winter. Night falls at 4 pm; rain falls all day, sometimes. It is hard to find the desire, let alone an opportunity, to get out and take pictures. All my photographs of this place are repetitive anyway – always the same views, the Merton playing fields, the Radcliffe Camera (of course: the biggest, most beautiful camera of all), the telephone wires on my suburban street, over and over again. These days I don’t even need to leave the house. I realize I’ve been unwittingly working on a series of photographs for a few months now: shots from my desk, taken through the study window, of the cherry trees and the painted pink wooden chair in the garden, rotting and unstable after a year in the sun and rain.

I mean to juxtapose the photos, to observe the reddening and yellowing of the leaves, the falling of the leaves, the bareness of the branches, happening quickly, in these still shots – to speed up time, or clarify its passing, at least. But I don’t. I don’t need to, I guess, because I know that on my phone, interspersed with shots of the tarte tatin I made the other night and the bit of cornicing that fell from our living room ceiling earlier this month, is this linear, visual representation of the march of time, the change of seasons, the thickening of the weeds in the garden we don’t tend to enough.

In other news the leaves outside my study window are red, the ice cream truck is still driving around the block on weekend afternoons, I can’t seem to find a decent pair of jeans anywhere (but that might be because I can’t seem to bear being in a shop for more than five minutes at a time), I’m alternating between D.H. Lawrence and David Sedaris before bed, and I’ve had cheese on toast for five out of seven lunches this week.

How’s your October been?

Anyway, the advantage of air travel (apart from, you know, the advantage of air travel) is that you get to watch films. As this is basically the only time I watch films, I have to cram a lot into a few hours, so I watched three on the way out. And I know I’m behind the times here, but Bridesmaids? Really?

If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a woman called Annie who gets picked as her best friend’s maid of honor even though her life isn’t perfect. I mean, other stuff happens, but I think that’s the crux of it, and I had been led to believe that it was some sort of brilliant, funny, clever example of how women can be brilliant, funny and clever in films. In theory I’m not much of a feminist, but I’m willing to get behind something that portrays women as independently hilarious and witty, and who doesn’t like to laugh?

So imagine my chagrin when, having reclined my seat back and asked for a glass of red wine to accompany my chicken and root vegetable mush, I discovered that I wasn’t laughing.

At first I thought maybe it was me. I was being judgmental, I needed to loosen up, my brain was too focused on worrying about whether or not I’d locked the back door and turned the gas off. Then I thought it was probably just a bit slow; maybe they were just getting all the bad gags out of the way before building up to a mind-blowing climax. But somewhere during the seemingly interminable “two bridesmaids trying to one-up-each-other-with-not-very-amusing-speeches-at-an-engagement-party” scene I began to think that maybe I was forming what might be called an Opinion.

Here’s what I see: this film is the female equivalent to something like The Hangover (by the way, I almost never read reviews or articles about films – which may make my writing about a film somewhat questionable – but I’m 99% sure that about a million more qualified people have already said that).

I don’t mean female equivalent in the sense that it’s taken the things that The Hangover does for men and adapted them for a female audience, I mean it’s exactly the same, but with women as the principle characters. Which is fine! It’s great, actually. I mean, I guess it’s great. I guess it’s great that it’s now okay for there to be a scene in a film during which a bunch of women vomit on each other’s heads and shit onto expensive dresses, or during which a woman gets wasted on a plane and the end result is not a questionable one night stand but a comedy tackle from an air marshall. So yay! Crass, heavy-handed physical comedy is now gender-neutral! But wait. It’s still crass, heavy-handed physical comedy, even if women are doing it too.

In fairness, there were a few good things. I really like Kristen Wiig. I wanted to give her a hug and then hang out with her. And it was pretty weird to see Sookie from Gilmore Girls not being Sookie (wow, I think this is the most times I have made pop culture references in a blog post, or possibly my life, ever).

My absolute favorite moment in the film happens when Annie, exasperated and exhausted, is sitting at a bar with her cop (boy)friend, talking about how her best friend from childhood is getting married and seems to have all her shit together. “I feel like her life is going off and getting perfect and mine is just like phrrr.. [makes sound of things going bad],” she says.

I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t had a thought like that. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have thoughts like that a lot. That’s a good line. That’s a good moment for a film to have.

But it was not really a laugh-out-loud-funny film, not most of the time. There was too much noise and too much padding around something that was strong enough to stand on its own. I’m inclined to like a film about a woman who doesn’t really know how to make her life work in the way she wants it to. I don’t need a scene where her housemate’s Vicky Pollard-inspired sister (see! pop culture!) lifts up her tracksuit top to reveal that the huge tattoo she accidentally got last night is now infected to make me like it. I don’t need a scene where a bride-to-be shits in the street under cover of a merengue-like wedding dress to make me like it. In fact, as you may have gathered, these things make me less inclined to like it.

I keep wondering what happened to subtlety. Why is subtlety not cool? Why can’t we just make and enjoy a film that celebrates how funny it is that none of us have any clue how to be grownups, how funny it is that we don’t all have cup-holders in our cars or a lot of money or a job we like or a sense of what’s good for us? That stuff is funny, and it’s funny because it’s true, and because it’s a little painful but less painful when we realize we’re not alone, not because it resembles the cartoons we used to watch when we were kids.

In fact I go there and I feel like it’s not a place anyone could live, let alone me, even though I know lots of people live in London and lots of people love it. I just don’t see anything there that suggests living on a human scale. The architecture is all mixed up – beautiful things, monstrosities that should never have been allowed to be built, but nothing really stands out, so your impression is never one of either beauty or ugliness or even of contrast, just of some big grey slab that’s muddy and muddled and doesn’t make any sense. The buildings are big but of course nothing is big inside, so you get the impression it was built for giants to look at but dwarves to live in (the opposite of the Tardis, I suppose). And it’s just so disparate, so desperate, so empty even when it’s crowded. In my two mile walk from Pimlico to Chelsea I saw nothing charming except at one point a broad tree-lined avenue which turned out only to be leafy and green because it bordered a hospital, and the lovely garden I could see through the fence was not for public consumption at all. Leafy London. Except most of it seems sterile and shoppy to me. Everyone is shopping, in a way.

***

So I tried shopping, too. I went into a shop, I bought nothing, I went back out again. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of pretty things; it’s that nothing suited me in that moment. I was a traveller; I wore stained jeans and an old flannel shirt and carried a heavy, sweaty rucksack.

It’s funny that even though I have a home I’m still window-shopping for places to live all the time. Every place I visit, even London, is a possibility. I only think of this now because I came across this piece by John McIntyre on André Aciman’s Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, which I haven’t read but would like to read. “Aciman,” writes McIntyre, “views the places he visits not with the wondering, landmark-seeking eye of a tourist, but with the speculative, assessing eye of a potential resident…He examines this habit at length in “The Contrafactual Traveler,” and concludes that, “I ‘connect’ not by saying, ‘Isn’t this lovely, picturesque hill town beautiful?’ but ‘Do I see myself living here?’”

***

The tube was crowded and on the way from Sloane Square to Paddington, an Irish group played live music in my carriage. They were good. They made me smile and think I could get used to that sort of thing. I guess in a way it’s why people live in places like London, it’s why people live in cities, because that sort of thing might happen and make you smile, whatever sort of thing “that” is, whatever makes you smile.

But anyhow I didn’t have any change to give them because I’d spent the last of my change on an artichoke and egg sandwich on artisan olive bread on the King’s Road. So I couldn’t show my appreciation and then they were gone, on the platform, and we were left alone, sweating and close. I did not really want to listen to my music anymore, although my headphones were still in and as it turned out my music had been playing the whole time, but very quietly, so I hadn’t noticed.

***

On the train back to Oxford I fell asleep accidentally, slumped against the window with my hand on my almost-full cup of coffee, my second weak, pointless latté of the day. I had tried to read Hemingway, well, I had read Hemingway, for a bit, but something about the way he described Gertrude Stein as having “immigrant hair” had started to grate on me, even though I had read the book before, and that particular story, in fact, many times, and knew I liked it. But it grated on me and grated on me, and I just sat there and read it over and over and over again – immigrant hair immigrant hair immigrant hair – wondering what does it mean, why does it bother me so much? Until I fell asleep slumped against the window, train crowded at midday, people everywhere, my weak latté still clutched in my hand.

I woke up and it was a muggy day in Oxford. The train station was ugly and for a moment, as I stumbled through the turnstile and stood remembering the way Paddington always makes you feel like you’re on the edge of something, that something new or big is just around the corner, it felt provincial. But I see myself living here anyway.

I’m only guessing that it’s a rat. It could be something else. But I’m guessing it’s a rat because it has that unmistakable dead-rat smell. The first time I smelled it was in my dad’s grey Toyota 4×4. The car I learned to drive in (long before I was legally allowed to drive) – we’d take it down to the beach in the evenings and I’d practice releasing the clutch and rolling smoothly forward. And one day, summertime, we climbed inside to go to town to get groceries and there was this faint whiff of…something. We thought maybe we were imagining it, but a few days later it was more pronounced, and a few days after that it was almost impossible to set foot inside the truck without gagging, and eventually we figured out that a rat had climbed inside the engine and died (rats were always climbing around in the cars, but most of them had the dignity to die elsewhere) and we just had to wait the smell out. So we spent a few weeks driving with the windows down.

A few years ago one died under the floorboards in the hall. Impossible to extract without ripping up half the house. Halfway across the world, I felt weirdly nostalgic for my rural California childhood.

Now I keep thinking I should just use my cold as an excuse to enjoy curling up in bed and watching movies all day, but it’s actually not that fun to be curled up under a duvet sipping hot drinks and lunching on hot soup when it’s BOILING OUTSIDE (not something you often get to say here, to be fair, and my annoyance at being ill during a heat wave has just as much to do with the fact that I’d like to actually enjoy the summer weather as it does to do with physical discomfort). And, also, the coolest, most appropriate sick-room in the house, the lounge, has been appropriated by a decomposing rodent. Yay!

It was springtime in Oxford and the cherry blossoms were blooming and there was something not quite right. This was supposed to be the buoyant time of year, but I kept waking up in the hot blue depths of the pre-dawn with no breath, my heart beating too fast. I remembered feeling like this once or twice before, or maybe it was more than that: I remembered feeling like this for weeks at a time, but I thought I had put all that behind me. So now I thought: am I dying? Well, maybe. But also maybe I have felt this way before and asked myself the same question, needlessly, and been okay, so maybe I will also be okay this time too. But then I thought: well, perhaps this time is different. I thought that perhaps in the morning, if I was not dead, I should make an appointment with the doctor. All those vertiginous nights and I had learned nothing! But in the end I never made an appointment with the doctor, not about that, anyway, and I kept waking up, which was, I eventually decided, a good sign.

When I began to examine my situation, I realised that at the heart of it was this: I could not decide anything, but I was running out of time. I was both very young and very old simultaneously: maybe the tightness in my chest was simply the weight, the vice-grip of missed opportunity. But also I looked around and everyone was older than me. My friends were all older than me. My boyfriend was older than me. We kept talking abstractly but also very seriously about babies, each of us trying to impart some sense of urgency to the other whilst also, at the same time, trying to make light of the situation, to stop the progress in case we had misunderstood each other. He was five years older than me: that was a lifetime, it was nothing. I was still young, to have children, but he was old, even though he was young too. I kept thinking about it this way: as if age somehow mattered.

Only of course it did matter. Age had always mattered. I had always been younger; I had been propelled forward, skipped a grade, left to flounder with my patchy understanding of long division and joined-up writing, encouraged to consider myself intellectually precocious even while I struggled with basic social interactions. But now I was reading articles in the newspaper about how fragile fertility really was, which did not help things, because I was already worried, again needlessly, again powerfully, about fertility. I wanted to go to the doctor and ask, but I did not know how to, and I did not want to have a conversation about how young I was, how much time I had left, because I was not young! I had so little time left!

***

His grandfather kept asking why we were not yet married. It had been four years and I suppose it was not an unreasonable question. We asked ourselves the same thing, too, and I could never find a satisfactory answer except that we weren’t. It was very simple, really. We had lived together from the start and there had never been any doubt about the seriousness of our situation, of our strange devotion, and yet even when we did talk about getting married we talked about it as very young people are apt to do: as a thing for the future. And yet here we were four years later, the future was upon us! So we simply hadn’t caught up with ourselves. But it was hard to say this to a 90-year old man who wanted to see his first grandson married. You see? Age did matter after all.

***

But the real issue was that I could not decide anything. For instance I could not decide if I wanted to commit to children. I mean, I did, really. I thought about my own parents, who had not the benefit, as we ourselves had, of all this time and youth. My mother was 36 when she had me, but this was not, I had begun to realize, really the conscious decision I had always imagined it to be: it was not necessarily about feminism, or about putting a career first, or even about indecision. It was on the other hand at least partly to do with the fact that she simply had not met my father sooner, and so had not the same luxury of time that we, theoretically, had.

But then again I thought about how little I had done so far and how much I did not want to feel useless. I thought about how unprepared we really were. Neither of us had any money to speak of or any prospect of earning very much money ever. We did not own a house and although we had a very understanding landlord in Ireland who did not charge us very much to live in a beautiful terraced house with a big garden in East Oxford down the road from our favourite pub we had very little stability, because while this arrangement might last forever, or at least for a long time, it might also not, and if it did not, I couldn’t see what we’d do. We’d been utterly ruined by living in this beautiful house and I did not know where else in Oxford we could go and be happy as we were happy in this place, at home as we were at home here at home.

But then perhaps it would not matter: we had always said, for instance, how we wanted to move to the US at some point. I couldn’t even decide about this, now: I was so happy in Oxford (even when I was desperately unhappy), I had such a sense of community (even when I felt lonely), I rode my bicycle through the city centre every single day and every single day I was overcome with this sensation that I belonged here: or at least, that I wanted to belong here. The beauty had not gotten old and familiarity had not ruined the novelty of finding myself here, of all places. So where else would we go, and why would we go there? But at the same time we liked the idea of being the sort of people who could get up and go, who could raise children in two countries, or three. And he was deliberately setting up a portable life: a career that allowed for flexibility.

***

This was another problem: careers. I had none. I did have a job, where I spent eight or nine hours every day, with people I liked very much, performing tasks I mostly had no passion for. But anyway a job is not a career, and the real problem is that I could not do the things I really wanted to do. I could not write, much, because I had no time and no energy and then whenever I did write it came out all jumbled and depressed, or else I worked on a novel that I could not decide what I felt about. In some ways I thought it was very good but there were also ways I suspected it was very bad, and I was afraid of finding out which bits were which, in case I had to confront the fact that I would have to do something very seriously different with it to make it readable. And of course I knew that even if it was readable, it wouldn’t necessarily be what I wanted it to be, and even if it was what I wanted it to be, it wouldn’t necessarily be published, let alone read. So it seemed a bit of a dead-end, or at least, not the best way to spend what precious time I had to myself.

***

With the rest of my hours I slept and swam. And I thought about how I wanted not to have to swim every evening with the rest of the weary workers: all of us slogging through our days, slapping our arms against the water, mouths moving open like fish lips as we rolled our heads to the side to receive air. I wanted to swim at midday, maybe. Or midmorning. Or mid-anything. Just anytime that was the time I chose and not the time that had been given to me.

So then I thought that if I felt that way about my time, perhaps children were not right, because the thing I knew, one of the very few things I knew, about children was that when you had them you had no control anymore over your time. You would be awoken again and again in the night and then for twenty years you would give yourself to something else. But then I thought that this was just what I needed: a real reason to not be selfish, not a fake reason, not a salary or a fear.

***

There were certain things I did know. I knew that I was in a holding pattern, I knew that something would have to give or be given, and soon. I knew, too, that in the end we would be alright, that it did not matter if we did not have a house or even if we were not married, and that since we did after all love each other there was no real reason to think that we would not find a way to support a family if we wanted to. I knew also that I did not want to raise a family on unhappiness, and the situation I had got myself into was an unhappy one, because it was not one in which I was doing something I wanted to do. I knew that I had to write something. I knew that I had to keep swimming, because it was the first thing I had found in a long time that gave me the peace of mind they say exercise is supposed to give you. I used run, but the problem with running was the impact: I got a bad knee from it (this was why I had started swimming in the first place), my side often hurt and I would have to cut the run short (later the doctor told me that this was because of my hip and too many years of running on hard surfaces). I had liked running, and I still liked it, but not in the same way. It left me tired, which is a good feeling to have but not always as good as feeling simply buoyant. I guess perhaps it was just that the act of floating seemed a small miracle. My own mother could not swim, and yet I had been given the ability to, I had had lessons and an upbringing by the beach. And my grandmother, now in her 80s, had been swimming practically her whole life and still did it regularly.

I even knew that all my obsessive worry was irrational, and that I was waking up in the middle of the night for nothing, and that I was very lucky in very many ways, and that I was thinking too hard about too many things that were too far in the future for me to have any control over. But even so I kept worrying and I kept waking up.

***

My thinking was very circular. I would think for a time – any time, in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, halfway through a meeting, staring at a slide being projected onto the wall or at my desk looking out at the tennis courts and watching a pair of white-haired men send the ball back and forth on the grass courts. And then I would reach the place I had started: a question, a series of questions. I would find myself unable to understand if I knew what I wanted or only knew what I thought I wanted (or were these the same thing?), if I was able to move forward or not. So I would keep staring out the window. And meanwhile, all the while, time was passing me by, or I was moving with it, or anyway I was getting older, if imperceptibly.

Perhaps this is what they mean by growing up: the awareness not of mortality – nothing so grand – but simply of each moment. The ability to literally feel the length of a second or an hour, and to place that second or that hour in context, to know how much it means. But in any case I did not really want to be grown up: I only wanted to sleep through the night, I only wanted to find it not such an effort to smile at people or even at myself in the mirror. I wanted to cut my hair short, even though I worried I never would, in the same way I wanted to say, ‘I want to start a family now, because why not?’ even though I knew I would not say that, yet. I worried what would happen but also wanted to know what would happen if I did do these sorts of things.

I told myself that in a way, once before, I had done something like this: I had simply moved to Oxford, which went against logic, which was not the easy or even necessarily possible thing to do, and yet I had done it and it had been easy and we had made it possible. And it was the best thing I had done, it was one of the only things I could not convince myself, if I tried, to regret: no amount of convincing would make even my wretched anxious self think that that had been at all a bad idea, even if it had not always been good, even if I had not always been smart about it, even if we had struggled.

So I thought I should be comforted by that.