For the past few weeks I have been trying to capture the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window on video. This is harder than it sounds; they come off in bursts, because of a gust of wind, and by the time I realize it’s happening it’s already happened. This is like Autumn itself: I always think how much I love it, the way the leaves glow and the air goes crisp, and how much I’m going to take advantage of it this year, really go for walks, really explore and enjoy it. And then one day I am at my desk, trying to capture the last yellow leaves as they come down, and I realize that I’ve missed it! Again! Already the tree nearest me is bare, save a single red leaf on the tip of a single branch, and soon the cherry trees too will be naked.

So I still have no satisfactory video footage of the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window. I do have lots of short video clips of nothing happening. Someday I will find them and wonder why they’re there. I will wonder this for about ten seconds, and then I will delete them because they’re taking up space, and who wants ten short video clips of the view they see every day?

***

Trying to capture on video something which I cannot capture on video is just one of a number of things I’ve been distracting myself with lately. (By the way, is that the correct phrase – “on video”? It seems curiously analog for a process which involves nothing more than tapping the screen of my iPhone). The problem is that I do actually have something I need to be concentrating on (namely, writing the book which is actually going to be published). I don’t mean that I can’t concentrate (I can concentrate, I sat in the same chair for several hours on Sunday and read Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam in its entirety – not a long novel, but certainly an act which requires a certain degree of concentration). I just mean that I can’t see the connections between what I’m concentrating on very well. So on the one hand I have the thing that I’m mostly working on, the thing where all of my attention should be but isn’t, quite. (Is all of anyone’s attention ever on just one thing? At least part of mine is always on worrying about whether or not I’m paying the thing I need to pay attention to enough attention instead of the thing itself.) And then on the other hand I have these other things on the fringes, which are infringing on my ability to think clearly about anything.

***

One day, convinced that nothing in the world could compel me to do good work, so why bother, I watch an old episode of Silent Witness over lunch. I’m still at my desk, which makes it seem like I haven’t thrown the towel in quite yet, or at least, I haven’t thrown all of the towel in, I’m still clutching on to one corner, like it’s a lifeline. Last week was particularly busy, I tell myself, so I deserve this hour (which turns inevitably into three). But for how long can you honestly say you ‘deserve’ something like that? When has the debt been repaid?

Anyway, watching old episodes of anything is a dangerous game for me. When I’m in the throes of a TV show obsession I am worryingly unable to cope with real life. And as a matter of fact I’ve been spending quite a lot of time watching old episodes of Silent Witness recently. After that first sneaky hour a number of others follow, until they are not sneaky anymore. I am watching an episode at lunch, an episode after lunch, an episode before dinner, an episode during dinner, an episode after dinner. I could pretend that I’m trying to find something relevant in it; that any distraction can actually be warped by willpower into something tangentially but unmistakably useful. I’m studying character development, storytelling through cinematography, whatever. But in the interest of being honest, I’ll tell you the truth, which is that I mostly watch it for the pretty faces.

Last night (or maybe this morning, at about 2 am, just before I fell asleep and had fitful dreams about solving a crime which culminated in two exactly identical bodies lying on the mortuary slabs – not twins, just two versions of the same body) – it occurred to me that I also actually just like the show. There’s no shortage of unrealistic television dramas about people who solve crimes and cut up dead bodies and do vaguely sciencey shit – CSI, the other CSI, the other CSI, and so on – but this one, for whatever reason, is my favorite. It doesn’t make me squeamish, which it should (paper cuts make me squeamish, let alone fake autopsies). It doesn’t frighten me, particularly. It walks a fine line between being too ridiculous to be worth watching and representing very finely some aspects of the human condition – elements of the soap opera combined with elements of an Ian McEwan novel, perhaps.

Between episodes, I spend some time thinking about what it means that there are so many of these kinds of shows out there and so many people watching them. I’m not qualified to speculate on this, of course. I’m sure someone somewhere has done a study on it, or written an article. But in my concentration, I don’t think to look it up. The crime element explains some of the apparently endless appeal (a number of these kinds of series have been running for over a decade) – we’re drawn to mysteries, aren’t we, they’re easy to make compelling even in an hour-long slot. But beyond that is the question of whether it is morbid or wise to surround ourselves with all of these fictional representations of mortality all of the time. These shows may not be subtle, they may not be what astute critics would sneeringly call “good television”, they may stretch the limits of our willingness to suspend disbelief, but at the core is the simple truth of life ending in death. Blah blah blah.

But yeah. Basically what it comes down to is this: I like the show because when Tom Ward and Emilia Fox smile at each other over a microscope or a corpse, it makes me smile, too.

***

To try to trick myself into thinking about the thing I should be thinking about (that’s a retrospective excuse, of course), I start a side project. Or, at least, even though it isn’t fully formed as an idea in my head yet, I describe the latest thing that’s distracting me from the thing I really need to concentrate on as a “side project” in order to validate it (everyone needs a hobby, right? So why can’t the side project just be my hobby?). I try not to make it seem too concrete, because the point at which it becomes concrete is the point at which I need to acknowledge either that it is A Thing I’m Going To Run With or A Thing I’m Going To Put On The Back Burner or, worst of all but probably most likely, Not Really A Thing At All. I try to use words that are so ambiguous that stringing them together adds no meaning: loosely speaking, I say to myself, it’s about death, depression, anxiety, memory, and purpose(lessness). It’s really very funny to me, but I don’t know why. I haven’t yet been able to pinpoint precisely what it is that makes me laugh about this.

Then, of course, I find this piece about how to write funny by Steve Almond. “As a rule,” writes Almond, “the sadder the material, the funnier the prose.”

That’s it, that’s the thing, the idea that’s distracting me, or at least that’s the idea that happens to be distracting me in the moment I read it. Take Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which for an unrelated reason has been heavily on my mind lately. No matter how many times I read it (I’ve lost count, I’m afraid to say), it always makes me laugh. That’s a good sign: if its jokes (which seems woefully the wrong word here) relied solely on something theatrical, circumstantial – misunderstandings, Shakespearean situations – surely their funniness would, gradually, start to diminish. One can generally only be delighted by an engineered joke for so long (wordplay is another matter). But the funniest bits of Vile Bodies are the saddest bits – and the book is a tragedy, really.

There’s also Geoff Dyer, who’s at his funniest when describing – well, anything, but particularly those things which on the surface appear quite serious: anxiety, depression, aging, loneliness, ruin(s). Here he is writing about having a nervous breakdown in Detroit. It’s one of the saddest and funniest things I’ve ever read:

It was raining outside. Not a howling storm, just steady drizzle. The kind of rain that yields no sense of when it might ease up, that seems to be keeping itself in reserve so that it can, if necessary, keep going till the end of time. ‘It was raining outside.’ Gore Vidal derides someone for writing a sentence like that, feigning surprise or relief that it was not raining inside. But that day in the Clique I looked down and saw that it was raining inside as well as outside. My egg-smeared plate was becoming wet. Drops of water were falling on to my toast, moistening my eggy hash browns. As I looked it rained harder and I could not see. I was crying, not sobbing, just this steady leak of tears. And then, as I realized I was crying, I felt that I was in danger of sobbing. I got a grip on myself, stopped the leak, staunched it. I ate my wet eggs and looked at the rain outside, hoping that would take my mind off the rain inside. I’m having a breakdown, I said to myself, I’m having a breakdown while having breakfast. I said this to myself to calm myself down, to try to familiarize and render ordinary the extraordinary turn of events that had led to this internal rain. I stifled my sobs and ate my breakfast which did not taste any worse because I was having a nervous breakdown. When I had finished the eggs I wiped my knife with a napkin and spread butter and apricot jelly on the whole-wheat toast. I finished the rest of my coffee. I calmed down. I was no longer leaking tears but I was no less distraught now than when I was having a nervous breakdown, which I was still having even though I had, to a degree, managed to regain control of myself.

Why is it funny? You might ask that; I’ve asked myself that. But you might just as well ask why it’s sad. The tragedy is in the comedy and the comedy is in the tragedy. That’s right, isn’t it? Like Lorrie Moore (who Almond also mentions in his article). What makes A Gate at the Stairs so funny? Certainly not its wretched outcome – or maybe that’s precisely why it’s funny. Funny for not being funny, like everything else. When I was about six years old my best friend broke her arm trying to do a back handspring in our living room. For some awful reason I began to laugh. I ran into my room with our other friend, another witness, and we giggled inconsolably, behind a shut door. I did not find it funny that my friend was scared, in pain. But something about the inevitability of the situation, perhaps, something about the irreversibility of it, elicited an involuntarily hysterical reaction – like the scene in Outnumbered where Sue submits to a fit of laughter at a funeral.

“So why are these books so funny?” Almond asks, after listing his own favorite funny books – The Catcher in the Rye, Money, Birds of America. “To begin with, because their authors reject the very premise that suffering should be treated only as an occasion for sorrow. They view suffering as something more like an inevitable cosmic joke, one that binds us all…Their characters make us laugh because they tell us the truth at a velocity that exceeds our normal standards of insight. And because they continually violate the normal boundaries of decorum, by confessing thoughts and feelings the rest of us spend our lives concealing. We’re both shocked and gratified at their candor, and so we laugh.”

***

I wish I could connect this to what I started writing about here, but as I’ve said, the bit of my brain that makes connections between things isn’t doing its job. You could blame all the TV or the navel-gazing or the short days or the pleasantly dull routine I’ve settled into or whatever, but I don’t really think it’s symptomatic of anything; it’s just the way things are at the moment.

Anyway that’s more or less what’s been going on in my head/life for the last few weeks.

❧

On Monday evening we went to Mayfair for the launch of P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters by Dr. Sophie Ratcliffe.

I had the immense pleasure of working, a little, on the book. About two years ago, Sophie asked me if I’d like to be her research assistant. She was heavily pregnant with her first child, and I would show up at her house in the early afternoon to do some Wodehouse. It was a very hot summer, and sometimes we’d take a break to drink elderflower cordial and watch Wimbledon; Andy Murray was doing very well, I seem to remember, until he one day he wasn’t.

Then this little creature – a baby boy – materialized. The thing I always think about babies is how suddenly they appear, even after nine months of anticipation. Where there had been no one, there was someone: a son, an actual human being. It sounds stupid – of course you know this is how birth works. But when I returned to recommence the Wodehouse work, I kept thinking: last time I was in this house this child did not exist. And now this child does exist.

I think books might be a little the same way: not as momentous, but equally surprising, even after all that time. My involvement was ad hoc, part time, and only spans the last two years; but this book has been in the works for nearly six years. There were a lot of letters, and consequently, even after editing (I can tell you with some confidence that once you’ve read one of the elderly Wodehouse’s letters listing various physical ailments, you’ve basically read all of the elderly Wodehouse’s letters listing various physical ailments), it’s a big book. (“I have been looking through my diary,” Wodehouse writes to Denis Mackail in 1946, “and I realize that I must be one of the world’s great correspondents. This is the 43rd letter I have written this month, and my monthly average for the last year has been over thirty”). So its presence now on my desk seems miraculous to me, even though, not so long ago, I delivered the manuscript to Random House (it was so big I had to carry it in a rucksack) after Sophie had made some final edits, and it seemed at that point a very real thing.

Anyhow, I didn’t know the first thing about babies, and to be honest I didn’t know all that much about Wodehouse, either, but Sophie was kind enough to believe in my ability to pick up on the basics of both, and I spent many happy hours pushing a pram, making tea, steaming milk bottles, leafing through old copies of Punch and The Captain at the Bodleian, researching obscure silent film stars, transcribing letters, reading and re-reading passages from Robert McCrum’s epic biography, formatting footnotes. It was easily the best, most enjoyable and ultimately satisfying work I have ever had the honor of being allowed to do.

In fact I’ve spent the last two years feeling a little like I’m living in Wodehouse’s backyard, like I have this view of him that no one else has. I’m not even sure I like Wodehouse, as a man, all the time, but I feel close to him, or to his words, anyway. Perhaps the joy of letters is not just their historical and academic importance, but the way you can sometimes be made to feel that a letter was, in a way, meant for you – how comforting as a writer, for instance, to read the insecurities of such a great author. “Gosh, Bill, will one never learn to write?” wonders Wodehouse in 1954, even after so many successes. Gosh, I tell myself, often, and after very few successes: will one never learn to write?

I first read Wodehouse in my teens; I was lonely, and obsessed by the discrepancy between what I perceived to be the beauty of the early 20th century, as embodied by the tragic decadence of, say, Brideshead Revisited, and the ugliness of these very early days of the 21st century. I had voluntarily exiled myself from the community of my peers; I forced them to reject me by rejecting them first. Instead of joining in, I chose to live simultaneously in the past (I wrote by copying the cadences of Agatha Christie and Evelyn Waugh – something I’m not sure even now I’ve been able to fully correct) and the future (I worked hard in high school so that I could get into college so that I could be successful in whatever my chosen career was, which seems comic now).

What appealed to me about Wodehouse, of course, was the nostalgia. “Let’s face it,” Wodehouse writes in 1973,

“the world I write about, always a small one, – one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie Wooster would say, – is now not even small, it is nonexistent…This is pointed out to me every time a new book of mine dealing with the Drones Club and the lads who congregate there is published. ‘Edwardian’ the critics cry, and I shuffle my feet and blush a good deal and say ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’…But sometimes I am in a more defiant mood. Mine, I protest, are historical novels.”

Someone better versed in 20th century British history than myself might argue that the world Wodehouse wrote about had never existed at all, but I’m not sure matters. The nostalgia for it is as fresh now as it was in 1973 or 1933. On Monday I found myself face-to-face with Norman Murphy, a man of seemingly limitless knowledge about Wodehouse. He is old and bright eyed; he approached me after the speeches, caught me starting my second glass of wine, leaning against a stack of books on a table, trying to look nonchalant and friendly at the same time. He asked who I was; I told him, or at least I said my name, and my reason for being here.

“Ah,” he said. “Now, what did you read, and where did you read it?”

I did not point out, but I could have pointed out, I guess, that Wodehouse never went to Oxbridge, either. I suppose in a sense I had passed a test simply by understanding what he was asking (later, I told the story to a friend of mine who really did go to Oxford; “I don’t get it,” he said). I felt revolted by the antiquated assumption that, in order to contribute to anything worth contributing to, one must have read a subject at an appropriate institution (I was educated in Boston, but not even at Harvard!). But a part of me felt also comforted, or at least sympathetic: it was an act of nostalgia, I felt, to ask such a question, in such a way. After all, I had felt so initially drawn to Oxford as a place because it placed me as near a thing that doesn’t exist (the Oxford of literature) as I could be; my living here, in England, was in a way also an act of nostalgia.

To be contrary (but also truthful), I told Murphy that I had grown up in California (“I think Californian scenery is the most loathsome on earth,” Wodehouse wrote while living in Hollywood). I told him I was writing a book about a rock n’ roll band. I disagreed when he suggested that Beerbohm’s fictional Judas College was based on Christ Church. And he was, I flatter myself, delighted and horrified in equal measure.

The question people often ask, when confronted with this book, or a book like this, a book of correspondence, is what will happen next. Will there be any more lives in letters? Is this one of the last? “A Life in Email,” after all, doesn’t have the same gravitas.

I find the question doesn’t really interest me. Perhaps the teenage me, speeding through the loathsome, beautiful California landscape, wanting to be a part of the modern world and reject it at the same time, would have come down on the side of the doubters, the ones who say that because tweets are disposable, the art of correspondence has died. Now, though, I remain hopeful that there will nearly always be enough contradiction in the world, and enough nostalgia, to keep correspondence – whatever that may come to mean – alive. And in the meantime I mean to further develop my relationship with Wodehouse by reading his letters again, in their final form, and seeing what narrative makes itself apparent this time.

❧

Last week I went to London to hear Geoff Dyer speak about Americans. I didn’t have any particular desire to hear Geoff Dyer speak about Americans, but I did – almost desperately – want to hear Geoff Dyer speak, and I did want to know what The School of Life’s secular sermons are like, so I travelled from the Cowley Road to Conway Hall early on a Sunday morning.

It was one of those lukewarm September days. I sat at the front of the hall, perhaps wanting to be noticed, to be (perceived as) bold. A woman in a red and blue military-style jacket (like a drum major’s uniform, perhaps, if I knew what a drum major’s uniform looked like, or even really what a drum major was) stood before us. She wanted us to sing; this really was a sermon, and there were hymns. She said she had changed a little bit of the first hymn – Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, lyrics printed in our pamphlets – and invited Ed, her small blond pianist, to play a few bars so that we could practice the modified verse.

We sang. It still sounded like a hymn, like an English hymn sung in an English church on a rainy English sunday. It had that hymn-rhythm; which is to say, no rhythm at all. I don’t know much about singing, but I’m pretty sure that the way the English sing their hymns makes virtually no sense unless you’ve grown up singing them that way.

After we sang, I felt good; singing in public always makes me feel this way, as if I have achieved some kind of victory (in preschool I was once admonished to the point of tears for mouthing the words to a song rather than singing them out loud). But there was something unnerving about the whole thing, too. There was something strange about this woman, in her drum major’s jacket, with her Shirley Temple curls and her peppy voice, imploring us to loosen up a little, shake our limbs a little. I did not want to shake my arms or my legs like a chicken; I certainly did not want to do so repeatedly, and I most certainly did not want have to pay the bald man sitting next to me a compliment, not because I didn’t think he was worthy of a compliment, but because the compliment would inevitably be forced, even if meant – I like your shirt, I like your blazer, you have a nice smile – and therefore quite meaningless. Moreover, the first thing that had popped into my head was, “I like your hair,” which was definitely not something you could say to a bald man you had never met before. So I just looked the other way; it was easy, I pretended I was on the tube, trying to avoid looking at the person across the aisle whose knees were touching mine.

And the bald man turned to the curly-haired man behind us and said: “I like your hair.” And the curly-haired man said to the bald man, “That’s a great shirt!” And it was a great shirt; I hadn’t noticed before, but it was a great shirt now that the curly-haired man had mentioned it.

***

Then Geoff Dyer – who, even though he makes frequent reference to being tall and thin, is much taller and thinner than you imagine he is – was on the stage, at the pulpit, preaching, or, rather, speaking. He sounded a little like he might be suffering from the onset or aftermath of a mild early Autumn cold; occasionally he paused to sip from a tall glass of water. He told some anecdotes, about Americans, about the British, about the time he went to Big Sur and stood in silence on a bluff overlooking a bank of fog so thick it obscured the sea, everything, and thought how peaceful it was until an American man appeared on the scene and boomed into the quiet: “Sure is peaceful, isn’t it!” I knew I’d remember that anecdote, not because it meant anything much but because I, too, have been to Big Sur and been impressed by the way the fog rolls in and covers the coast but allows you this God-like view over it, this view that makes you think that virtually anything could be going on below you but you are above it, on the sun-bleached hillsides, in the sun. Well, yes, I thought: that is my country.

***

But then, I don’t really know my own country. I’ve probably seen more of England – percentage-wise, at least – than I have of the USA.

Last summer, on our way to Toronto, we had a layover in Minneapolis, and so, for the first time in a long time, I was in my country – though of course I had never been there before, to Minneapolis, to anywhere near Minneapolis.

I passed through immigration. The officer, who looked about my age, did not seemed inclined to interrogate me, but neither did he seemed inclined to let me through without at least making an attempt to understand the apparently complicated circumstances under which I found myself now here, in our country but his city.

“So you live in the UK?” he said, flipping through passport pages, looking at faded stamps and expired visas.

“Yes,” I said.

“But you’re going to Canada.”

“Yes. For a wedding. But not mine,” I added. I laughed, he didn’t. Maybe he was thinking it was perfectly plausible that I was flying to Toronto via Minneapolis for my own wedding to an Englishman. For some reason I started to think, what would happen if I just made a run for it? Would they catch me? Would they detain me? Would I go to jail? How would I explain it?

“So you live in the UK and you’re going to Canada and you’re not staying in Minneapolis?” he summarized.

“Yes,” I said. And he stamped my US passport, and I was home, geographically if not emotionally.

Thirsty in the departures lounge, I bought a bottle of Aquafina water with two stray dollar bills in my wallet. It reminded me of being in high school, buying bottles of water from the vending machine outside the gym during the long, hot volleyball season, which always began in an Indian summer. We would sweat our way through two hours of scrimmages and sprints and inspirational speeches. I was 14 on 9/11 and I remember that afternoon, though we’d spent all day in front of television screens, which they’d produced as if by magic and hauled into all the classrooms, it was business as usual. Drills and sit-ups and bottles of Aquafina from the vending machine. Sometimes it was so hot that we would go across to the pool after practice and leap in. Then I’d spend the long drive home wet, my t-shirt stuck to my sports bra, my hair smelling of chlorine and perspiration.

So Minneapolis is not where I’m from, but in a way, it’s part of where I’m from. The truth is that when I say “my country”, what I really mean is “my parents’ house,” “the farm my best friend grew up on,” “the bit of Boston I used to live in,” “the other bit of Boston I used to live in.” All of these tiny, disconnected places, forming a patchwork map, my map. I love my map. I love those places. I feel patriotic about street corners, particular coves and hilltops, parks and benches and cafés and long winding roads. But I don’t know what Americans are like; I don’t know what America is like. I don’t know what to think of my country as a whole. I don’t even know how to see my country as a whole.

***

I guess the trouble with being an American abroad is that you never know where you stand. Everything depends on politics, and politics cannot be counted on.

In his sermon, Dyer alluded to a period – four or five years ago, when the pound was worth twice what the dollar was worth, when animosity towards George Bush was at a high – during which Americans were treated with a much chillier, more patronizing attitude. I remember that period. That was when I first came here. I was defensive, yes, but I always imagined that people looked at you a bit differently if you were American. It was polite in those days (it may still be polite, in fact) to ask if someone was Canadian if you discerned a North American accent. I remember an aggressive and insecure compére at a comedy show, mistaking my sarcasm for genuine insult, telling me I was just another one of these Americans, spending a few weeks here, pretending to know everything, and why didn’t I just go back to where I’d come from? And then, later, realizing his mistake, he was so apologetic (“the cult of the apology,” Dyer called it, this unmistakably British instinct – “the human equivalent of birdsong”) that I couldn’t help but feel some kind of perverse sympathy for him.

But here we are now, and things have changed, and authors are giving talks in praise of Americans. And in a few years, or a few weeks, something else will change, attitudes will shift, and I, who has not moved, will stand somewhere else.

***

Then there is the issue of friendliness. The American smile. Updike’s quip: “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy”. I started to think about this. As I thought, I realized that I was probably, even in that moment, quite happy to be in London on a sunny Sunday morning listening to one of my favorite authors dole out praise for my countrymen, scowling. I am nearly always scowling. When I work, when I sit, relaxed and reading or listening, my face contorts in a way that is comfortable for me but uncomfortable for everyone else; I’m often asked if I’m okay. Yes, of course I’m okay, I say, can’t you tell?

Needless to say, I don’t have an American smile. I was not invited to join the cult as a child, I missed the meetings where the mechanics of the smile were discussed and practiced until they became an instinct.

I used to work at a school in Oxford. About half of our adult students were Americans doing a semester abroad; the other half came from all over the world to study English. One of my many menial tasks was to print student photos onto ID cards. Even before you checked the files, you could always tell the Americans from the rest, especially the girls: they were the ones with shiny grins as big as the moon, wide eyes, flat hair, heads cocked at a flattering angle. They were not prettier than anyone else – very often the opposite – but they always gave the impression of being prettier than everyone else.

As I listened to Dyer speak about the charm of Americans, I wondered if maybe it wasn’t real charm, not always; maybe sometimes it was the illusion of charm, like those girls smiling up at me from their ID cards, pretending to be prettier than everyone else and therefore convincing me, convincing all of us, that they were.

Even I am charmed when I go back to the US; I am always amazed that shopkeepers want to have such long and involved conversations with me, that cashiers want to make eye contact with me, that the girl at the bank is so genuinely curious about my weekend plans. But I feel like I don’t know how to trick myself into being charming. I feel, frankly, like I’m not a very good American, with my scowl and my shyness and my sorries (I may not be part of the cult of the smile, but I am definitely part of the cult of the apology).

Lately, though I’ve been practicing being more American. I’ve been trying to accentuate my accent, for instance, or to raise my voice above a whisper in the pub. I suppose that the longer I’m here the more strongly I feel the compulsion to assert the fact that I’m from there, to solidify my standing as an outsider even while I feel increasingly like I am part of something.

***

After the sermon was over, after we sang a final hymn, I stood in line to waiting to ask Geoff Dyer to sign a book. I hate asking authors I love to sign books. I’m always hoping that, somehow, perhaps by looking deep into my eyes, they’ll discern that I’m special, that my appreciation for their work is special, that we could be friends, even. At the same time, I know it’s a pointless thing to do: I’m not trying to increase the value of my library, and I’m under no illusion that because an author has scribbled “to Miranda” on the title page, we have any kind of relationship.

But as I stood there before him, presenting my book and my nervous smile, I made a conscious effort to try to be more American than I might ordinarily be. I began to smile and to speak. I gushed about how much I liked his work. I said my name so quickly (perhaps, I hoped, so American-ly) that he had to ask me to repeat it. He signed my book. I said, “have a nice day!” And then I sped off with my heart thumping for no obvious reason, sure I’d made a fool of myself.

Later, waiting for the bus home, sipping a too-large chai latté like I used to do in college, the sun shining limply over Notting Hill, I forgot to care about whether or not I had made a fool of myself. I thought of this, by Jawaharlal Nehru: “But in my own country, also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.” I figured that really, the only country I could claim any ownership of was the one that’s made of memory.

❧

I’ve been talking about collaborating with my lovely musical friends Little Fish for a while now. Like most good ideas, it was born in a pub after a few pints, and now it’s an actual real thing: I’m writing a book! With them!

It’s called The New Original Little Fish Paper Club Handbook™, though it isn’t exactly a handbook. The subtitle is “essays on a rock n’ roll band”, which is the closest we’ve come to describing it succinctly, and it’s being published through Unbound, which means that you – and anyone you know – can help make it happen.

I wrote about Unbound just after they launched in May, and I’m thrilled to be working with them for all of the reasons I outlined in my original post. But I’m particularly pleased to be working with them on this project, because there’s a lot of overlap between the reasons that Unbound was set up and the reasons that Little Fish – who’ve toured all over the world supporting acts like Supergrass, Placebo, Alice in Chains, Courtney Love and Blondie – chose to leave their label earlier this year, settle down in Oxford, and pursue an independent career. The intention of our book is not to cast the music industry as the big bad wolf, or to suggest that everyone should take a more DIY approach. But we do intend to explore the implications of independence, and the questions it raises, particularly for a band – questions like, “why do we play music?”, “how do we make a living doing this?”, and, indeed, “what is a living?”. (These questions, by the way, are totally transferable: as a writer, I ask myself variations of them every day).

We officially launched the project on Monday evening at an event in Notting Hill with a short pitch and a performance by Little Fish. You can watch the pitch video, read more about the project (including a short excerpt) and pledge your support (if you decide you want to) on the Unbound site. A million very heartfelt thanks to everyone who has supported or intends to support the project, or encouraged us in any other way, however small. It means a lot to me and to Little Fish.

Here’s an excerpt from the pitch and then I promise I’ll shut up about this for at least five minutes:

The New Original Little Fish Paper Club Handbook™ is a book about Little Fish, but it’s also a book about making it work, making your own way, and making stuff – music, comics, t-shirts, fishy paper squares, stickers, badges, vinyl, stop-motion animations, even books. It’s about declaring your independence and rewriting the myths you live by.

You can be part of the Little Fish story by pledging your support. Supporters will get access to a shedful of updates, photos, videos, and free exclusive downloads. And Little Fish will get the chance to share what they know – and don’t know – about what it means to be a band.

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One night I went for a walk, to dislodge some words that had got stuck at the very back of my head, in the least accessible place. I took my camera and walked down the Iffley Road at sunset. It happened to be a very fine sunset, with pink bleeding into the horizon and gold clouds over the track where Roger Bannister ran his sub-4-minute mile. I took a few photos. I thought maybe it would help if I tried to look at the city, or even the world, from a photographer’s point of view, but apart from the sunset I was having a hard time figuring out what to take a photo of. It didn’t help that the city was basically empty; it made everything feel static. Very few people seemed to be out enjoying the dregs of summer as I was out enjoying the dregs of summer.

Anyone who was outside, though, was also taking photographs. I began to feel a kind of camaraderie. A camera-raderie, maybe. On Magdalen Bridge a girl on a pale blue Pashley paused to pull a camera from her handbag. In Radcliffe Square, the big Camera dwarfing my little camera, bells began to ring, and I stood taking pointless beautiful photographs, listening to the bells ringing. A family wandered past; I got their silhouettes in some of my shots. They were also taking photographs, naturally: they were tourists, or at least, I imagined they were tourists, because they looked tourist-like, whatever that meant. But I had to stop myself thinking like this when I saw that I could also seem to be a tourist, and in a way I still was a tourist, even after four years, and I would still be one after forty, too. The family skirted around me and went to stand for a long time outside All Souls, though there is nothing much to see there; I have often looked through the gates of All Souls and never seen a soul.

Some girls were taking photographs under the Bridge of Sighs. Three of them stood in a line and jumped up obediently as the fourth took a photo, and then they changed configuration, so the one taking the photo could also be in a photo. I thought it was funny, and a little sad, that no matter how many times they did this, one of them would still always be missing from the photograph.

I went down Queen’s Lane, liking the sound of my rubber soles on the street, which was notable for being the only sound I could now hear. When I first started riding a bicycle in the city I had crashed twice in the same spot, trying to squeeze through a narrow gate. Now I had been cycling for years, and I had forgotten what it was like to walk here.

***

Outside the Grand Café, I considered the cocktail menu. I did not want a cocktail. I thought about having a glass of white wine, though I can never see the point of drinking a glass of wine you don’t love unless you’ve got food to go with it. I wasn’t at all sure they would have a white wine that I would love, particularly when I didn’t even really feel like having white wine. In fact I didn’t know if I wanted to go in at all. Nevertheless I went in, and ordered a Kir Royal, and sat in front of a big mirror, on a wicker chair, and read from Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. A party in Venice, cocaine, champagne, sex. I read for the duration of my Kir Royal and then felt obliged either to order another or to leave, even though it was still practically empty, just a couple sitting by the window and a pair of girls at the bar. I might well have been on my own, I thought. I did sort of want another, I could have stayed in Venice for longer, but in the end I brought my empty glass to the bar and left.

***

I crossed the road thinking I might like to take a bus home, but I had just missed one and I did not immediately see another coming, so I put some music on and walked home, where I finished the Venice section of the book and moved on to the India section: not just a change of scenery, but also a shift in perspective, a change from “he” to “I”. I read:

“Every atom of the air is saturated by history that isn’t even history, myth, so a temple built today looks, overnight, as if it’s been there since the dawn of time. Every morning is the dawn of time, I wrote in my notebook. Every day is the whole of time.”

I made a note of it, because in a way it corresponded to a thought I’d been having, or trying to have, about memory and place. It made me think, in fact, of the epigraph to another Geoff Dyer book, The Missing of the Somme:

“Remember: the past won’t fit
into memory without something left over;
it must have a future”

That was something by Joseph Brodsky. In Jeff in Venice, Dyer writes that “Jeff had never read Brodsky” – but of course Geoff must have, or must at least have read that particular bit of Brodsky and identified it as relevant. I guess sometimes it’s better to have a quote without context; it’s more malleable, it’s why epigraphs work. I love epigraphs in books, but in fact I rarely read them; I always think the epigraph is a representation of the private relationship the author has with a text, and kind of irrelevant to the relationship that the reader will develop with that same text. It’s like saying, “hey, in my head this complements what you’re about to read. In your head it may have nothing to do with it. Whatever.”

***

Maybe it’s like writing about place: the place is actually irrelevant to everyone else. I used to like reading about Paris, before I had ever been to Paris, just to see the names of streets and squares that meant nothing to me. I don’t think it much mattered that when I first read A Moveable Feast I didn’t know where the Place Saint-Michel was, hadn’t yet sat in a café there with my lover, both of us poor and a little hungry, sucking down café au laits in the late summer heat. But then I went through a phase of thinking that context was paramount, that to really read a book, it was essential to know the place it was about, to have a map of memories in your head (to “anchor you”, I thought).

But then every time I read a book about Oxford and came upon a passage about the Radcliffe Camera or the High Street or the Grand Café or the Cowley Road I would have to go back through my own catalog of experiences, find a corresponding situation, consider the gap or overlap between one writer’s view and my own. And that can be tiring.

***

Every day is the whole of time – the thought I had been trying to have was simply this: places trap memory by accumulating it. Like rain collecting in a bucket with infinite capacity. Like Tennyson – “I am a part of all that I have met.” And part of a memory is also the future of that memory. Places are haunted by ghosts, but also by those who are still alive.

Before bed I wondered how much of our description of place has nothing to do with place, and everything to do with the “I” or the “he”. I’ve never been to India, but I’ve been to a place where “every atom of the air is saturated by history that isn’t even history, myth”. But maybe I haven’t; maybe that is just a state of mind, a state of mind you could be in wherever you were in the world.

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