In the introduction to George Monbiot’s No Man’s Land, I read: “Humankind was born on the road. Our brains…are those of the migrant. The restlessness which, in one corrupted form or another, is felt by every human being on earth, is incurable.”

We’re far from Africa and we’ve lost our roots, but there’s still an everyday restlessness, corrupted by centuries of evolution and years of education, skulking in the dark corners of our consciousness.

Friends of ours have just bought a boat to live on. They like the idea of portability; their boat gives physical form to an unspoken desire to periodically migrate. They can float up and down the Thames with their possessions and their love. It’s more a metaphor than anything – in rainy England, confined by villages and narrow rivers, by family homes and local pubs, we’re hardly the Turkana, traversing inhospitable desert lands, setting up temporary camp after temporary camp – but I’m not immune to the temptation of just…picking up. And going.

Why do I like the idea of a floating existence, the ability to suddenly pick up my life and simply shift it elsewhere? The reality of it – the friendships lying fallow, the swapping of time zones, the stress of every mundane detail – is not romantic, and an anxious person is not naturally suited to rootlessness. But still.

In 2007, during the floods, we helped a man called Rob prevent his houseboat from running adrift. It was my first summer here, I had just met the Man, and everything looked bright and strange. I was surprised by the power of the river, swollen and purple in its malleable banks, but I understood intuitively what it is to have one’s home threatened by a force bigger than oneself. Years of fretting over the smell of fire in the California hills had taught me to respect the fragility of a man-made structure; I still had dreams (nightmares?) of choosing, methodically, ruthlessly, which possessions to flee with. That boat was Rob’s home but it could as easily be carried away, or “dash’d all to pieces”, as Shakespeare’s Miranda put it, on the rocks.

Later, we sat in the boat and shared a bottle of wine. We felt a million miles away from Port Meadow, which glistened in the murky twilight, a galaxy away from Jericho with its cocktail bars and boutiques. Rob’s self-sufficiency (he even had a set of solar panels on the roof) captivated us completely, and when we did eventually meander back into town, we sat in a hot pub stunned by the brightness of the lights and said very little.

A few weeks ago, a friend emailed me to say that, almost exactly three years on, Rob had passed away. This will go down in history as a hot summer, a happy time during which the sky burned blue and children ate ice cream and young people got slowly drunk on champagne as they punted down the Cherwell; no floods this year, no boats needing rescue. And when we next visit that spot on Port Meadow, what will we see? Not Rob’s boat, moved a hundred times since we sat near the fire in its belly, hungry for warmth and company on a cool midsummer evening, now ownerless, adrift in spirit. No; the landscape changes constantly.

2.

So you could say that maybe it is not as easy to be at home somewhere, anywhere, as it might seem.

We wander down long roads towards manor houses. I read that the English have this fixation on the home; and maybe these vast estates were built, I think, to allow their owners the illusion of wandering – a harrowing journey down a dark corridor, a flitting between huge empty rooms.

My home is more the man I live with than the walls around us; it’s my books, not my post code. But for us, the constant movement of the summer has made me crave a period of stillness. The backstage passes, the train journeys, the forays into the exotic, the picnics and punting. It’s been a kaleidoscope period, a beautiful whirlwind.

Now we’re housesitting for friends on the edge of the Cotswolds. And what I feel here is maybe the opposite of Monbiot’s corrupted restlessness. Late in the afternoon, after too many hours with my legs folded up against a wooden desk, I go for a walk with the tiny brown terrier who has attached himself to me like a miniature shadow, who follows me from room to room, who curls up at night beside us. The sky is full of puffy clouds, a grey mist on the horizon (I’m caught a mile from the house at the point at which it evolves into a downpour). I walk down bridleways, past fields of wheat edged with a lace of white flowers.

In the evening we go to the pub for our dinner, or else we roast a chicken and eat it sitting in the lounge watching an unexpectedly good film starring Helen Hunt and Colin Firth, with an appearance by Salman Rushdie as a obstetrician. We drive to the train station and back in a big green Land Rover; I feed the pigs in red wellies, denim shorts, one of the Man’s old button-up shirts. I tell the dog not to pee on the poppies that grow in bunches by the fence, though I don’t know why, as I’ve let him pee on every hedge between here and the next village.

A frail rain falls; the sun comes out.

Earlier we walked the other direction.  It was early afternoon, light, grey, the trees bent over the water.  The dog picked up impractical sticks and we sipped from a small bottle of whiskey.  Amazing how quickly we could be palpably outside the city.  Smelling woodsmoke from narrowboats and surrounded by green and brown; the golden stones of Oxford had dissolved, the spires dissapeared behind a puffy cloud.  My wellies rubbed raw a spot on my foot, the same spot on the same foot that had been rubbed raw so many times before.  We came to a crumbling nunnery; now just a field walled in, the outline of a church.  We ate apples at the pub and drank wine waiting for our lunch. 

Now we tell ghost stories but there’s nothing eerie about this stillness.  The eerie part is re-entering the city, coming suddenly to a well-lit bridge, passing parked cars, pubs, restaurants, cashpoints, closed shops, kebab vans.  It’s crowded, though there aren’t many people out tonight. 

Meanwhile, I’ll get back into blogging, but my time seems to be consumed at the moment by a thousand little things–working, writing, eating, sleeping, cleaning, running, planning.  Strolling along the river.  Stay tuned.

Strolling the busy streets of Musbury.  Ben looking tipsy and Xander looking authoritative.  Neither was either.

Did I mention the band that opened for Ben was called “Itchy and Scratchy”?

Ben Walker vs. the River Cottage Chickens

A real, live, authentic River Cottage Chicken.

Geeks.

The man himself, Mr. Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall.

Down time with Xander and Ben.

He was a big hit with the kids.

Oh you know.  Just hanging out.

This handsome fennel-seed salami caused Ben a great deal of distress, and Xander and me a great deal of amusement.

Heading back to the cabin.

We’ve seen some fairly spectacular sunsets.

The sunlight has been disappearing and reappearing all day.  We arrive under a blaze of blue sky and I’m tempted by the ale.  A whole tableful of ales, £3 each.  We go outside and stand in a pool of the sort of warmth that is too rare this summer.  It takes about ten minutes for it to start raining–raining hard.  Time for another pint.  I’ve reached my ale-maximum, one pint, so I try the Hereford perry.  Smooth, sweet, and dangerous.  At a certain point it gets dark and then it gets a little cold, so I go inside to warm up.  I sit with my feet up in a corner of the pub.  Maybe it’s the perry, but I can’t get this silly grin off my face.  There’s a live band playing music.  I’ve lost track of my tasting sheet but I wasn’t doing much with it anyway.  We decide to dance, for a bit, and then Joe, who’s a bit of a local celebrity, with his red face and his Oxfordshire accent and his penchant for skirts and heels, reveals the denim mini-skirt and fishnet tights he’s been wearing under his trousers, paired with a dirty t-shirt and a pair of slip-0n trainers.  “If I’d known it was gonna be this kind of night,” he says, “I’d've put me heels on.”

Before bed the Man and I lie down in the wet grass to admire the stars.  The next morning my trousers are still wet and my blazer is stained, and I can’t for the life of me remember which ale I tried and what I thought of it, other than that it tasted ale-y and made my mouth warm, but it’s okay, because I can go to the shop next door and get a croissant and the papers and spend the day reading outside.  My choice?  The Idler #42, with an article, conveniently enough, on the very village I’m in.

In the evening we watched the sun setting over the Oxfordshire countryside amidst the tea lights and elderflower champagne of a midsummer wedding.

It occurred to me sometime between then and now that even when I am not working, I am.  I’m always working.  Isn’t that frightening?  And a little exciting?

I’ve been reading and re-reading Louis MacNeice’s Selected Poems.  Here’s one for you on this sunny, windy, green July Sunday:

Coda

Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.

So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caught between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.

But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.

From Louis MacNeice. Selected Poems. London; Faber, 1988, p.158.

(Also, re: the last post, this, from Alain de Botton: “Journeys are the midwives of thought.”)