There’s nothing that pleases me more than a sense of belonging. I like when things overlap and I like when I’m at the centre of it somehow. It’s ego but it’s also human.

Take a day like this:

I am sitting in the Bodleian, staring out the window, towards the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, thinking how absurd it really is, that this is my local library, that this grand place is where I work, that on my desk are three volumes of magazines from 1908 bound together in such a fragile way.  And there I am, gazing blankly, mouth hung open in that expression of well-meaning vacancy, when who should stroll by but someone I know, who says hello in a frantic whisper.  Later I go downstairs to the Lower Reading Room and smile at a colleague as he looks up from his studies.  Rolling down Broad Street, another colleague passes, waves.  Now I’m sitting in a cafe listening to music made by friends of a friend, watching a local businessman, whom I happen to know, cleaning the upstairs windows of his restaurant.

Why does this please me?  Why do I persist in having what amounts to a village mentality, and why should any of it matter, anyway–these brushes with a sense of community, this six-degrees-of-separation thing? Why do we get off on knowing that someone out there knows us? Oxford is a great place for this; anywhere you go you’re likely to know someone, if only obliquely, or else someone is likely to know someone you know.

“The local,” William Carlos Williams once wrote, “is the only universal.” I guess that’s probably true. I guess in a way that’s why I like the overlap so much. Why, in the end, it’s so important.

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We start at dawn. Still dark, though the clocks tell us it’s high time to be up and about, starting our business, having our coffee. Breaking our ritual nightly fast.

At the bus stop, in a thin drizzle, we wait. The morning lightens but does not brighten; all the world’s covered in grey mist.

On the train we pass through a patch of snow. Beside us the Thames is thickening. A heavy brown mass; no longer the sleepy stream it always seems at Oxford. Then we diverge from the path of the river, sipping our coffee at 60 miles per hour, still half-asleep, reading our books without paying them proper attention (my mind, for instance, has already wandered to what I will write about this moment, on the train, sipping coffee). We observe the backs of business parks; strange architecture, engineering for a world built around cars and a certain kind of lifestyle, religious in its regularity. Even running away has become a bureaucratic nightmare; form-filling, proof of identity, proof of residence, pounds paid dutifully for administrative costs that no one will ever actually incur.

Then we rejoin the Thames, wide and wild now. Half-following the river into the city.

I say I like the grey austerity of London Paddington. I say I like the way the light comes in; I like the curved industrial metal. He says, Really? Disbelieving as we pass a Burger King and a W. H. Smith. But I’m looking up, past these things which are a marker of our confused time, to what once was. I see steam, trapped pigeons spreading their stained wings, the light catching dust above our heads.

(On the way back, I think: There’s nothing quite like a good long train journey to clarify, liquefy the thoughts, so they come flooding in like snowmelt in a mountain stream. I threaten to hop on a train to Penzance. But what would I do when I got to Penzance? I wonder aloud. What would you do? He says, again mildly disbelieving. Find a pub, I decide, which is as good an answer as any, and in this grim mid-winter weather, probably the most truthful I could give.)

I have my photograph taken by a cheery chemist who asks what it’s for and then, when I tell him it’s for a visa application, asks where we’re going. When I tell him Kenya, his smile widens, but he doesn’t say anything, not at first. He shows me my photo on the smudged screen of a digital camera. I look wary, my cheeks flushed by cold, my eyes bright, my mouth crooked where he told me I could smile, if I wanted, they won’t mind, it’s not like getting a British passport. My hair, which I tried to tie back in a messy, self-contained bun, has come loose, and a long strand hangs past my left ear. I’m not displeased with the photo, though. Something in it, maybe the nonchalance, appeals to me. I tell him it’s fine, and as he’s printing it from a machine mounted on the wall, he tells us he was born in Mombasa, and then asks where we’re going in Kenya. There are good flowers there, he tells us when we name the place. Beautiful flowers–you’ll see. I pay him in cash and he tells us to enjoy our trip, and goes to help a woman pushing a pram, rummaging through the cough medicines.

At the embassy, which is like all embassies–serious, hushed, full of patriotic images and metal detectors–only in miniature. We sit and fill out our forms in a narrow room. The whole affair is much more casual than I had anticipated. I’m comforted by this. It’s not like standing in my own embassy, surrounded by armed guards, being asked to relinquish my mobile phone, my iPod, my freedom for hours on end.

We hand our passports over. And there I am: a stranger in a strange land, without any proof of identity, without any means of leaving. For a moment I feel panicked; then I feel free, and lighter than I have in years. Separated from my history, my birthplace, my future plans, my work permit. Forced into the present; and he, too, beside me, parted from his paper identity. For once we are are of equal, or same, nationality; that is to say, none. Into the wet droves we emerge, dodging puddles. We head back towards the station, the train, the river, the other city with her fair spires.

Our train out had been crowded, steamy, but now, at midday, it’s as if nobody has the impetus to travel anymore, so we are as if alone in this carriage. A stray human or two, also caught on this slow passage from London to Oxford via every imaginable village in between, flips the pages of a newspaper. Someone has left a window open and the cold air comes rushing in around us each time we gather speed, but we do not protest, nor do we make any motion to close the window, for the motion of the train has already lulled us into that magical half-sleeping state of transit. The irony is that we’re now too complacent to cross the narrow car and close the window, while all that keeps us from slipping away into a heavy doze is that fresh air.

So we’re suspended by our own actions, our own inactions, our understanding of inertia.

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Here we are, arrived again at Christmas. I’m wearing new slippers and Xander’s shirt and considering the vast quantities of varied foodstuffs I’ve consumed today.

It starts with church. I don’t do church, really, but the English are under the impression that their version of church isn’t particularly church-y; that is, they seem to think that singing endless rounds of carols which proclaim undying love for Jesus has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with tradition. And of course the funny thing is that they’re right; nobody I’ve met sings those carols with pious intent, they sing them because afterwords there is mulled wine and mince pies and the unmistakable buzz of Christmas.

So I acquiesce to church in this case, and dutifully ignore the purple banner above the pulpit, emblazoned with a crown, which reminds us all that Jesus is “King of Kings, Lord of Lords.” We’re seated next to the orchestra, a motley but well-meaning bunch ranging in age from 10 to 90 (or so it appears). I’m directly in front of one of the young violinists, who scrapes her bow against the strings with both carelessness and great concentration, as if she can’t quite bring herself to commit to playing this instrument which is so clumsily slung beneath her chin, but knows she needs to make a sound. Then one of the flutists, in her early teens, reads a passage from the Bible with a glassy voice that would make the BBC proud (she read the same passage last year, as I remember, and seems to have improved her delivery). We sing some more. Perhaps the vicar makes a speech, but I’m overcome with a pleasing sensation of happiness and can’t bring myself to pay attention to whatever point he’s trying to make by unwrapping a gift in front of the congregation; if I listen closely, I might be made to feel guilty, and this mood doesn’t leave any room for guilt.

After, we glide over the ice to the car. The fog of the morning has lifted. Earlier a white mist, half-lit by the sun, had draped itself over the trees. Now, though warmth is spreading, there are patches of snow in the fields; Bing Crosby comes on the radio, and it’s the whitest Christmas I’ve ever seen, anyway.

We have coffee. We open gifts. We overeat, and circumstance persuades me to nibble on a brussels sprout or two although the taste is too acrid for my liking, almost maliciously acrid, I think, as if the vegetable is laughing at us all. We light the Christmas pudding and watch the blue glow; then we pour various kinds of cream over it and try to pretend that we’re still hungry enough to eat more. Then we have some dessert wine and play charades, which ends with me trying to mime the word “saving” by rescuing a crumb from some unseen plight. We nap; I have the feeling that I could sleep the whole night through, but at about 8 o’clock I rouse myself for some tea. I nibble on chocolates, pay a cursory amount of attention to the television, flip through books; we’re all only half-present, it seems.

We’ve forgotten what outside looks or feels like. In this insulated world the rhythm of the day is dictated by baths and naps and meals and snacks. It’s nice somehow, like disappearing completely for awhile, like holing up during a storm. We make plans to go for a walk tomorrow. Maybe there will be snow on the ground, I’m thinking.

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We tell ghost stories on the way home.  It’s dark; Port Meadow is black, the river is silver and still.  We have bike lights and a parafin lantern.  A mist covers the ground, as if we’re wading through it.  I can see my breath, feel the tingle of my fingers. 

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.

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(This is not a post about beer, by the way.  This is a post about a village.)

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.

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