Punting, July. I remember this day because it was cooler than it looked, too windy for punting really. In the evening we sat around a fire drinking wine; the jumper I wore still smells faintly of woodsmoke, which is appropriate for the transition into Autumn.

❧

Every Saturday we go to the farmer’s market. No, that’s not true. Every Saturday I go to the farmer’s market. We used to go together, but I think he got annoyed with the conversations we would have when we got there. “Do you want a chicken?” he would say, as we waited in the queue to buy eggs.

“I don’t know,” I would say. “Do you want a chicken?”
“It’s up to you!” he would say, trying either to be accommodating or infuriating, I’m not sure which.
“It’s up to you!” I would say back, because I am incapable of intelligent conversation pre-breakfast (and indeed sometimes post-breakfast, too).
“I don’t mind,” he would say, so I would not buy the chicken because it seemed to make sense to mask ambivalence with frugality – we don’t need meat to survive, we’ve already got bacon at home, etc etc etc.

But then, later, milling around near the vegetable stand, he would be at it again.
“Do you want some celeriac?” he would say.
“I don’t really know what to do with celeriac,” I would say.
“There are lots of things you can do with celeriac.”
“Yes, but I don’t really know what to do with celeriac.”

I would think maybe that was it, the end of the conversation about what vegetables we did or didn’t want in our house, the end of the string of humiliating admittances I would have to make about the gaps in my culinary knowledge (“You bought rhubarb?” “I thought it was celery!”, etc). But a few minutes later, he’d say something like,
“Is there anything else we need?”
“I don’t know,” I would say, because I really didn’t know: it’s impossible to know precisely what kind of fruits or vegetables are necessary for the week ahead, especially when weeks are so unpredictable, and you can’t even say for certain on which nights you’ll be dining in and on which nights you’ll be scoffing a quick sandwich from Sainsbury’s (BLT, reduced to clear, 49p) before a gig you’d forgotten you were going to.
“Well, is there anything else you want?”
“I don’t know. Is there anything else you want?”
“It’s up to you. Do you want some kale?”
“I don’t know. Do you want some kale? Obviously you do want some kale, since you brought it up. So just buy some fucking kale and stop asking me about the fucking kale.”

At which point we’d not only not buy the kale but also forget to buy bread, and later I would regret that we hadn’t bought a chicken but be annoyed at my impulsive decision to buy all of the broccoli in Oxford, now yellow and wilted and sitting in a tote bag on the kitchen table.

So anyway, as you can probably understand, I mostly go on my own nowadays.

I enjoy this. I like the ritual of it, and I like the bargaining power it gives me when I’ve come home with eggs and bacon and mushrooms and I get to say, “I brought home the bacon, you cook it!” And our local farmer’s market is held in a primary school behind the Tesco Metro on the Cowley Road, so I like cutting through the Tesco on my way to the market, using it as a public footpath, buying nothing in a mute display of smugness. I like listening to music on the walk. I even like that I’m always, without fail, quite late, so I often miss out on all the desirable goods (asparagus during asparagus season, cream from the local dairy, bagels from the bagel lady), because when I do get my hands on one of these items, it feels like a real victory for laziness. Look, I slept till noon and I have asparagus pee!

But there are some times when the experience is trying. It all depends on my mood. Some Saturdays, it’s like walking into a big warm fuzzy hug full of sunshine and cheese and dreadlocks. There are delightful youngsters smiling up at everyone, beautiful families pushing discreet prams, students stocking up on muddy potatoes, old eccentric women buying strawberries and garlic. Other days, though. Other days there are a bunch of kids screaming, and smug people who have successfully procreated pushing their prams over my unprotected toes, and students who still smell of last night’s cheap booze, and old women who snarl like hyenas if they sense you might be eyeing up the same pumpkin.

In particular, I resent the queueing system, or lack thereof. For a society so preoccupied with queueing, Britain really can get it wrong sometimes. For example: people tend to queue for the bread in such a way that they block the queue for the eggs and cheese. Why? They could easily queue in such a way that they did not block the queue for the eggs and cheese, but the one or two times I’ve tried to impose some order, I’ve been skipped over and eventually reprimanded for not standing in the right place. At the vegetable stand, standard practice is to select a number. This is ostensibly to make queueing easier (there’s much less stress if you know that, eventually, your number will be called, at which point it is your right to be served), but people don’t seem to understand that there’s no need to jostle or compete, and rather than stepping back to allow others to peruse the peppers, they hover near the tills, as if their constant presence can somehow change the order of numerals.

But the really annoying thing, the most annoying thing, is that it’s impossible to stay annoyed. Just as soon as I’ve decided to be grumpy for the rest of the day because I’ve missed out on the last of the milk and I don’t know where to stand so that I am actually in a queue for anything, let alone for what I actually want, the woman next to me, equally perplexed, laughs and asks if this is the queue for the eggs. Or the vegetable man smiles as he weighs my vegetables and helps me fill my bags. Or the guy at the bakery says, “see you next week”, indicating that I’ve been taken for a local, that my regular presence has been noted. And I can’t be grumpy anymore. I just can’t. No matter how grumpy I was. No matter how many prams have trampled my toes. No matter how many people are holding the exact same Guardian Hay Festival tote bag (including me).

Is this a rant or an ode? I don’t know anymore. Dear farmer’s market: give me my grump back. Or don’t. Whatever.

❧

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.

❧

“Many animals, like human beings, live in environments of their own construction rather than simply in nature.”
- Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place

Lately I’ve been taking photos on my way home from the grocery store. Usually it’s evening. Usually I’ve been to buy something very mundane – bread, butter, salad greens, sponges. I am wearing nothing special. The walk is nothing special: down wide streets lined with cars, shiny in the twilight, past smashed bottles, bent bicycle wheels, couples having arguments outside of houses, children running after balls or each other. I tread on cigarette butts, avoid dog shit, look up at the phone lines and the clouds crisscrossing the sky. There is nothing and everything beautiful about these walks, and when I take photos of things that I’ve been passing for years without noticing – a telephone box on the corner of a street, a sun setting over some terraced houses in a cul de sac – they seem to come out more surreal (or is it hyperreal?) even than they appear in the moment I take them. There is a release, a calm in knowing that this constructed landscape is beautiful, even if it sometimes appears not to be.

“Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.”
- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I never saw myself living in the suburbs. I grew up somewhere rural. Suburbs had an ugly connotation. Now I forget that I live in suburbs, of a sort. But when I look at the photographs I see something unmistakably suburban about the place I live. I am reminded that it is independent of Oxford but at also a part of it; that it is its own place, too. In the photographs, devoid of context, of the evening sounds, it appears empty, disembodied. The roads seem to go nowhere, to end in buildings or sunsets. But there’s a kind of dignity, too, and while I expect to feel alarmed or alienated, looking at these images, I never do.

❧

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.

❧