I.

Here’s the thing: I’m a serial re-visitor. I like to chase my own tail.

I’ve made this list of all the places I want to see. I add to it all the time. But then instead of booking a flight to Cairo or wherever I suggest we go back to Fez, say, where we’d been three years earlier, on our first holiday together. We had a nice time then; we drank a lot of black coffee and walked round and round the medina until we’d earned the beginning of a sense of direction. At night, after a too-big meal and a final coffee, we’d climb to the rooftop of our cheap backpacker’s hotel and watch the lights glinting. We’d flick through the photos we’d taken on our digital cameras, reliving the frozen moments, assimilating them.

It was a good time to go on holiday: we had no shared past and no particular compulsion, yet, to speculate about the future. I remember that at the end of the trip, on the bus back from Luton, I made a list in a little leather notebook of all the things I needed to buy when I got back to Boston, things I needed to furnish the new studio apartment I was moving into. I had this excitement-tinged-with-sadness feeling, but I made the list anyway, and then fell asleep on his shoulder like we had been together for years and would always be together, like we weren’t from opposite ends of the world. I think this is maybe what people mean when they talk about being present, about inhabiting the present. We were there and that was it: we were there, and still unbothered by the logistics of living, or living together, or making a living, or making a decision about our future. I had a semester left of college to complete, so life was full of invisible possibilities – I trusted implicitly that they were there, even if I couldn’t identify what they were.

You can’t return to that time; you can’t return to any time. But you can return to a place. So I return to places. So we go back to Fez, or New York, or the same village in Wales, over and over again. A poor sort of time-travelling, but there it is: it’s the best we’ve got.

In most cases I trick myself into believing that it’s because these are places that need revisiting – they’re complicated, demanding, worthy of a relationship. They’re marriage material, not one night stands. I say there’s too much to Fez to be found in a single visit; we need to go back, give it the time it deserves. Upon second visit I find that I am comfortable enough here, walking in my own footsteps; I am someplace familiar, deliberately seeking out familiar landmarks – squares, cafés, that restaurant we really liked. But this sense of familiarity is more disquieting than calming. At one point I find myself fighting a panic attack. I pretend it’s the heat, the travel, the heady smells, the crowded dusty streets, the donkeys pushing past, the chickens waiting patiently to be slain. We climb up out of the fray and sit on a low wall at the edge of the medina and I identify at last the strange feeling, the disquieting feeling: the feeling that I am haunting myself, following my own ghost, inhabiting the space she inhabited three years previous in an attempt to somehow be her again. It’s the feeling that I am jealous of myself as I was then: that I am both with myself and outside myself. I’m not unhappy now, in this present – far from it; I’m in love and it’s summer and things have turned out okay. But I know more about the me in that previous present: I know what happens to her, I know how she gets from there to here. Whereas I don’t know how I get from here, now, to there: I don’t even know where ‘there’ is.

So we sit on a wall and I feel simultaneously right and wrong. That evening we have a beer with a friend and watch the nightly migration of birds cloud the sky. Later in the week we take a taxi out of town and hike to a waterfall, where the air is clear and cool. And then we go home again. Three more years elapse. I consider another trip.

***

Notice that to write about this, I use the language of the supernatural. Familiar, as in the familiar spirit, assisting witches. Ghosts. Haunts. I do this instinctively but also knowingly. A few years ago, a friend sent me a link to a paper by Steven Connor. “As a term, ‘haunting’ has an almost disappointingly innocuous past,” Connor writes:

Well into the eighteenth century, a ‘haunt’ could be simply a place to which one had frequent recourse…As a noun, a ‘haunt’ signifies not exactly a home, but rather a sort of second home, a place to which one has periodic recourse from one’s regular home…Over the last couple of centuries, it seems to have become more common for places to be haunted than persons…A haunted place has become stuck in time, or time has been scored into it.

***

Oxford always seemed to me a haunt of long-dead phantoms, living off its past and alien to anyone with energy and a mind on the future; now I walk among its ghosts and see them as my own.

- Pico Iyer

We are always sharing space with ghosts. “All landscapes are haunted by ghosts,” the geographer Patricia Price writes. Sometimes the ghosts are versions of ourselves; sometimes the ghosts are people we never knew, people who never even existed except in the minds of others or the pages of books. When I moved to Oxford I finally read Jude the Obscure for the first time. I’d tried before and always abandoned it about two pages in, but now there was a shared geography, and certain passages and sentiments stayed with me, particularly as Autumn took the city in its wicked fist, shook the trees and turned the stone grey with worry. The city became Christminster, Hardy’s University town – and I, I suddenly came to understand, had moved here, like Jude, to be close to something that I wasn’t quite a part of.

I took long walks after dark; I felt very Hardy indeed, walking in the cold abandoned nights: “There were poets abroad, of early date and of late, from the friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has recently passed into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who is still among us…” One night, on St. Giles, wide and empty, a woman with a black eye came lilting towards me, as if she was walking on a ship in stormy waters. We stood under a streetlamp while she asked for change and I refused to give her any. I don’t know why I refused: I was broke too, but broke in a different way; I could have reached into my bag and discovered a few coins. But I walked on, I guess because sometimes the things we imagine we see somewhere seem more real than the things we actually see. I’m not proud of this, but it’s how I spent a lot of time feeling when I first moved here, I think: like if I tried hard enough I could make every ghost manifest itself, like I could literally build my own version of the city.

I stopped in a café for a glass of wine. It was warm and smelled of salt and onions inside. Jude Fawley had lived in Jericho, I remembered. I had read a lot – too much – about this city. I knew what fate awaited Fawley, as I knew what becomes of the sorry lovesick undergraduates in Zuleika Dobson’s Oxford. Through the fogged café windows I could just make out all the doomed heroes, phantom figures slouching home on twisted roads. I loved this place, but I never knew if I belonged to it or if it belonged to me; never knew if I haunted it or if it haunted me.

“We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places,” writes Robert Macfarlane, “– but we are far less good at saying what places make of us.”

***

So I revisit places. At least once a month, maybe less in the winter, and often by accident, I find myself in Christ Church meadow, sitting on a particular bench near the bridge to the boathouses. I sat here the week I first arrived, nearly six years ago now. It was a hot, clear day, the start of summer, the VIIIs in full swing, the banks crowded by spectators. I wore a sleeveless dress and sucked on a zinc lozenge, trying to ward off a cold that was threatening to ruin my plans to meet my new almost-boyfriend for drinks later. And now, whenever I find myself nearby, I like to mark the spot, acknowledge the memory, so I pause midway through a run, or on a chilly January walk. I have no idea if the view has changed, if the trees nearby have grown, if the shape of the river has changed at all, if the path ringing the meadow is more worn than it once was. I don’t notice the surroundings at all: I only notice myself being there, again and again, year after year.

II.

We go to New York again and again, too. I didn’t like New York at first; it took me maybe a dozen visits to warm to it. This is another argument for revisiting: sometimes you have to give a place another chance, or another dozen chances. Sometimes the relationship needs to be nurtured, requires great patience.

We go back to the same Brooklyn bars, claim some kind of ownership. We feel the half-memories we made here (too much whiskey, popcorn strewn across the floor, frantic, heavy conversation with friends we only get to see once a year) bind us to the physical location in which they were made, even though the physical location, if it had the capacity to remember, would have long forgotten us by now. Do you know how many people come here every night? And you show up two times in as many years and think, “this is our place”! So fine: our place and everybody else’s. It belongs to us, and to the girls communing with the toilets, and to the dudes sliding off barstools, stumbling away, holding up the doorframe, dissolving into the shout-infused night. It’s ours, to share.

We go to Coney Island. I know: us and every other hip young thing with an SLR and a pair of Converse. The first time I visited it was April, and I was 12 years old. My mother and I had come from California via a hazy layover in Las Vegas. I think I must have slept, but when we arrived, I didn’t feel like I had slept; I wasn’t yet accustomed to the sensation of trans-continental travel, hadn’t learned how to overcome the particular weariness that follows a red eye flight. So when, in the early evening, after a day of aimless wandering, we took an F train to Coney Island, I fell asleep and woke up disconcerted, wondering if this was a thing you were allowed to do on subways. Did grown-ups fall asleep on the subway? Later, living in Boston, juggling schoolwork with jobs and internships and long nights of drinking, I would learn the art of sleeping gently between stops, slipping fully awake at just the right moment, disembarking like an automaton. But then it was a new sensation, and the time spent asleep gave Coney Island a kind of magical property: I couldn’t identify exactly how we’d gotten here, I didn’t know how long the journey had taken, I didn’t know, geographically, where we were in relation to where we had been. All I knew is that it was a place my mother had visited in her youth; she’d spoken often of it, of New York in general, and now here it was.

There are a few photographs of us on that evening, taken by a friend. We’re silhouettes against the backdrop of the sea. I’m wearing a leather jacket and a pair of ugly khaki cargo pants. I have a pimple on my cheek. What I remember is being cold and windswept and reluctantly having a ketchup-slathered hot dog from Nathan’s, hunger overriding my erroneous and newly developed adolescent desire to preserve the child’s waiflike figure I’d previously taken for granted.

***

Years later I came in December. We’d been out too late the night before and we sat mutely on the train, shifting through stations. The journey seemed to take forever, it seemed to take longer than the journey from England had taken. I observed a man across the aisle from me reading a book, the title of which was obscured by his gloved fingers. I looked out over the frosty rooftops. The air grew cold as the doors hissed open, then hot again as they steamed shut. And then we were there, at Stillwell Avenue, crossing the street. My partner had never been here before and, like I said, my memory of it was mostly not my own at all: the photographs, the stories my mother had told me, about being here as a teenager and being compelled to ride the Cyclone even though she hated it, telling her boyfriend after that he could ride it again, if he wanted, but it would have to be alone. Not my memories at all. My memory was of the limp hot dog, the wind and the cold, and here again was the cold, only ten, a hundred times more ferocious. My face went pink and hot and then numb. My fingers in their thick gloves were burning, then numb. Outside Nathan’s a wedding party posed for photos. The bride wore a long strapless white gown but stood stoically while the photographer, encased in a heavy duffel coat, attacked the scene from a dozen different angles.

We went along the boardwalk, taking our own photos. As I could no longer feel my fingers or my toes or my nose, it didn’t seem to matter if we stayed the whole afternoon. We passed one or two other people, drifting along, but they looked unconnected to the rest of the world, like maybe they were imagined figures. I took a photo of a plastic palm tree, planted in the sand near the ice-grey Atlantic. When the cold became unbearable we sought refuge in Nathan’s. We ate hot dogs with onions. Outside it grew dark and when we left, pulling our scarves up over our mouths to try to take some of the bitterness from the wind as it shot down our throats, the neon signs lit up and we took blurry photographs of the way they glowed.

***

We were back the following year. This time it was hot, 84 degrees at midday. I wore shorts and sandals and tried to take photos as we had before, but found that everything looked washed out, dull. Even though the weather was good and it was a weekend, the place was sparsely populated, mostly by shiny sun-bronzed old men on bicycles who had left their shirts at home. We watched some friends ride the Cyclone; I got a photograph as they came down one of the lesser slopes, hands in the hair, faces aghast or delighted or perhaps both. I stood at the frothing line of the Atlantic, watching two swimmers gliding up and down, completely parallel the shore, admiring their strokes.

Although it felt and looked like midsummer, it was nearly mid-October, and everything had been decorated with ghouls and goblins and giant spiders and bloodied zombies in anticipation of Halloween, of cold nights and warm scarves and the smell of rotting leaves and sickly sweet smoke machines. I posed for a photo in front of a zombie-like figure with blood down his shirt and at the corners of his mouth and his bloodshot, perfectly round eyes. My own eyes were shrouded by the Ray-Ban aviators I’d bought off eBay a year or two ago, when I had been working full time in an office and felt like I could finally afford to be frivolous (now: a full-time freelance writer with no clients and no projects; this trip felt like something I’d stolen, but it was the best we could do: meet my parents in the middle, spend a week in someone else’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, have beers on the rooftop looking out at the skyline, imagining that things would soon be different, easier, clearer). If you looked up you could see the shredded witch-figures hanging from lampposts. Everywhere was the eerie, the haunted, the haunting. A place to which one has periodic recourse from one’s regular home.

For lunch we went to Nathan’s and had lemonade and hot dogs outside in the sun.

❧

In a love affair, most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland’s sadness. To that person, they remain faithful.

— Walter Benjamin, One Way Street

***

“Birds in flight, claims the architect Vincenzo Volentieri, are not between places, they carry their places with them. We never wonder where they live: they are at home in the sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.” (Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage)

I first read this in flight: between England and California, via New York. I re-read it on the deck of my parents’ house, resolutely bathing in the cold winter sunlight, the faint glitter of the Pacific to the south (not the west, as you might expect; this sliver of coastline is geographically contrary). There were probably birds passing overhead; somewhere, too, the rumble of a jet engine, the symbol of the ease with which we can now cross continents, slide through time zones, make new places for ourselves.

I read it and it first comforted, then worried me. What if home is just a memory that we carry with us? I wrote in the margins of the book. It seemed like a nice idea at the time – taking attachment to place, to land, soil, buildings, alleyways, something physical, and making it portable, memorializing it, putting it in a pocket. But memory doesn’t always serve people very well, does it? Even now, retelling this story that is not even a story, I have falsified things – some deliberately, but others no doubt without realizing. I will never realize. What if home is just a memory that we carry with us? Well, then, home is more fragile than I ever imagined. Then we really do live, like our documents, the invisible archives of our digital existence, in the cloud(s).

***

“This profound attachment to the homeland appears to be a worldwide phenomenon. It is not limited to any particular culture and economy. It is known to literate and nonliterate peoples, hunter-gatherers, and sedentary farmers as well as city dwellers. The city or land is viewed as mother, and it nourishes; place is an archive of fond memories and splendid achievements that inspire the present; place is permanent and hence reassuring to man, who sees frailty in himself and chance and flux everywhere.” (Yi – Fu Tuan, Space and Place).

***

A few months ago I went to a talk at the School of Geography and the Environment. I went as a member of the public – that is to say, in this case, as someone not affiliated with the University, an observer rather than a participant. I had emailed someone in the department the day before to ask if it would be okay for me to attend. I’ve lived here for five years and only now am I starting to feel comfortable enough to assume that I even have a right to ask these things – or maybe it’s that only now am I starting to feel uncomfortable enough in my own city-skin to want to push the boundaries, expand my map. I think in some sense I was seeking validation – I mean that although I was and am intensely curious about the subject of the lecture, on both a personal and professional level, I also attended in order to remind myself that I belong here, if I allow myself to.

“In a place where everybody is known from birth to death, identity is pregiven,” I read. “It is only the mobile strangers arriving en masse that provoke the need to be certain of who someone is.”

***

Whenever I try to talk about my own homeland to people – about the USA as a whole, that is, the vast place to which, according to my passport, I belong, the place where I am a citizen – I discover that I don’t have a vocabulary for it. This is just another way of saying I don’t really know much about it. Some of it is memory again: how much do you tip a bartender for opening a bottle of beer at a dusty counter in some midtown dive? I can’t remember, if I even ever knew. I’m useless when friends, visiting the country for the first time, want advice. I haven’t even seen most of it. My mother, I believe, has been to all 48 states in the continental US. I’ve been to fewer than 20. I’m not from there, I can confidently say about most of the country I’m from.

But there’s also a sense in which I have willingly closed myself off to understanding. I seek to embody the role of the outsider. At 17 I moved away from home, left California, the only place I had ever really known in the flesh. It wasn’t because I was particularly excited about the university I’d chosen (in retrospect, I had much better options). It was because I was attached to the idea of Boston itself; it was because I wanted to be an outsider there. I wanted to know what it felt like to not be from somewhere.

***

And now I find that the borders of My City have shrunk. I have this view, this window, and my slice of City is just an overgrown garden that I rarely venture out into. The ground elder has spread. The cherry blossoms have fallen and the trees are big and green. Last weekend we walked into town. It was cold out, almost uncomfortably so, and worryingly empty: a lone violinist on Turl Street, persuading his instrument to sing Vivaldi, a few cyclists on tired-sounding steeds, shopkeepers with cigarettes, a family strolling through the pale light near the entrance to Exeter College. In the covered market, the shops were mostly shut. In Radcliffe Square, the tower of St. Mary’s had been obscured by scaffolding; its spire was just visible, emerging as if from a winter cocoon.

We went to a few pubs we had not been to very recently: our old haunts. We spoke of people we used to know. It wasn’t that some things seemed like a very long time ago, it was more that some things seemed like they had never belonged to us at all – these things had happened to people who looked like us and talked like us but were just impostors in a parallel universe. It’s hard here to know if the ghosts are haunting us or if we, in our constant presents, are the ghosts, haunting our own pasts. Something about a small city invites this kind of thinking. The passage of time is what makes it three-dimensional; the history, even if it isn’t our own history, the lives and deaths of fictional characters who have also crowded these pavements, are all as crucial to its makeup as stones or sewers.

***

Five years ago I arrived in Oxford for the first time. It was hot and I walked from the train station into town. I had no map but ended up by the river, at Christ Church meadow. This day is just like that day: no clouds, no threat of rain or evening chill. Coincidentally I find myself at the train station again, walking through town, in the vague direction of home. Now of course I don’t need to ask for directions or pause every so often to get my bearings, but even the familiar can feel devastatingly unfamiliar when you feel weary or out of sorts, and there are days when I recognize almost nothing here.

As I walk, I listen to music. A woman is singing, “I build it up…I dream it up…I build it up…I dream it up…it’s easy living inside my head, it’s hard to live without pretend.” We construct our own cities, write our own maps – we build them up, dream them up, often long before we’ve even visited. I remember crossing a bridge five years ago, looking down at the green ribbon of canal, the trees bent thirstily towards the water. Everything I knew about this place was fiction – either my own or someone else’s, Waugh’s or Beerbohm’s, say – but already the fiction had begun to mix with experience. Here’s a place where everything and nothing is always changing: it’s known for being rigidly adherent to antiquated traditions, and yet there’s this constant flow of people, arriving, leaving, all the time.

Downstairs in my study it is cool, as if it’s trapped the chill of spring. In the late afternoon I walk to the pool, which, like the city, is empty – just a few other dogged swimmers crawling their way up and down the lanes. When I pause for breath at the wall and look to my left, out the great window at the side of the building, I can just see the tower of Magdalen College above the green of the trees. I feel slow. It seems to take me a long time to get from one end of the pool to the other. It seems to take me a long time to walk home.

Later, we listen to music in a room that smells like a church but isn’t a church. The heat is heavy, almost foreign. “Home is only a feeling you get in your mind/From the people you love and you travel beside,” the band sings. After the gig, we drink pints on the pavement as people pass by on bicycles, in sportscars. I say things I don’t really mean, I guess to be contrary, but later I wish I could keep my mouth shut sometimes. As we cycle home the skirt of my dress gets caught in my bicycle but it’s nice to have bare legs finally. In the morning, the way the heat smells and the still air feels and the birds sound remind me of waking on an island off the East African coast; the smell of the mosquito coil, burning in a tiled bathroom; the oppressive net, draped over our disheveled bed. The smell of cigarette smoke on a hot morning or a balmy evening always makes me think of other places, other climates, Paris or Fez on an aimless summer morning, café hopping, dropping cubes of sugar into mud-brown espresso.

***

If I acknowledge that it is five years sine I first arrived in Oxford I am also acknowledging that it is five years since I first met the person with whom I share my life now. I think of the film Away We Go, which is a film, in a sense, about finding or making a home – about having the freedom and the burden to choose a place. There’s a scene, I think towards the end, when Burt and Verona, who are searching for somewhere to live before their baby is born, are talking about their situation. “No one is in love like us, right?” she says. “What are we gonna do?”

Cheri Lucas writes of a long-distance relationship: “In between these meetings, we’ve created a space for us, just us, online: a portal through which that flow sustains. A borderless space that transcends geography, that exists somewhere only we can access.” That borderless space is the home, perhaps, even if you live in the same city, the same home; even if you live alone. It’s the overlap of person and place. Mobility creates the illusion of rootlessness – as long as we are mobile, carrying our places with us, able to communicate via portable devices, it seems conceivable that we might float forever, that there might be no need for a sense of belonging to anything more tangible than an idea. But the truth is blurrier. We may carry our places with us, but our places carry us, too.

❧

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.

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