In New York, it was hot. I forgot to be amazed that we’d just crossed the Atlantic ocean in seven hours. I wore shorts and sandals a lot. We went to Coney Island, enjoying the air conditioning in the F train all the way to Stillwell Avenue. The last time we were there we saw a pair of newlyweds having their photo taken outside of Nathan’s. It was December and almost unbearably cold; the bride wore a long sleeveless gown and stood motionless, her shoulders bare and her face frozen into a smile, while the photographer, in a heavy coat and fingerless gloves, darted around the wedding party. Then the place was photogenic; now it was sort of eerie, all set up for Halloween but inhabited by sun-seekers, shirtless men on bicycles and girls in bikinis lying on towels or splashing at the shoreline. I stood in front of a zombie-like figure, blood on his plastic shirt, trying to get some shade. This place was becoming a haunt of ours, I thought.

***

We were staying in a Brooklyn Heights apartment, up six flights of stairs. A few doors down was a café with a bench shaped like the Brooklyn Bridge; at the end of the street was a playground, at the other end, an Italian restaurant. At breakfast I re-read Hemingway because I’d just seen the latest Woody Allen film. There was a good desk in the corner of the room from where you could look out at the Manhattan skyline, but the chair had wheels and the floor sloped, so you couldn’t sit there for too long without sliding away. There was a roofdeck, and on the hottest nights we went up and watched the sun set over the buildings and had a Sam Adams. I’d had an apartment like this in Boston, a tiny, well-lit 2 bedroom apartment with access to an empty roofdeck. I couldn’t tell if I was nostalgic about it – even some of the smells reminded me of that place – or grateful to be somewhere else now, metaphysically I mean. I remember once coming back late after serving drinks at some swanky function (I was a temp for a catering company; I owned a polyester tuxedo, complete with clip-on bow tie and trousers with an adjustable waist) and wanting a beer – it was spring, quite hot out. My roommate had left some Harvest Moon pumpkin ales in the fridge, so I opened one and took it up to the roof where, not very long ago, we had made snowmen during a St. Patrick’s day blizzard.

***

Later in the week, when the weather had turned (not cold and Autumnal, but wet, humid, the skyline shrouded in a queasy mist), we went to the Brooklyn Museum. Somehow I found myself in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, although I had no particular interest in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I stood in a dark room. On one wall was a gilded mirror; on the other, a large screen, onto which was being projected the image of a room. In the center of the actual room was a chandelier, lit up, upside down. And into the projected room a woman in period dress walked. She entered, looked around, exited. A few moments later she reappeared, standing on the ceiling, upside down. She began to recite a speech, or perhaps a series of speeches. I was alone in the room with her. Then I was joined by a woman in a leather jacket. She looked around, took a flash photograph of the exhibit, left. She was not part of the exhibit. I was not part of the exhibit. On the wall outside the room I read: “In The Spirit and the Letter, the viewer enters as space where sculptural elements, including a softly glowing crystal chandelier balanced upright on the floor and a framed mirror hanging upside down on the opposite wall, invert physical assumptions to produce an uncanny sense of dislocation.” I did not know what this had to do with feminism, exactly, though I had to admit that later, looking at my photographs of the exhibit, the image of the woman standing on the ceiling made me feel a little disoriented.

In fact I go there and I feel like it’s not a place anyone could live, let alone me, even though I know lots of people live in London and lots of people love it. I just don’t see anything there that suggests living on a human scale. The architecture is all mixed up – beautiful things, monstrosities that should never have been allowed to be built, but nothing really stands out, so your impression is never one of either beauty or ugliness or even of contrast, just of some big grey slab that’s muddy and muddled and doesn’t make any sense. The buildings are big but of course nothing is big inside, so you get the impression it was built for giants to look at but dwarves to live in (the opposite of the Tardis, I suppose). And it’s just so disparate, so desperate, so empty even when it’s crowded. In my two mile walk from Pimlico to Chelsea I saw nothing charming except at one point a broad tree-lined avenue which turned out only to be leafy and green because it bordered a hospital, and the lovely garden I could see through the fence was not for public consumption at all. Leafy London. Except most of it seems sterile and shoppy to me. Everyone is shopping, in a way.

***

So I tried shopping, too. I went into a shop, I bought nothing, I went back out again. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of pretty things; it’s that nothing suited me in that moment. I was a traveller; I wore stained jeans and an old flannel shirt and carried a heavy, sweaty rucksack.

It’s funny that even though I have a home I’m still window-shopping for places to live all the time. Every place I visit, even London, is a possibility. I only think of this now because I came across this piece by John McIntyre on André Aciman’s Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, which I haven’t read but would like to read. “Aciman,” writes McIntyre, “views the places he visits not with the wondering, landmark-seeking eye of a tourist, but with the speculative, assessing eye of a potential resident…He examines this habit at length in “The Contrafactual Traveler,” and concludes that, “I ‘connect’ not by saying, ‘Isn’t this lovely, picturesque hill town beautiful?’ but ‘Do I see myself living here?’”

***

The tube was crowded and on the way from Sloane Square to Paddington, an Irish group played live music in my carriage. They were good. They made me smile and think I could get used to that sort of thing. I guess in a way it’s why people live in places like London, it’s why people live in cities, because that sort of thing might happen and make you smile, whatever sort of thing “that” is, whatever makes you smile.

But anyhow I didn’t have any change to give them because I’d spent the last of my change on an artichoke and egg sandwich on artisan olive bread on the King’s Road. So I couldn’t show my appreciation and then they were gone, on the platform, and we were left alone, sweating and close. I did not really want to listen to my music anymore, although my headphones were still in and as it turned out my music had been playing the whole time, but very quietly, so I hadn’t noticed.

***

On the train back to Oxford I fell asleep accidentally, slumped against the window with my hand on my almost-full cup of coffee, my second weak, pointless latté of the day. I had tried to read Hemingway, well, I had read Hemingway, for a bit, but something about the way he described Gertrude Stein as having “immigrant hair” had started to grate on me, even though I had read the book before, and that particular story, in fact, many times, and knew I liked it. But it grated on me and grated on me, and I just sat there and read it over and over and over again – immigrant hair immigrant hair immigrant hair – wondering what does it mean, why does it bother me so much? Until I fell asleep slumped against the window, train crowded at midday, people everywhere, my weak latté still clutched in my hand.

I woke up and it was a muggy day in Oxford. The train station was ugly and for a moment, as I stumbled through the turnstile and stood remembering the way Paddington always makes you feel like you’re on the edge of something, that something new or big is just around the corner, it felt provincial. But I see myself living here anyway.

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.

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.

We each had a laptop. BBC in the background. News sites being refreshed. Twitter. People, some of whom we know, posting photos and videos and sound clips and updates. People posting false information, too (reports of looting on the Cowley Road in Oxford were greatly exaggerated, for instance: that is to say, there was absolutely no unusual activity on the Cowley Road in Oxford at all). Information overload. Is this a good thing? I never know. I do know that we knew more about what was going on in London from our home in Oxford than we would have known if this had happened 10 years ago and we had lived in London.

So I wonder how our long-term impression of events will change because of the way our short-term perception and consumption of them has changed.

***

Again we ask for prayer, say our thoughts are with people in places we aren’t. There’s a certain futility to this. Everybody has something to say, but is it always worth saying something?

I don’t mean that people should not speak, that we should censor ourselves or limit our reactions. But when I sit down to write about this, I feel distant and impotent. I think: I should have said something sooner, I should have reacted instantly, already the time for speech of the sort I want to make has passed, already we are moving on, collectively, talking about it in new or different ways. But part of me, the part of me that doesn’t move at internet speed, that moves at human speed, is still back there, still formulating thoughts and opinions based on what I’ve seen, even if it’s secondhand, thirdhand.

In many ways immediacy is important. But if you aren’t there, real time updates have a different meaning. The impact of information changes based on geography, proximity. Hysteria is contagious, but context cannot so easily be transmitted.

***

There’s something here about inhabiting a city, too, isn’t there? About what it means to live in a place, to make it (and un-make it) a home. Sometimes we forget – or I forget, anyhow – how much of a place is its people. I tend to think of community and place as separate, though overlapped. It’s easy to be preoccupied by architecture, by maps, by landscape and history and memory. But the truth is place, home, city, are all living things. And it takes empathy to live in a city, to be part of a place.

***

At about half past one in the morning, I fell asleep slumped over on the couch. Later, in bed, we heard a man wander down our street, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Rama-DAMN you!“, he kept saying. I assumed it was unconnected to everything else. You often hear people shouting at this time of night in this part of the city. But it did occur to me, briefly, that perhaps tonight we were readier to listen than usual.

“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.

I’ve been reading Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People who Can’t be Bothered to Do it. I love Geoff Dyer. I have a literary crush on him in the same way I do Alain de Botton. Maybe even an actual crush; I like his photo on the backs of his books and the way he describes himself, in Tripoli – “grey hair, bulbous nose, scrawny neck…I have often ben disappointed by my appearance, but I have never looked so utterly repulsive as I did then.” And I think it would be hard to read anything he had written and feel truly sad, because at the end of the day (or the book), no matter what the subject matter, there remains the fact of someone living in this world who writes the way he does.

But it is also hard for me to read this book and not, at times, feel sad – or, more precisely (if we’re going to talk about precision), on the edge of sad. There is a preoccupation or flirting with ruin; in Rome he reflects, “I was well on the way to becoming a ruin myself, and that was fine by me.” There is the theme of Keats’ “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”, the Autumnal whiff of decay – the sense of vertigo, of tumbling; of simultaneous helplessness and resistance to something as natural as gravity or seasonal change. In Amsterdam he writes: “I was happy to be here in this chair-intensive café in the autumn of my drug-taking years, with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Dazed, who a few weeks later would succumb to one of her periodic bouts of severe depression, and my old friend Amsterdam Dave, whom I had met only the night before and who months later, would himself – like the author of the present memoir – go completely to pieces.” So I read the book with the feeling that I am with him on the edge of a precipice; that the fall will be both inevitable and survivable; that it will nonetheless hurt.

2.

In Libya, though, Dyer visits some ruins – Leptis Magna – and observes that, “ruins do not make you wish that you had seen them earlier, before they were ruins – unless, that is, they have become too ruined. Ruins – antique ruins at least – are what is left when history has moved on. They are no longer at the mercy of history, only of time.” And even in Amsterdam, he realises: “I have just described exactly the place we’re in. I’m already in the place I want to go to.”

3.

I have this preoccupation with nostalgic places, places where memory seems to be a stronger motivator than anything else. Oxford is, to me, very obviously one such place; its essence is not actually (for instance) in the happy days of men in boaters punting down the idle Cherwell in the calm after one war and before another, or the mahogany rooms in stone colleges, the sounds of bells and port being poured – it’s in the memory of these things, or, more specifically, a sort of shared, made up memory of these things, an irrational yearning for them.

The reason I feel at home in nostalgia is that it is the only lasting thing. It is comforting. We are all so very much at the mercy of history and time, and nostalgia is the forever-feeling, the feeling that lasts after a thing goes. It is the only safe space, really. You do not wish you had seen ruins before they were ruins; they have transcended the forces that will eventually render you yourself obsolete. And similarly I do not wish I had seen Oxford at any other time, because I know that Oxford at any other time would be just like it is now – constantly looking backward towards those days: “Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint,” Evelyn Waugh writes in Brideshead Revisited; “Oxford in those days,” observed William Morris some fifty years earlier, “still kept a great deal of its earlier loveliness”.

4.

Then there are places on the uncomfortable edge of nostalgia.

One Sunday, while my parents are visiting from California, we drive to Ilfracombe, which is not a place I know anything about. We drive down motorways and then through rainforests along narrow roads. We arrive in early evening and the fierce rain that has followed us from Oxford begins to subside; the sky spits and fizzes, then goes quiet. I am left feeling exactly as I always feel in these sort of seaside towns: as if I have arrived just in time, although nothing has changed for a very long time.

On the walls of our hotel, of every hotel in Ilfracombe, probably, there are photos of the place in happier days: Victorians standing on the shoreline, Edwardians mounting a hill to view the ships below, men holding on to their hats in what is, the photograph manages to imply with its impressionistic blurriness, a mild and welcome breeze, not at all like the angry winds now whipping through the town. The hotels then, I think, would have seemed grand. Or perhaps they are only meant to make us feel like that, perhaps they have always been as grim as they appear now, and the miracle of them is their ability to convince you that in those days they really were something. Women with parasols would have walked out to the water, and there would have been a cheer if not a warmth in the air, where now there appears primarily to be nothing: nothing open, nothing of note, nothing to do, nothing to say, except to sigh and wonder if the fat cat curled up in the alleyway has a home and whether the seagulls are deliberately targeting your car or if the dappling of guano on the windscreen will start to feel normal, soon.

As we walk down the High Street my mother remarks that this is the sort of place that only had its heyday so that we could reflect on it later, that it was built with ruin in mind. Maybe this is true; we pass the empty chip shops and derelict pubs, the charity shops, the vacant storefronts, and the nightclub, open till 3:30 every night, next to the Indian restaurant and across the street from a cashpoint. We eat dinner in a restaurant nearish to the sea; the interior has been recently renovated (so recently, in fact, that all the tools and materials are still stacked up in the back near the toilets). There are straight-backed chairs and fake antlers hung from the walls, and it is full of people looking like they are on their big night out, in dark jeans, with slicked back hair, eating fancy food that is utterly devoid of taste. Even the wine tastes of nothing; I drink a large glass of it without noticing that it is not my water. Across the street is an antique shop selling wooden ships trapped in glass bottles and RAF commemorative china and rusty basins, which sounds nice written down, sort of poetic and eccentric, but looks sad, perhaps because the shelves in the window are so sparsely populated.

But everyone has such a brave – or rather indifferent, which I think is much the same thing – face! Or at least, everyone we see, which is about two people, seems to be the picture of pleasantness. And the proprietress of our hotel is so cheerful and accommodating that she moves two cars just to make room for ours and neglects to ask for a deposit or a card number or any indication, in fact, that we might have a means of paying her.

In my hotel room, trying to mollify my angry tastebuds after a cheesecake the flavor and consistency of ice and a glass of distinctly un-port-like port, I make hot chocolate and listen to the seagulls. Two towels have been neatly folded on my bed, a chocolate resting on each, although I am sleeping alone tonight. There is wifi and a flatscreen television. The chalky taste of the hot chocolate is familiar, and the seagulls, too, remind me a little of my childhood, in the sense that I lived somewhere as a child where you might hear seagulls from time to time.

The problem is that everything is so earnest, and so earnestly awful. I like these seaside towns, I like the crumbling facades and the empty shops and the faded shutters and the ice cream aesthetic. But I like them in a very ambivalent way: I like them in the same way, maybe, that I like Geoff Dyer’s recognition of his own deterioration. And I’m as unfair on these places as we are on ourselves – affectionately, resentfully bemoaning our “bulbous noses”, while the reality is, we’re not so bad after all, we like ourselves really, we’re just surprised, sometimes, by what we see, and in our surprise a little cruel.

5.

So when I wake up the next morning it seems to me that maybe the places on the uncomfortable edge of nostalgia are only uncomfortable because they are – like certain ancient ruins – “too ruined”. After breakfast (heavy pieces of wet white toast, sopping up the yellow egg yokes) we drive to a nearby village, from where we embark on a coastal walk which takes us up and down along the cliffs and affords us great views of the blueish sea and the purpleish sky and the green and brown place where the land begins, and I see that maybe the towns only look tired in comparison.

I love the South Bank. My understanding of the geography of London is pretty disjointed; I can never really see how one area relates to another (I know the names of lots of places in London, and have been to lots of places in London, but my mental map of the place is disturbingly blank, like there are lots of small areas bobbing in a sea of cheap suits, angry black cabs and Pret a Mangers). And I barely know how the South Bank fits into the rest of London (I only just discovered that the London Eye is south of the river!), but I have this weird fondness for it. I think maybe it’s because I went there with Xander once, right after we first met. It was warm and sunny and this was before iPhones (which makes me feel SO OLD until I remind myself that iPhones only really came to prominence a few years ago) so he had an actual copy of an actual A-Z, hardbound in black leather. I distinctly remember him bringing it out and me being impressed, though in retrospect I can’t think why we needed it, as all we did was get on the Bakerloo line at Paddington and get out at Embankment and then walk across the bridge and look at Antony Gormley statues standing like suicides in the sunshine on the edges of buildings. Then we sat outside and had a beer and watched people and it was pleasant.

Anyway it seems to me that it is always sunny and Saturday on the South Bank, even if it isn’t Saturday and even if it isn’t really very sunny. So it was very nice to find that this Saturday it was both actually Saturday and actually sunny and we were strolling along the waterfront eating pork sandwiches and ice cream and on our way to see Joanna draw on the walls of the Tate Modern bookshop as part of the launch of her fabulous new book London Walks.

By the time we actually got to the Tate it was late afternoon and Joanna found a spot for us on the shop window (near a fashion blogger and a few portraits down from Boris Johnson) and Xander and I stood semi-still for awhile while she drew us. And now, we’re on display! In the Tate! We’ve been temporarily immortalized (the plan is for the drawings to stay up all summer), so do say hi to our window-selves if you happen to be strolling past.