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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

A frail rain falls; the sun comes out.

On the 17:36 to London Paddington. We keep passing those ubiquitous self-storage units. I associate them with trains now. Or perhaps it’s the other way round – I associate trains not with rolling countryside but with sprawling industrial amenities.

How can there possibly be so much stuff in the world that needs storing? Who rents these units, and for what purpose? It seems to me that once people become disengaged from their things, they cease to need them. For awhile I toyed with the idea of having some things in Oxford and some in California, but it really was pointless, and after a season I’d re-acquired everything I wanted but had left behind. The rest was duly carted off to the Salvation Army. What we own means nothing without us, not the other way around.

There’s a man who stores his furniture with us. No one really knows where he is anymore (Canada? Australia?) and it seems he has no thoughts for the things which gather dust in our house, though money continues to appear monthly in our account, like magic. Recompense for nothing at all.

So whenever I see those self-storage places I feel like I’m looking at these vast empty spaces. Even if they are full, even if people do use them – what’s the point? What’s inside is just abandoned stuff in its own abandoned world.

But back to trains. Air conditioned trains on a hot day, which always remind me of the summer I spent commuting from Goleta to Santa Ana. I was interning at the Orange County Transportation Authority (is there irony in the amount of time I spent transporting myself for those three months? Oh, yes!), spending three days down there before returning home for a long weekend. And on Wednesday evenings I’d buy a sandwich for dinner and change out of my suit and I’d catch the last train back.

Between Santa Ana and Los Angeles I’d watch the hot, pale sunlight turn into a Southern California twilight, and in that twilight we’d rush past the other side of things. People’s backyards – plastic toys, dirty pools, beer bottles. The tired backs of buildings, the places where cars go to die, the places where trucks go to stock up on goods. Warehouses and factories. A Spearmint Rhino with a neon sign and a mournful countenance.

But mostly self-storage places. They were everywhere – a part of the landscape, like rolling golden hills and stunning sea views.

You never really saw any people on that journey. A few stops out of L.A. it would suddenly be dark and you’d have to turn your eyes to the seat in front of you again, and outside there would be nothing but flashing lights.

This time Fez is much less about us and much more about the place itself, the people here. Now I think it extraordinary that we came here when we did – only six weeks into our relationship, the future (our future, that is, he being English, me being American) only a cloud through which we could not even imagine passing. But we trusted each other completely here, and lay on our hotel bed taking photos of our sweaty, hairy, unclean selves.

Now we are staying with friends. But it is also different because three years of living together has made it so. It is lovely but also, weirdly, lonely. If you are no longer getting to know each other in such an active way (now I can make jokes about his past and he knows the geography of my history and there is much less exclaiming over a tajine: ‘oh, I didn’t know you’d done that!‘). It is sometimes almost like travelling with oneself. If he knows, now, that I like to wash my hands more than strictly necessary, and I know without thinking about it that he will smoke almost twice as much here, then there is little (nothing!) to try to hide, and even less to be grateful for the revelation of.

And this is such a sweet thing, but also scary – suddenly here we, this one thing that is a “we” but also an “I”, are, in a foreign country. Perhaps in a way this is why I slept badly last night – for, in spite of him being beside me, loving, handsome even in sleep, smelling and feeling more familiar than anything, than even myself, I felt a sense of being also alone. And perhaps also this is why people (eventually) have children – I had this thought yesterday, as we were discussing the merits of trans-national relationships: that at a certain point you become so close that you almost need someone else – who will be like him and like you but different and constantly, forever, surprising – again. Is that a strange thing to think? But then, everything is strange here.

The problem with Sundays is the inevitable slow march towards Monday. You can feel each moment sliding past like an adder at your ankles; dangerous, slimy, fickle. Hang the laundry to dry outside and already you are halfway through the day before you’ve even begun it (or so it feels). It always starts with such promise and then suddenly you find yourself deeply asleep on the couch while the sun beats down hot outside, too weary from the effort of trying to preserve each instant and enjoy it to stay awake any longer.

Today I find myself in just this position – prone, one arm flung across my forehead – when the Man walks in. I find myself shooting up through the black waters of sleep and am unexpectedly awake-but-not-awake. And in this tiny space – only a second, really, perhaps two – I find myself thinking how funny, or maybe how extraordinary, that there is another person who lives here (not just here in this house but here, in my life), who says as I sit up with my face creased and my eyes full of terror (the way I pop up like this reminds him of a meerkat, he sometimes tells me) not to worry.

Yesterday we did summer things. It was a sweet, slow day. We went to the farmer’s market and bought eggs, a free range chicken, vegetables, an old copy of an early P.G. Wodehouse novel. We sat in the shade drinking homemade elderflower cordial and snacking on lemon cakes. Later we did the thing which we often do on Saturdays – we have brunch (salad, sausages, flatbread, orange juice, coffee) and read the Saturday Guardian (I read aloud Tim Dowling’s column to him, he reads Lucy Mangen’s to me). Then we went out into the garden and picked cherries and watered the potatoes and sat in the grass and I tried to do the crossword but gave up on it. We ate brownies and raspberries in a pool of sunshine.

We brought the cherries to the pub and I had more homemade elderflower cordial, this time paired with champagne, because, well, why not? On the way home we stopped by Sylvesters and impulsively bought lavender and rosemary to plant in the garden, and some ropes with which to hang the hammock. I had half a nap on the couch and we heated up some pizza before going into town as darkness settled to listen to some music. At midnight we sat upon the hammock, the two of us, limbs folded, watching the star-drenched sky until some neighbors called us over, so we brought red wine and glasses and climbed the fence and met them for the first time, and a few hours later we were in bed with the heat of the day still palpable in the walls of the house.

25.06.10 Fez, Morocco (Café rooftop, near Bab Boujaloud)

I.
Morning clouds are burning off. Or perhaps they aren’t, perhaps they’ll stay all day. But at any rate something’s burning – plumes of white smoke coming from a small chimney, a smell which reminds me of London. I have to reach for the memory, but slowly, through the Moroccan morning, it comes: I’m 12, it’s my first time in England, we’re at the Imperial War Museum, moving through artificial First World War trenches. They have replicated (and softened) the moans of wounded men and the boom of guns; it’s dark, there are flickering lights that illuminate plastic statues of officers bent over their plans, casualties lying still on stretchers, rats at the feet of a nervous recruit. But mostly the have put a smell into the room – a smell of soft, warm burning. A smell like this smell here, now, in the medina.

Three years ago we came to this same café and sat just as we are today, on the rooftop, with our tea. He made a sketch of an elaborate iron lampshade, which took him nearly two hours to complete, and I mostly watched him, occasionally making notes of my own. It was hot, I wore a veil of sweat over my face, large black sunglasses obscured my eyes.

Now the mint tea is finally cool enough to sip. Sunglasses? I can’t decide. On, off, on, off, oh, well. Maybe it’s better to squint anyway – to meet the haze with half-closed eyes. Alice says it gets cold here in winter. Today I’m willing to believe that; it’s so cool, with the overcast sky and the breeze and the soft air. I see it’s not all dry dusty heat. Nowhere, not even England or Africa, can be defined by weather alone.

II.
There are cats on the rooftop (a cool tin roof!). Mean, skinny strays – a whole pack of them, moving towards us as a hungry phalanx.

III.
Bab Boujloud was only built in 1913. And the cherry festival, at Sefrou, is the oldest festival in Morocco after only 90 years. So you see, it’s strange that what seemed so old can be so new and yet things here – or at least the outline of things, the basis for them – are ancient. Medieval and often seemingly frozen in time.

24.06.10. Fez, Morocco (Ali & Alice’s house, rooftop)

I.
True it is not the Africa of my dreams; but then, that place does not exist. It is not elsewhere, it is simply absent.

II.
The pigeons are making their guttural sounds; the wind is both strong and soothing, the sunlight casts a golden spell. Soon the sun will drop below the hillside – even now the sky at the horizon has turned pink. Behind me a minaret stands proud. Minarets and satellite dishes characterize the landscape here. I’m always so fascinated by these uncanny juxtapositions, but really they mean very little. This is simply how things are nowadays. There’s wifi in the medina; what of it?

This is a place that is both not-familiar and also very familiar; it moves quickly and slowly at the same time. From here it all looks so simple – I can see the Merinides hotel, the ruins on the ridge, and it hardly looks very far. A crow could be there and back long before the sun disappears. But below is a bowl of complexity; by foot it would take you an hour to find your way through the tangle of streets and shops and dead-end alleyways (”derbs”, I’ve learned they’re called, these exotic culs-de-sac). You would not be there in time for sunset. See? Simple but not simple.

III.
Oh, but it’s as Africa as any other bit of Africa. Its Arab influences do not preclude it from belonging to its own continent.

26.06.10

Ali tells us of the jinns, the spirits. He does not like the dark because it is infused with them (and we arrive again at light and dark). Alice says he tells her not to go into dark alleyways.

Then she tells us a strange tale of going to see a purging of jinn-infested women. (We are on the rooftop, eating Moroccan style out of a tagine, sipping red wine, the empty bottles of which must be carefully brought out and disposed of one by one, so as not to offend the neighbours in this dry-but-not-dry part of the city). They wore black, Alice tells us. They brought offerings to the river – bread, milk, chickens, a hedgehog.

(A hedgehog? )

Yes, a hedgehog, she says. But the hedgehog was simply flung to the riverbank, while the chickens were beheaded. A man gave the bread to the river and scattered the milk. The women, or some of them, began to convulse and make strange guttural sounds, an indication that they could see the devil.

***

27.06.10

Islam is everywhere and nowhere here. You breathe it in at night; it seeps into your ears with each adhan, and yet it feels such an organic substance, as if were part of the molecules of the air, that it is sometimes easy to forget the foreignness of things.

One of Alice’s friends, a teacher at the school where Alice is studying Arabic, sips mint tea with us one afternoon. She is 25, a student of Tajwīd, recitation of the Qur’an. It is a specific and shockingly intricate art; it takes years to master the correct emphasis and pronunciation. Her love for her religion – not as a religion in the way that we conventionally understand it, but as a topic of study, a thing which lives and breathes itself, a story – is infectious.Really, we decide, our thoughts hazy from the heat (perhaps this is the ideal atmosphere in which to learn – your mind malleable, melting like wax, reforming around each new idea) everything is the same (philosophies, religions); everything is about how we live our lives.

She speaks to us in perfect, almost un-accented English about her own students, some of whom are ambivalent still about having a female tutor.

Strange this balance, I think. How sometimes you find yourself thinking, here: ‘there’s so much!’. And at other times, ‘there’s so little!’ It’s so cramped, so open. So hostile and yet so friendly.

***

28.06.10

Later, at the local hammam, topless, filthy, I sit on the hot tiled floor while another woman, topless too, her hair wrapped in a white scarf to keep it from her face, scrubs me vigorously. We do not speak the same language, but when she wrenches me round so she can scrub my front, and holds my arm up with a smile and a tsk to indicate how much dirt she has brought to the surface, how much dead skin will be washed away with the next bucket of water, we are in the same moment, inhabiting the same world. Maybe later I pass her on the street, and do not know it – she shrouded by a hijab, me pale-skinned and wide-eyed like every other Western tourist, each of us indistinguishable in spite of that moment of intimacy.

But in that moment: how unselfconscious I feel! Usually so aware of things – unsightly folds of skin, the size of my breasts. But the folds are like everyone else’s folds, and my breasts are certainly no larger than most of the other women’s, and the water, the steam, the scrubbing all act as a drug, and an hour and a half slips by unnoticed.

We have been, we are, travelling. We are in a state of travel. Dispossessed, half-asleep, gripped by other worlds (Moroccan spiced coffee, of which my bag now smells, and the distant Irish troubles of the 1920s, of which I have been reading), totally and utterly outside the moment and space we’re actually in.

We are however capable of looking towards the future: what will we have for dinner? Probably Chinese, or else pizza – and someone will deliver it swiftly and practically wordlessly to our house, and we will not say shokran, nor will the man who delivers our dinner expect anything, or see any disparity (class, colour, religion) between us and him. Our street will seem miraculously wide and the drunks exceptionally loud and we will for awhile miss (or at least unconsciously feel the lack of) the five calls to prayer, particularly the one just before dawn. Perhaps we will wake then, each of us, silently, without even knowing the other, too, is conscious of the quiet hour. We will hear the yelp of bicycle wheels or the moan of an errant car alarm, and then, comforted by this intrusion of noise, we will sleep again, through the dawn, too late, wake bathed in hot light, angry, minds elsewhere.

There is no possibility of jet-lag (no time difference, not that I was ever even vaguely aware of the time as we traipsed through the medina), but we will pretend that we’re travel-weary and in doing so, convince ourselves that we are travel-weary and jet-lagged after all, and people will know how to interpret the haze in our eyes, for we will say, ‘Oh yes, we’ve been in Morocco’. I despair of how that will sound – arrogant, perhaps? Though we hardly mean for it to.

It’s just that the way time moves alarms me. On the way to the airport, we say glibly that it hardly seems a week could possibly have passed since we were on the way to the medina, and I’m reminded of a dream I had shortly before we left, in which we departed and then suddenly I found myself returning, thinking, ‘but that was so quick, and we hardly did anything we said we would!’

Everything, really, is a variation of that dream – how else did I arrive at the age of 23, when just yesterday I was 20, and travelling back from Fés with a newfound lover, making lists in the back of my notebook of the furniture I would have to buy in order to furnish my apartment in Boston when I got back in September; and crying at the ending of John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, when really I meant to cry at my predicament, at the seeming impossibility of being parted by an ocean (not to mention a thousand yards of red tape, a thousand pounds, a thousand moments of yearning and wishing and resenting) from my love. Three years ago? No, that was three minutes ago, or else three centuries ago. We live always on dream-time, moving through molasses, or being propelled at the speed of light through our own experiences.

…and here we are now. Replicating the journey physically at least, though now I make no lists, because the house in Oxford is already full of our things (mostly our books), because I have a visa that makes my life there valid. “Oh September, where did you go?” is the refrain of the song I’m listening to, and oh how often I find myself thinking that! Without even knowing which September I mean. Perhaps I mean the first September I ever saw – how would I know? And what difference could it possibly make? It was September and now it is not and soon enough it will be again – this is an inevitable, unvarying truth. Leaves will fall again from the cherry trees in our garden and I will sit mournfully in my study and say, “Oh June, where did you go?” – wondering how the green could fade so fast.

Speaking of which, where did June go? For already it is July and Wimbledon is nearly over and soon our friends’ son will celebrate his first birthday, when this time last year he was only an idea, crouching in his mother’s body, a being who both did and did not exist as we took a break from our investigations into the life and writings of P.G. Wodehouse to eat cold fruit and watch the tennis, while outside on Plantation Road the elderly shuffled past, gasping in the heat, sweat forming in the ravines of their facial wrinkles. September indeed!

(Later I think how funny: for although we’ve been travelling all day, I am now inexplicably, unexpectedly, in England, at home, as if I had been moved like a chess piece from one place to another, as if the time and space between there and here had been erased.)

The sun has sunk now. We’re all on the terrace, even the dogs, who are fickle in their attentions, though lovingly so – as if, I think, they are trying to distribute themselves evenly among us, so that none of us is disappointed for long by the lack of dog’s head in lap.

Last night I went out and took photographs of the minaret near Ali and Alice’s house in the moonlight. The darkness here is characterized by light. The religious symbolism of this does not entirely escape me – at a christening last week in Christ Church cathedral, we were asked to help the baby walk always in light – but I find it difficult just now to articulate it precisely. It is like this: even at night the minarets seem to be illuminated, whether or not they actually are. The one near Ali and Alice’s house is abandoned and silent, but still it shines.

I don’t mean magic exactly. (Though at dinner, Ali tells us of the magic here, and I cannot help but trust him – he’s from here, he knows, his confidence is contagious). I mean that we see the minarets, the city itself, always bathed in light, even at the cold hour of midnight. Awoken at 5 am by the resounding calls to prayer, the day seems already to have begun, even if the sun has not yet lifted its hot, heavy self over the Eastern horizon.

It’s nearly midnight but something about the quality of light puts me in mind of an earlier hour. It doesn’t feel fully dark yet. Perhaps it’s the warmth. My espadrilles make no noise on the walk home. I can see the flashes of people’s televisions, a few late night conversations over bottles of wine. Everyone seems civilised and subdued. Hush, says the moon, and we obey. The pubs are shut.

In the mirror I’m startled to realise that the brightness in my cheeks is actually sunburn; I’ve caught the sun today, somewhere on my walks from town and back, to a friend’s place for dinner where we sat in pools of twilight, candles staining our eyes with bright spots.

I wear a floral print dress. It’s ’40s, almost-frumpy, which fits my mood. My hair is messy. The glamour is in the not-glamour, or so I tell myself. The slightly sunburnt nose; I could get used to the way this weather makes me feel.

Last night was the summer solstice. A year ago I was with my mother in Bath. This year we celebrated, without meaning to, by listening to Stornoway in a hot, cramped upstairs room. They sang:

Oh and it’s a Monday night in June
And I should be sleeping
But it’s so damn warm inside
I’m in the garden dreaming

It was a Monday night in June. I should have been sleeping. It was so warm inside. And after, we lay dreaming with the window open.