We’ve both got a cold and an attitude and an overdeveloped sense of winter angst. As we walk towards the castle I tell him that it’s sad, we don’t spend very much time in Oxford anymore, we’re always skirting around it, it’s almost like we’re afraid of it though really I know it’s only because everything we need–the pub, the office, our friends and family–are also on the outskirts. Every day I cycle to work and I manage, going from one far end of the city to the other, to avoid the centre altogether.

He says it’s only because of the weather, which is miserable and makes us like hermits.

I say that there was a time when if a shop closed down and a new one opened up in its stead I would know instantly; now it might be months before I noticed. I wonder to myself how many things have changed without me knowing. There are roadworks on the High street that make it almost impassable; I’ve avoided it for months, and now, for the first time in a long time, I take a moment to observe the mannequins in shop windows, the half-hearted early springtime displays, the canary yellow macs and peep-toed heels.

He doesn’t seem perturbed by it but I can’t stop thinking about how long it’s been since I sat on the steps of the Clarendon building watching Japanese tourists pose for photos and flush-faced American undergrads in groups, hiding under their new hoodies, watching women in heels and students in vintage brogues or else boots and tight skirts, toddlers tripping over the uneven stones. Our love was born here, doing these things, but that summer feels a very long time ago. Who was I then, with the time to waste on trivialities?

And who am I now, to think it might be a waste?

When we reach the castle we have dinner at a place I’ve never been before; it’s huge and dark and full of dolled-up girls with painted lips and high heels and a twentysomething-single-career-girl-attitude. I’m glad I’m not them but at least they don’t have a cold, I think. It’s a very American place, cavernous, full of booths and happy-hour menus and even the toilets downstairs trick me into thinking for an instant that I’m in New York or Los Angeles. I feel momentarily both homesick and repulsed.

It’s just winter, he tells me. We’ll walk around the city in spring, we tell each other, we’ll drink at all our old haunts and watch as many people as we like when it’s warm enough.

So until then I’ll spend time in my study, by the radiator, watching cats in the far end of the garden. There goes another one now, a new black-and-white thing, picking through the tangle of dead brush. And here I am in Oxford, missing Oxford. Humans are funny creatures, much funnier in a way than these aimless cats.

❧

And so we arrive at that time of year when winter seems interminable. Your bones have been cold for so long that even a hot bath fails to thaw them. The English are invariably sullen over late-winter weather, and I’ve heard several times that we’re in it for the long haul this year, that we don’t stand a chance of an early Spring, as if we’re children, we’ve been badly behaved, the thermometers want to punish us.

I stand outside, in our back garden. It’s too bleak for words, the sticky black paste of mud and dead leaves, the naked shivering trees, the poignant abandoned laundry line, the table and chairs which have spent these long months buckling under snow and rain. I realize I haven’t stood in the garden for weeks. From my study window I have a view of it; I watch cats trying to catch birds, I see the neighbours’ sad detritus gathering mud, but I haven’t actually stood here, surveyed it at ground level, for too long. I miss standing in our garden, I realize.

Every once in awhile there is still the lingering dream of African light, of trade winds, spice, valleys like bowls; but mostly the mundane has crept back in. I like how local I feel, here, how we go to the pub on the end of our road for bloody marys and sandwiches, how well we know the roads, how predictable the fall of night is each evening, how every night is getting a tiny bit shorter. I like the idea that I will, over the next few months, slowly reacquaint myself with our garden. We will grow potatoes again, maybe. One day we will wake up and it will be warm enough to start to prune and dig, and the colour will start to come back into our cheeks, which have already turned pale again.

❧

Infatuation. That’s a good word for our dizzy relationship with places we feel particular affinity for. I’ve often thought this–that our relationship to, say, a city, has the same qualities as our relationship to a lover or a partner. I feel that with Oxford–this is what I keep trying and then re-trying to represent in The Book, The Book which has become like a beast in my mind. I keep trying to over-complicate it, as if I don’t trust myself, when really it is all very simple. Really it is only a manifestation of a love affair with a particular place.

❧

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

❧

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

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

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

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

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

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

❧