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.

“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.

It was springtime in Oxford and the cherry blossoms were blooming and there was something not quite right. This was supposed to be the buoyant time of year, but I kept waking up in the hot blue depths of the pre-dawn with no breath, my heart beating too fast. I remembered feeling like this once or twice before, or maybe it was more than that: I remembered feeling like this for weeks at a time, but I thought I had put all that behind me. So now I thought: am I dying? Well, maybe. But also maybe I have felt this way before and asked myself the same question, needlessly, and been okay, so maybe I will also be okay this time too. But then I thought: well, perhaps this time is different. I thought that perhaps in the morning, if I was not dead, I should make an appointment with the doctor. All those vertiginous nights and I had learned nothing! But in the end I never made an appointment with the doctor, not about that, anyway, and I kept waking up, which was, I eventually decided, a good sign.

When I began to examine my situation, I realised that at the heart of it was this: I could not decide anything, but I was running out of time. I was both very young and very old simultaneously: maybe the tightness in my chest was simply the weight, the vice-grip of missed opportunity. But also I looked around and everyone was older than me. My friends were all older than me. My boyfriend was older than me. We kept talking abstractly but also very seriously about babies, each of us trying to impart some sense of urgency to the other whilst also, at the same time, trying to make light of the situation, to stop the progress in case we had misunderstood each other. He was five years older than me: that was a lifetime, it was nothing. I was still young, to have children, but he was old, even though he was young too. I kept thinking about it this way: as if age somehow mattered.

Only of course it did matter. Age had always mattered. I had always been younger; I had been propelled forward, skipped a grade, left to flounder with my patchy understanding of long division and joined-up writing, encouraged to consider myself intellectually precocious even while I struggled with basic social interactions. But now I was reading articles in the newspaper about how fragile fertility really was, which did not help things, because I was already worried, again needlessly, again powerfully, about fertility. I wanted to go to the doctor and ask, but I did not know how to, and I did not want to have a conversation about how young I was, how much time I had left, because I was not young! I had so little time left!

***

His grandfather kept asking why we were not yet married. It had been four years and I suppose it was not an unreasonable question. We asked ourselves the same thing, too, and I could never find a satisfactory answer except that we weren’t. It was very simple, really. We had lived together from the start and there had never been any doubt about the seriousness of our situation, of our strange devotion, and yet even when we did talk about getting married we talked about it as very young people are apt to do: as a thing for the future. And yet here we were four years later, the future was upon us! So we simply hadn’t caught up with ourselves. But it was hard to say this to a 90-year old man who wanted to see his first grandson married. You see? Age did matter after all.

***

But the real issue was that I could not decide anything. For instance I could not decide if I wanted to commit to children. I mean, I did, really. I thought about my own parents, who had not the benefit, as we ourselves had, of all this time and youth. My mother was 36 when she had me, but this was not, I had begun to realize, really the conscious decision I had always imagined it to be: it was not necessarily about feminism, or about putting a career first, or even about indecision. It was on the other hand at least partly to do with the fact that she simply had not met my father sooner, and so had not the same luxury of time that we, theoretically, had.

But then again I thought about how little I had done so far and how much I did not want to feel useless. I thought about how unprepared we really were. Neither of us had any money to speak of or any prospect of earning very much money ever. We did not own a house and although we had a very understanding landlord in Ireland who did not charge us very much to live in a beautiful terraced house with a big garden in East Oxford down the road from our favourite pub we had very little stability, because while this arrangement might last forever, or at least for a long time, it might also not, and if it did not, I couldn’t see what we’d do. We’d been utterly ruined by living in this beautiful house and I did not know where else in Oxford we could go and be happy as we were happy in this place, at home as we were at home here at home.

But then perhaps it would not matter: we had always said, for instance, how we wanted to move to the US at some point. I couldn’t even decide about this, now: I was so happy in Oxford (even when I was desperately unhappy), I had such a sense of community (even when I felt lonely), I rode my bicycle through the city centre every single day and every single day I was overcome with this sensation that I belonged here: or at least, that I wanted to belong here. The beauty had not gotten old and familiarity had not ruined the novelty of finding myself here, of all places. So where else would we go, and why would we go there? But at the same time we liked the idea of being the sort of people who could get up and go, who could raise children in two countries, or three. And he was deliberately setting up a portable life: a career that allowed for flexibility.

***

This was another problem: careers. I had none. I did have a job, where I spent eight or nine hours every day, with people I liked very much, performing tasks I mostly had no passion for. But anyway a job is not a career, and the real problem is that I could not do the things I really wanted to do. I could not write, much, because I had no time and no energy and then whenever I did write it came out all jumbled and depressed, or else I worked on a novel that I could not decide what I felt about. In some ways I thought it was very good but there were also ways I suspected it was very bad, and I was afraid of finding out which bits were which, in case I had to confront the fact that I would have to do something very seriously different with it to make it readable. And of course I knew that even if it was readable, it wouldn’t necessarily be what I wanted it to be, and even if it was what I wanted it to be, it wouldn’t necessarily be published, let alone read. So it seemed a bit of a dead-end, or at least, not the best way to spend what precious time I had to myself.

***

With the rest of my hours I slept and swam. And I thought about how I wanted not to have to swim every evening with the rest of the weary workers: all of us slogging through our days, slapping our arms against the water, mouths moving open like fish lips as we rolled our heads to the side to receive air. I wanted to swim at midday, maybe. Or midmorning. Or mid-anything. Just anytime that was the time I chose and not the time that had been given to me.

So then I thought that if I felt that way about my time, perhaps children were not right, because the thing I knew, one of the very few things I knew, about children was that when you had them you had no control anymore over your time. You would be awoken again and again in the night and then for twenty years you would give yourself to something else. But then I thought that this was just what I needed: a real reason to not be selfish, not a fake reason, not a salary or a fear.

***

There were certain things I did know. I knew that I was in a holding pattern, I knew that something would have to give or be given, and soon. I knew, too, that in the end we would be alright, that it did not matter if we did not have a house or even if we were not married, and that since we did after all love each other there was no real reason to think that we would not find a way to support a family if we wanted to. I knew also that I did not want to raise a family on unhappiness, and the situation I had got myself into was an unhappy one, because it was not one in which I was doing something I wanted to do. I knew that I had to write something. I knew that I had to keep swimming, because it was the first thing I had found in a long time that gave me the peace of mind they say exercise is supposed to give you. I used run, but the problem with running was the impact: I got a bad knee from it (this was why I had started swimming in the first place), my side often hurt and I would have to cut the run short (later the doctor told me that this was because of my hip and too many years of running on hard surfaces). I had liked running, and I still liked it, but not in the same way. It left me tired, which is a good feeling to have but not always as good as feeling simply buoyant. I guess perhaps it was just that the act of floating seemed a small miracle. My own mother could not swim, and yet I had been given the ability to, I had had lessons and an upbringing by the beach. And my grandmother, now in her 80s, had been swimming practically her whole life and still did it regularly.

I even knew that all my obsessive worry was irrational, and that I was waking up in the middle of the night for nothing, and that I was very lucky in very many ways, and that I was thinking too hard about too many things that were too far in the future for me to have any control over. But even so I kept worrying and I kept waking up.

***

My thinking was very circular. I would think for a time – any time, in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, halfway through a meeting, staring at a slide being projected onto the wall or at my desk looking out at the tennis courts and watching a pair of white-haired men send the ball back and forth on the grass courts. And then I would reach the place I had started: a question, a series of questions. I would find myself unable to understand if I knew what I wanted or only knew what I thought I wanted (or were these the same thing?), if I was able to move forward or not. So I would keep staring out the window. And meanwhile, all the while, time was passing me by, or I was moving with it, or anyway I was getting older, if imperceptibly.

Perhaps this is what they mean by growing up: the awareness not of mortality – nothing so grand – but simply of each moment. The ability to literally feel the length of a second or an hour, and to place that second or that hour in context, to know how much it means. But in any case I did not really want to be grown up: I only wanted to sleep through the night, I only wanted to find it not such an effort to smile at people or even at myself in the mirror. I wanted to cut my hair short, even though I worried I never would, in the same way I wanted to say, ‘I want to start a family now, because why not?’ even though I knew I would not say that, yet. I worried what would happen but also wanted to know what would happen if I did do these sorts of things.

I told myself that in a way, once before, I had done something like this: I had simply moved to Oxford, which went against logic, which was not the easy or even necessarily possible thing to do, and yet I had done it and it had been easy and we had made it possible. And it was the best thing I had done, it was one of the only things I could not convince myself, if I tried, to regret: no amount of convincing would make even my wretched anxious self think that that had been at all a bad idea, even if it had not always been good, even if I had not always been smart about it, even if we had struggled.

So I thought I should be comforted by that.

I am reclaiming the city. I know it’s always like this in the spring anyway, or nearly always, but this year as with every year it feels different. It’s fun to pretend that no one has ever felt quite like this before, felt quite so viscerally the symbolism of spring; everything laden, ripe, the trees with their plump blossoms, the limbs of the city swollen from all the promise of things to come. Everything seems simultaneously possible and unlikely. The sky is fickle and yet so self-assured; one day it is like summer, all hot and blue, and yet the next an autumnal cloud cover makes you rethink everything, so that you can never be sure whether you feel this way or that.

Mostly it’s like being reacquainted with someone. The word “reclaim” implies ownership, which is maybe not the right sentiment, really, but this is how it feels: as if, in a very selfish way, I am taking something back, closing my fingers around it.

One evening I take a bus into town, quite impulsively, so that I can get a burrito and then wander around, down darkened streets, circle the Radcliffe Camera, where a lone man crouches low, takes a photograph. I pass, or am passed by, merry groups of Americans who are probably as young as or maybe even younger than I was when I first arrived; that is to say, quite young, quite impossibly young. I hate to think of myself as having been that young only because to do so makes me feel very old, even though I’m not at all old, even though I’m constantly feeling hopelessly young. The night falls in a very particular way. Cats dart across the streets of East Oxford and it doesn’t matter who wins, the end of the boat race, when the crews slump forward with exhaustion and elation, always makes me cry.

2.

I remember this time last year; I walked up the Woodstock road one day, in a coat which was not really necessary, with everything blooming pink around me. I was going to a lot of open mic nights at the time, I think because they make me feel simultaneously a part of something and also like an onlooker, which is often how I try to be even though it’s very hard to be both at once. One night, a few days after I had been refused a visa and then written a polite letter back and now was having just to simply sit and wait and wait and wait, there was a transition moment, a moment when things went from feeling truly awful to being bright and hopeful. It did not matter if I was refused a visa, I would go somewhere and write things. I would not starve because no one had ever let me starve before, least of all my own self.

Then after that I got the visa after all and a new job and still I had not finished my book, for which I kept setting arbitrary deadlines and then deliberately missing those arbitrary deadlines because, I suppose, I could not really imagine what would happen after the book, as if it defined me, or justified my being here, though of course it didn’t, I had been here first, then the idea, and not the other way around. For awhile it was a great relief having a visa because I knew that I could stay, but after awhile the relief wears off, or becomes just a part of daily life. The fact of being here ceases to seem so miraculous. And then eventually there is the thought that it is after all only temporary, two more years, as if I am literally buying time (I guess I actually am literally buying time). And now a year later I know to start thinking again about it again.

3.

In the same way that I feel both old and not-old as I’m passed by younger youths, I start to feel that I’ve grown gradually more comfortable in the skin of responsibility, whilst simultaneously finding it itchy, a bad fit. We do things we’ve needed to do for years; we finally buy a bedside table and a real wicker laundry basket and a bread bin and are not so much alarmed by the prospect of having to call a plumber as vaguely inconvenienced. I attach much importance to the bedside table and the bread bin. It’s very hard for me to see that we’ve grown up because it’s happened so slowly and we’ve been so particularly stubborn about it, and because we’re still not, after all that, really grown up at all, but there has been a shift, it’s very hard not to notice that there has been a shift.

It’s sort of an alarming prospect, this gradual change, the way it creeps up on you. Like, will we wake up suddenly, someday, to find that we have bought a house and paid off all our debts and have creaky knees, grey hair, grandchildren?

Maybe, probably, if we’re lucky, I guess.

Do I feel nostalgic here?

1.
At a certain point it occurs to me that I am always looking for somewhere to live.

I don’t need somewhere to live. I already have somewhere to live. I have a house, and a pub where people know me, and a corner shop where I buy cheese and sliced white bread and tinned soup for lazy meals. I have a history with my city, a relationship with it. I have a sense of belonging.

2.
But when I visit other places, I don’t want to see museums or monuments or the street where someone famous once stood naked on his head for twenty minutes or the spot where tourists always get their photographs taken. I used to think that this was because I was more sophisticated than that, or else that a sense of place is not in these things but in the way that people interact with pavements and cafés and in the architecture, the landscape, the things you can see sitting in a park or strolling down any arbitrary street.

Now I see that it is because what I like best when I visit a place is to wander aimlessly through neighborhoods in the evening, peering into the bright windows of other people’s lives, trying to picture myself there. I never liked New York City until I discovered the parts of it that I could conceivably, without too great a leap of imagination, exist happily. Now I say I love New York City but it’s really only because I can see myself living in Brooklyn and running in Prospect Park on the weekends and then having prolonged, bloody mary-fueled brunches. I don’t necessarily want this life, I’m not seeking a change, but “home” seems to be the way, ultimately, that I relate to places.

3.
Last year, on a flight to Kenya, I watched Sam Mendes’ “Away We Go”. And I guess I am doing exactly what Burt and Verona are doing, except without meaning to, and except without any need or even conscious desire to.

I guess maybe I don’t know how to visit a place. Only how to react to it.

4.
I’m in San Francisco. I’m never sure what my relationship with San Francisco is. I came here first with my parents when I was little and it was summer and unseasonably (everyone said) warm. We walked through Chinatown to the City Lights bookshop and yet I did not perceive how this place was much different from any other I had been. Still California, still home. Later I came back and bought a silk robe with an embroidered dragon from a Chinese lady and that night got food poisoning from a Vietnamese restaurant and a few weeks later became a vegetarian, for a bit. Later I came back and wandered around the SFMOMA taking photographs of the way the light – a hot springtime light, though the air itself was cool – came through the building fell in ordered lines on the floor. We spent a lot of time in a Yoko Ono exhibit. There was a telephone, painted white, and the placard said that once a day Yoko would call and speak to whoever happened to be standing there, whoever had the courage to answer when it rang. But Yoko did not call while we were there so instead we wrote wishes on little pieces of paper and hung them on a tree with tiny clothespins.

Now I do not know if the sum of these experiences equals a comfort and fluency with this place or not. Geographically I know nothing of the city; I feel adrift in each neighborhood, not able to picture how it connects to the next, not knowing where north or south is or what I would even do with this information if I had it. But I know that there is a patchy history, which must mean something.

5.
We revisit City Lights. I put my hand on the spine of a book in the Architecture section. Someone says, “excuse me,” pushes past, and it occurs to me – quite suddenly, in a way it has not really occurred to me before -that I am Californian, that I am not an outsider here in the way that I am an outsider at home, in Oxford.

I guess the paradox of this is, in a way, why I like to live abroad. Geoff Dyer writes about the same thing when he moves back to Oxford (of all places!) after a spell abroad: “Back in the land where I belonged, back among my own tribe,” he writes, “I immediately missed not belonging, missed that strange home you can build out of homelessness…And at the same time, coexisting easily with the feeling it apparently contradicted, was the feeling that I did not belong here.”

6.
So do I belong here or not? Maybe every visit is simply a quest to answer that question. And maybe the answer is, at least metaphorically speaking, actually in the wallpaper:

“We are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper,” Alain de Botton writes in The Architecture of Happiness. He is writing about our houses, the structures that surround us, the buildings we love and abhor – but isn’t this also true of places? We are as inconveniently vulnerable to the metaphorical color of the metaphorical wallpaper of our cities or towns or countrysides as we are to the actual color of the actual wallpaper in our bedrooms. Which in part explains a seemingly arbitrary whim to move to England, for instance, or a sense of belonging in an unfurnished Park Slope apartment overlooking a quiet street. “The tiniest details can unleash memories,” de Botton writes. “The swollen-bellied ‘B’ or open-jawed ‘G’ of an Art Deco font is enough to inspire reveries of short-haired women with melon hats and posters advertising holidays in Palm Beach and Le Touquet.” True too of the details in our surroundings. If “insofar as buildings speak to us, they also do so through quotation – that is, by referring to, and triggering memories of, the contexts in which we have previously seen them,” then also this is the way that whole neighborhoods, whole cities, whole countries, speak to us. Through nostalgia, even if that nostalgia is not fully understood, even if we have never before visited somewhere and so – logically, though this has nothing much to do with logic any longer – cannot be nostalgic for it.

So am I actually asking myself, each time I visit a new place, each time I wonder if I could live here, do I feel nostalgic here?

7.
Somewhere near Nob Hill, we sit in a café and watch people passing by. It is late afternoon. The sunlight is coming through the windows at such an angle that makes concentration on anything but idle speculation impossible.

A girl in a rust-coloured cape and a mustard beret walks past, carrying a bag of shopping. What if I was the girl in the rust-coloured cape and the mustard beret? Walking to my apartment on a sunday afternoon. Unpacking my groceries. Making a cup of tea and looking out of a narrow window to the street below, watering a house plant, stroking the head of a tabby cat, sitting on a red sofa and reading a book and chatting occasionally to the Man and feeling the weight of a sunday afternoon, the pressure to squeeze joy out of the last hours of the weekend. What if I was?

I guess this is the question I am asking of myself every time I go anywhere.

All the leaves have fallen and the cold becomes profound. The newly-naked branches look raw and pink from exposure, like our cheeks. Will it snow? Everybody says excitedly. But of course it won’t, not really, that’s not the sort of place Oxford is, where you get the first snow and then it settles and stays for months. Yes, it snows, in little anxious flurries, the flakes get in our mouths, stick to our backs, and then it stops and we walk to the farmer’s market to buy root vegetables and bacon.

We rocket towards the New Year. Time speeds up, or seems to speed up, but only in retrospect: we were there, now, suddenly!, we are here. There’s a flurry of excitement around Thanksgiving (since I’ve been away, everyone in the USA seems to have met up and agreed to start calling it “American Thanksgiving”) – people start to blog about how thankful they are, how they’ll overeat, how important it is to be with family. I hate the way they say that word, as if I – or anyone else – might not know what it means on any of the other 364 days of the year. Then they excitedly go out and buy stuff, because that’s the tradition. Everything’s about tradition.

I think people think I’m a bit crass about Thanksgiving, that I’m denouncing my heritage or something. But the thing is, what I mostly remember is bad school lunches with too much chalky turkey, and top hats and shoe buckles made out of construction paper, or else red and yellow Indian headdresses clumsily coloured in. I never remember how they chose which of us would play the pilgrims and which of us would play the Native Americans. I think they did that thing that primary school teachers do, which is wave a hand and say, “and everyone on this side of the room, you’re all piiiiiiilgrims!”. Sometimes someone would bring a real turkey in and we would look dispassionately at it and it would look dispassionately at us and then someone would say hey, it’s like a chicken, but bigger! I don’t think anybody ever said, “you’re about to eat one of these,” but it was implicit, and also it was California, so there was a pretty good chance that half of us were vegetarians already.

And later, I remember not going home one Thanksgiving, because if you have ever tried to travel across the United States of America on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving you know that it is not an experience worth $500 and 12 hours of your life. So instead I drove from Boston to New York with my roommate at the time, a Catholic grad student from Westchester County. I read Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, studied old court cases for an upcoming American Government & Politics exam (the professor was notorious – “oh, you’re taking a Mike Brown class?” people would say, but I had managed to make him like me by sitting up front in the lecture hall and staying awake). We had Thanksgiving lunch with her aunt, who lived an hour away in Connecticut. On the drive up I finished Decline and Fall. On the drive down I fell asleep. The next day we went to Gap and I bought a jumper and a pair of socks. We took the train to the city and tried to go ice skating in Bryant Park but decided the line was too long so instead we had pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks and looked at the trees and the strings of Christmas lights and later we went for pizza somewhere on the upper east side. One night we just drove aimlessly around, listening to Weezer, ending up in the Bronx, near Fordham University. It was a nice time but I fail to see how I’m meant to be sentimental about it. (The year after, my only concession to the holiday was to buy a pumpkin pie from Whole Foods. I ate it with a glass of vinegary red wine, sitting on the floor next to the heater, and then wrote a few thousand words of my thesis and watched Pirates of the Caribbean on my laptop.)

Anyway, at home we never ate turkey, but ham and salad and pumpkin pie. California is a hard place to be festive; it always shows holidays up, laughs and says, it’s Thanksgiving? Okay. But look at the bright sky, feel the sun on your back. Go for a swim. Have lunch outside. Don’t eat too much, you’ll want to go for a long walk later. The hills are green.

Really it’s just that I’m contrary and I don’t want to be made to feel thankful. And I certainly don’t want to take the Guardian’s poll on whether I nabbed my Black Friday deals online or in-store this year. Here’s what I did on Black Friday: I went to work. I bought a sandwich from the Moroccan deli down the road and everyone said, “ooh, isn’t it cold today!” Later, I went home and we had a glass of wine and watched videos of cats crawling into boxes.

So maybe that’s the thing. We’re marooned in November, in our own present. It’s impossible to look forward, equally impossible to feel any connection to even the recent past – was it last week I stayed in bed with a cold, the week before that we drove to the Isle of Wight? It may as well be last year, or someone else’s memory.

Everybody’s head is down and the trees are shivering. The leaves have formed a carpet over the garden pathway. A sleek black cat visits us nearly every night; we’ve called it Dobson, as in Zuleika, and don’t know if it’s male or female or if anybody owns it, but it seems to get enough food. Still, it likes to be scratched behind the ears and rubbed on the throat and to wrap itself around your legs.

I read: “Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.” But in this strange month it seems the other way round, that the entire world converges in a narrow gate.

On Monday he went to Scotland for a week. I was speaking to someone the other day whose girlfriend is in a South American jungle somewhere for six months. Next to that, Scotland for a week is pretty manageable.

When you live with someone, and you do all these daily-life things together, there’s an inevitable period of alienation when you discover that it’s evening and you’re home alone. How long has it been since you had a week of nights like this? Years. You cook pasta for one and watch something you know he wouldn’t enjoy – Gossip Girl or Foyle’s War, depending on your mood. You eat the sort of ice cream he might find boring (no bits of chocolate or cookie dough to break up the smooth monotony).

And the main thing is that suddenly you appreciate things you’d forgotten to appreciate, like your entire relationship, and that’s nice. That’s necessary, in a way.

You also remember important things. Like this: I remember that I do at least know who I am (as much as one ever can) apart from him. That’s always a worry with a man, but even more so when you’ve lifted yourself from your home country to reside elsewhere. The potential problem in this case is that you might allow yourself to be washed out by new experience – to become, in other words, a creature entirely dependent upon habitat, whose behaviour, likes and dislikes, daily life, is based only on The Man. What else would root you? – not childhood, or history, for in the eyes of your new countrymen, you did not exist before you came here, fully grown and adult.

But I’ve always cooked pasta and watched historical dramas that made me wish my hair was curlier and my dresses vintage. I’ve always liked walking to bookshops, spending hours deciding what to buy, impulsively stopping in at art galleries, eating lunch in parks. Nothing I do here is disingenuous. On my way home I keep running into people I know; and they know me although I am, at the moment, on my own. We still have things to say to each other. There’s chitchat, gossip, we make plans to meet up.

So in the end he and I discover that we miss each other’s company. It is not just habit or convenience or, worse, an unhealthy dependence, that keeps us together. It’s something much better. And for that, a week in Scotland is probably worth it.

Sometimes it still seems strange to me that I live here. Take today for instance. Entering a shop on the Cowley Road. I’ve left my bike around the corner, outside the Hobgoblin. I’ve been sitting all day in an office feeling overheated, wilting (you never can tell what it’s going to be like when you leave the house on an August morning), but now it’s a glorious evening and I’m in shorts. There are friends, and parents of friends, which somehow makes things seem more real. There’s music. And then a summer storm. A proper summer storm – thunder, lightening, a giddy downpour. I put my cardigan on. I watch the cars slopping down the street. The rain lets up and I go outside and cycle home and change into dry clothes, and now the clouds are breaking apart, crumbling under the weight of a purple sunset. So I take the glasses we’ve unofficially borrowed back to our local pub. Four pint glasses; not so bad. They’re having a pub quiz. I don’t stay for a drink. Instead I carry on down the street to another pub, where someone has left books on the geography of home and the poetics of space for me to borrow.

Speaking of home, on my way home, as I turn onto my street, I can hear the pub quiz questions. What is aurora borealis more commonly known as?

The northern lights. Just the other day I was talking to my parents, who live all the way in California. We were planning a pilgrimage to see the northern lights. Only planning in a vague sort of way – apparently they’re going to be very good in 2012 – but still. Here they are again.

And then I come home, to this house. I feel I’ve been dipping in and out of other people’s lives tonight. Or maybe they’ve been dipping in and out of mine. But that is the luxury we have here – to wave hello, to pop in at the pub not even for a pint but simply an exchange of friendly words.

I make dinner, I find an unopened bottle of wine in the kitchen. It turns out to be good for sipping, especially with a chunk of cheese. Later I climb the stairs to the bedroom. The man is away in Edinburgh for a week but it feels no less like our house. As if we’ve both installed ourselves here, wrapped ourselves up in the Oxford duvet. We know people! We know people’s families! And still it feels funny, good-funny, that I am brushing my teeth over a sink in Oxford, opening the window to my bedroom, and discovering it’s silent outside – too late for the usual closing-time rabble – early Wednesday morning, nobody coming or going.

I open one of the books to a random page. “But countless other images come to embellish the poetry of the house in the night,” I read. And later on, a quote, translated from the French: “I shall see your houses like fire-flies in the hollow of the hills”.

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.