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.

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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.

❧

It’s a bit funny, being temporarily separated from the person you love. I keep thinking of something that Heather Armstrong at Dooce wrote – I think she was traveling and I think she said something like, “it’s nice to miss my husband”, but I can’t find it now, so you’ll have to take my word for it. But it is nice. It’s nice to know that there’s someone out there thinking of you; it’s nice to collect thoughts and experience to share upon his return. It’s different from the time I had to leave for Boston and we didn’t really know when we’d see each other again and we had a massive time difference (and an ocean) between us. That hurt. I wouldn’t want to do that again.

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”.

❧

1.

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.

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