It’s a good night for walking home. The night that follows the first really truly warm day of the season: that’s always a good night for walking home.

In the streets around Summertown, everything is hushed and the lights are out in the houses, or maybe everybody has just drawn their curtains shut, and there are fallen blossoms under my boots. Even the cars as they slide down the road seem to be saying, shhhh. Be reverent, be gentle.

The warmth is fading a little but when the sun was out it got trapped under my coat, so maybe it’s stored up, and my limbs feel different.

On Broad Street the big issue seller suggests that if he can’t have my spare change, maybe he can have the yellow flower pinned to my coat. And why can’t he have my spare change, after all, I think? Because 20p is too little and 20 pounds too much, and that’s all I have in my pocket, and besides, yesterday I tipped a man in the bike shop £2 just for pumping my tires.

(In retrospect that seems backwards, but then, maybe not. I don’t want to feel guilty about my generosities. They’re too tiny as it is.)

And also, once I actually bought a Big Issue. I don’t know what came over me. I was exiting a shop and it was a bright sunny morning and I thought, well, okay, I guess you’ve got to do it eventually. But then I got to the office and couldn’t figure out what I should actually do with the magazine itself. Not read it, surely–it’s a symbol, not a consumable, a receipt, a badge. But I couldn’t throw it away either. That would be a true waste. So in the end I tucked it behind the scanner on my desk and then found it eight months later and went through the same process of thought before deciding that, actually, I could bin it, so I did, but not before I offered it to everyone else in the office. They politely declined and I think for half a moment as I dropped it in the recycling I felt a little fickle, as if I’d committed myself to this thing and now I was breaking my commitment. Why do we care about objects so suddenly and irrationally?

Three figures pass under the Bridge of Sighs. They look like shadows. Sitting outside the entrance to Hertford College is a young man in a red t-shirt crouched on the ground, flipping through a magazine, which is barely illuminated by the lamplight. A girl takes a photo of her friend; I hear her say, “that’s almost perfect, you know,” but there are so many things about which she could be talking about.

Speaking of almost perfect, I don’t suppose you could ever grow tired of Queen’s Lane. There’s that view of the back of All Souls and the windows of St. Edmund’s Hall and sometimes some music coming from somewhere (once, late at night as the Man and I were walking home, it was real proper jazz-age jazz played on a piano and I probably danced, a little bit).

On the High Street, the candy shop looks funny all asleep. You can’t see the colours of the candy and it’s like Willy Wonka dreamed in black and white.

In the end it’s a funny relief to be on the Cowley Road. Those North Oxford streets–they’re so beautiful, so big. It smelled heavenly up there, all pink and white blossoms. It was black and deserted and it would be easy to imagine yourself the only inhabitant of the entire area.

But here we have something else entirely. Chefs standing outside having their cigarette breaks. Girls in heels, shorts, and leather jackets (not even as sexy as it sounds, not even close). An ambulance, parked, lights flashing, no driver, outside a darkened house. An ice cream shop, a burger joint, a cinema, a chinese restaurant. A woman walking her dog with an open bottle of cider pressed to her lips. It all smells a bit greasy. I like it.

On James Street. Next to the pub where an open mic night is going on. I pause and peer inside just to make sure I know someone inside; I do; that’s good, I think. I won’t go in but at least I still belong. As I’m peering someone outside, smoking, recognizes me and we exchange a few words. Then I keep going, past the Conservative Club, out of which drips balding blokes and strange music.

Then our street. Always a little cramped, this street. Sometimes I can’t walk my bike on the pavement at all–how very unlike those wide North Oxford boulevards! And there, on the corner, is the house with the tall fence. Last summer I was thought the man who lived there was under house arrest because he used to stand next to that fence, eating his dinner or draping his arms over it and asking passers-by for a cigarette. Now I can’t imagine why I was so convinced of that. Harmless little house, harmless little man.

Our house, when I get there, smells of laundry. The curtains have not been drawn. The Man will come home from football soon. It’s one of those nights when I feel like it’s been an odyssey just to get from one end of the city to the other.

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“The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said.”
Philip Larkin, “The Trees”

From my study window I can actually see things getting greener. Every time I look up a new bud has appeared on a branch. We woke up one morning and the weeds had taken over the garden again–or at least looked as if they were gathering their strength, their troops, oiling their guns, polishing their boots, getting ready for the invasion. Now that we’re on British Summer Time the cool air has moved back in and between North Oxford and the Radcliffe Camera my fingers go numb and I have to stop and put my gloves on. But at least in this, my third spring in Oxford, I’ve finally learned to carry the gloves with me well into the season.

It’s a great time for trickery, spring. Philip Larkin had it right (he so often did), and the way the trees are turning green (like someone is putting a new layer of paint over them every day), the way the flowers are coming into bloom, is just like almost catching a whisper that someone almost sent out on the wind.

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I’ve written about this before, but a blog post I read earlier today made me think of it again.

It’s to do with Javier Marias’ All Souls–a book which I selfishly maintain paints one of the most stunningly accurate portraits of Oxford I’ve ever come across. It’s not about the city; it’s about my city. And here’s why: his narrator and I share a space. We both inhabit a world where, “there’s no one here who knew me as a…child.”

And I almost can’t tell you what that means, because it means so much. It is, stripped of context, what it means to live somewhere else. It means that when you meet friends for a drink and you look back, through the cider haze, what you see and what they see exist in parallel universes. This is the lonely side of it.

The happy side of it is that sometimes, just walking down Broad Street or cycling past the gaze of idle pedestrians, you have the strangest feeling: you’ve become weightless, your skin translucent like a fish, your mind lucid. Time overlaps with itself; Georgian architecture with Classical and Norman, Wren, Wolsey, Aldrich, a collage of names and periods. And your name? Unknown. You float down Turl Street, past the mouths of three colleges, each one guarded by a stiff porter in bowler who watches you without interest, who has seen a thousand just as young, and as possessed with the charm, beauty, and blamelessness of this youth, as you are. Oh, but this is freedom. Terrible, beautiful freedom. You are separated from your own history and yet at one with it. You can be things, where everyone around you must pretend.

So you become like a candle: self-contained, brief. I feel abbreviated here, and if I didn’t enjoy that feeling, I wouldn’t have stayed. It’s been nearly three years, and I can still pinpoint the moment at which I shed my history–which is full of wonderful things, ranches, farms, children, family, laughter, freshly picked fruit, waves and hills, sunkissed cheeks, but also of anxiety, selfishness, selflessness, a paralyzing shyness and a destructive self-pity. But then one day in May I stood in Christ Church Meadow and watched some little boys in stained cricket whites jogging across a field and thought: I’m not my past, my past is me. And then– is it coincidence?–that night, I was free and light enough to appreciate an encounter that could have been as tiny as an atom in my memory, and now here I am and that encounter is sitting across from me, and our past begins at the point where I felt for an instant that I had no past.

No one here knew me as a child. It’s the greatest blessing and also the greatest curse you could possibly imagine.

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No matter what happens, and lots of things happen, there is nothing quite like the feeling you get when you look up at the Radcliffe Camera and it is late at night and the square is empty and the sky is patchy and the city is hushed, but full of possibility.

Other re-discoveries: I am after all my father’s daughter. I find that even the long, dull ride to work is made thrilling by putting extra speed into my pedaling. I like the wind on my face and I arrive wherever I’m headed breathless, slightly sweaty, full of misplaced energy. I can make even my beautiful, dignified, black Dutch girl’s bike with its four subtle gears go fast.

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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.

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