This morning, still dark, we set out for the Isle of Wight. Everyone was unbelievably tired. But there was coffee, and a pillow in the backseat, and I had never been to the Isle of Wight before, so there was that.

The sky looked as if a grey sheet had been drawn tight over the island. We got a little almost-lost.

“We’re running out of island,” someone said, and then we ran out of island and had to turn back the way we’d come.

For a little bit we were in a police station (but that’s another story), and a man was trying to apply for permission to (use? buy? operate?) a class-4 laser. He kept saying, “I want to get this settled now.” He was quivering, stooped, his hair standing on end. He kept saying “A class-4. Have you written class-4 down? Not 3.9, I already have one of those. Have you written class-4 down?”

“Yes,” the policewoman said. “I have.” And then she wanted to know why he needed the laser.

“Scientific research,” he said aggressively. “Have you written it down? Class-4. It’s very important.”

She said she had written it down, and that he clearly knew a lot more about this than she did, and that even so he would still need to wait until monday. He said thanks and walked out.

After lunch we walked down a long set of steep stairs, leading to the muddy cliffs below. We faced the sea. Everything was a bit vast: funny how an island can shrink you. I watched the surfers going out, coming in. The water was wild and seething, each wave breaking at random, out of rhythm.

❧

We are at the station waiting for a train. This is unusual for us; usually we’re the unfortunate stragglers you see running as the doors shut, pounding the windows as the train pulls away. I hate running for trains. It upsets me, and I don’t know why it upsets me, and that upsets me even more. It’s not just the risk of missing the train; it’s the humiliation of being seen to have planned the day so poorly, the loss of dignity inherent in a frantic sprint with two heavy bags and a pair of impractical shoes.

Once, we missed the last train back from London on a Monday night. I blamed the Man, who had wandered off at a crucial moment. I was furious; I shouted, I stormed off. Outside Paddington I threw a bag of chips at him and a group of construction workers in high-vis jackets stopped to stare. Here, I shouted. Have your fucking fatty food. And we walked on opposite sides of the street for awhile, even though neither of us really knew where we were going.

Eventually, somewhere near Marble Arch, we made up and got a bus back. And at around four o’clock in the morning, just as we were pulling into St. Clements, facing the long walk down the Cowley Road, I forgave us both for missing the train, but only grudgingly.

And now we are at the station waiting – waiting! – for a train. What a luxury. To lean against a pillar on a cramped platform, to see the breath of a hundred commuters on the last desperate leg of their Friday night journey home on the October air.

I find somewhere to perch – the cold edge of a bench, my handbag on my knees. The Man reads his book beside me. I’m a bit teary.

I always get this way if I’m allowed a moment on the platform to breathe. There’s so much possibility in the air! Each announcement signifies an arrival, or a departure, or a delay. Some palpable stage of a journey. Every person here invites interpretation. Where are you headed? Where did you come from? Even the bland commuters in their bland grey suits become interesting, because they are not just worker-bees in the hive anymore. They are in transit. They are on their way to families or parties, or travelling a great distance after a long meeting, or going home to have a bath and an early night or to shoot up some heroin. The drab grey suit could in fact be just be a clever disguise. Maybe some of them are international spies, or thieves running from the cops; maybe the woman resting her head against a pillar has just been fired from her job, maybe the man with the cup of coffee has just been promoted, perhaps the two colleagues standing close but not speaking have just realised, just today, that they’re in love with each other.

But the point is: they could be going anywhere. And so could I.

Unlike at an airport, this sense of possibility is not sullied by logistics. There are no booked-months-in-advance-tickets, passports, forbidden items, security checkpoints, layovers; there’s no jetlag or recycled air. You really could, quite impulsively, get on any train that pulls up, just because you like the sound of one of the towns the line runs through. Moreton-in-Marsh. Penzance. Why not.

I am often tempted, in fact, to take an unplanned evening journey to Penzance. Perhaps its proximity to Land’s End gives it an exotic air. You may only be, in geographical terms, going to Cornwall, but also you are going to the place where the land ends and something else (a possibility, perhaps) begins. It’s all in a name, of course, but the surge of emotion I feel at the station is directly related to this sense that without warning you could find yourself en route to somewhere else.

I know it doesn’t work this way. A change in location does not necessarily correlate to a change in mindset. Alain de Botton writes about this in The Art of Travel, when he realises: “how little the place in which I stood had the power to influence what traveled through my mind.”

But a part of me likes to think that perhaps, if you plan nothing, if you go to the station intending to do something quite banal, and then, at the last moment, you get instead on a train to Newcastle or Edinburgh, you can outrun whatever state of mind you’re in. It might catch up eventually, but for a blissful hour (even a day, depending on how cunning you’ve managed to be, how thoroughly you’ve managed to fool your own self), you really can equate a different location with a different way of thinking.

But then I think: it’s nothing to do with the actual location. It’s the journey itself, the protracted hours in a cramped space, the shifting landscape outside. I don’t have any interest in actually finding myself in Moreton-in-Marsh or Penzance or Newcastle or Edinburgh; only an interest in going there.

“Place is security, space is freedom,” writes Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place. “We are attached to the one and long for the other.”

So the freedom, perhaps, is in the journey, in the spaces in between. And the security is that as soon as we’re in a place again, we’re ourselves again, also.

❧

We’re no longer in between seasons. The weather has become fiercely autumnal, and from my study window I can watch the steady fall of leaves and feel simultaneously nostalgic for summer, when we sat outside eating roast chicken and salad, taking our jumpers off to reveal almost-brown shoulders, and happy to be here where the air is fresh and the pubs smell of wood fires.

I’ve taken up swimming. I use the university pool because it’s so close to my house; I also like the feeling it gives me, like I’m an outsider who’s made it inside, a spy, a double agent. I don’t know what I look like to them – not obviously old enough to be out of education, not obviously young enough to be a bright-eyed, messy-haired fresher, either. One of my greatest conceits is that I imagine everyone is always looking at me all the time and trying to figure me out. I only think this because it is what I do to people. I’m dangerous to have around; I am constantly making up stories.

On a weekday evening I emerge from the pool and shower in the changing room, next to a small woman with pert breasts. I have never mastered the art of the changing room; I look around too much, my hair drips, I don’t know how to change subtly behind a towel, I don’t know anybody so I can’t have a casual chat as I get dressed again.

Tonight a gaggle of students have gathered and are preparing for a nighttime workout; perhaps they’re members of the swim team, for they speak in phrases like “stepping onto poolside”, which makes it sound like they Know What They’re Talking About.

They’re recovering from a big night out. One of them, husky-voiced, tiny and blonde, is reliving her drunken antics; another of them, also tiny and blonde, has slept with a man called Joe.

“I thought everybody knew,” she says, when the husky-voiced girl expresses her surprise. “But as they don’t, can we just keep it between us?”

And then she says, “did you get with anybody?” and looks a bit crestfallen when the husky-voiced girl says no. Perhaps she wanted a comrade-in-arms. Sometimes long late nights with lots of friends can make you feel lonelier than ever, and she gives off an air of being isolated. Her action has given her something to hide; everybody else is open, unfettered.

One of their friends comes back into the room. “Getting all the gossip?” she says.

“Yeah, I am getting all the gossip,” the husky-voiced girl says, but she doesn’t mention Joe. A closely guarded secret is born.

This is probably how female friendships are broken, I think, but I don’t know for sure.

When I leave, a tall boy holds the door for me. Perhaps he thinks he might later run into me, at a party, at his college. It’s the start of term. People think lots of funny things at the start of term, myself included, although I’m not a student any longer, and I haven’t been for some time.

More likely he doesn’t think of me at all. I get on my bicycle, disobeying the signs that tell cyclists to dismount on the narrow path, because I’ve noticed that everyone disobeys, and I think it must be an unwritten rule. At home the Man has made a butternut squash risotto and turned the heating on. I have that happy sleepy feeling that comes after a swim and we drink the rest of the white wine with our dinner and go to bed early.

❧

We get into London just at rush hour. We’re like the elderly, shuffling through the city – limping, stopping, starting, groaning with every exertion. We’re slaves to the lights and the traffic and the roads which even having been expanded were really never meant to accommodate so many vehicles. They didn’t see this modern era coming, the old city planners. Even when they saw cars, and sniffed the air and knew everything had changed, they didn’t see this.

London really is the most revolting and yet compelling place I know. I feel disarmingly at home here, even though my actual home is still a few hours away. I could never live here, I say again and again, every time we visit London, every time we leave. But when I return from somewhere else, nothing can change the fact that I feel fluent here.

But look at the fat old city cats with their weary heads bent! How they parade their disillusionment! More disturbing still are the earnest youths, commuting with buoyancy in their steps. They all look younger than me; probably this is their first job out of university, and they take such inappropriate pride in their cheap suits and purple striped shirts. Their ties are all too straight and they wear their enthusiasm like a badge, but soon enough they too will just be fat old city cats with more expensive suits.

One of them hooks his arm through the orange limb of a girl in a short dress who likes the tanning beds too well. Oh, they look so self-satisfied! He is bringing home the bacon! She is taking care of her appearance! He dreams at night of a corner office, an overflowing savings account.

She dreams at night of expensive holidays, first in Ibiza, and then, when they’ve outgrown the trite scene there, Mallorca or the south of France, where they may someday, after many happy summers in the same sterile resort, buy a holiday home. She will wear pristine white linen and he will have a blush of grey at his temple, and they will stand on their terrace and sip a cheap white that she thinks is charming and he thinks is too sweet, not up to the same standards he’s used to at client dinners, but soon they will be drunk enough not to care much, and they will try to seduce each other.

And in their own selfish, modern-urban way, they will reenact the opening scene of Private Lives on that terrace, although neither of them is wholly sure who Noel Coward is (she read English Literature at Exeter and somewhere at the back of her mind something – that great beast Intellect – stirs, and for half a second everything becomes clear before the fog sets again and she’s wondering if Noel Coward was maybe some sort of actor?).

There will be no exes on a neighboring terrace, but it hardly matters. Their isolation is so complete, so palpable, that they can enact an entire drama in just a moment, with the way they pour their wine, the way she lights a cheeky cigarette, the way he wakes half an hour early to go for a run on the beach, where he misses the presence of his personal trainer and does only a very abbreviated version of his usual route because hell, he’s on holiday, he may as well let loose and enjoy himself.

Yes: watching them stride down Liverpool Street it’s easy to think that soon enough she’ll move on from Topshop to Prada. But they’ll look just the same. And all of this is wretchedly, unnecessarily cruel, but I can’t help it. Even if it’s unfair, which it likely is, it’s what I think, and the way the bus squeals at every red light, the way my eyes have begun to burn on account of there being just so much to take in, the way my body thinks it’s still where it was this morning, in Africa, has made me meaner than usual.

“Look at them,” I say to the Man, half-asleep beside me, worn out by this crawl through the seething evening streets.
“Look at who?” he says.
“Them,” I say. And look at them indeed! The swarms, the hordes outside the pubs. Still in their work clothes; the men have removed their jackets to indicate an atmosphere of informality. They suckle on pints of Fosters, hungry like babies for milk. The women all wear shift dresses – it’s summer, after all, and even in England that means something – and their skin is too bronze, and they flick their ash to the ground flirtatiously. If a bra strap shows, no one makes any move to fix it, because it’s Thursday, nearly the weekend, and soon they will have the loose tongues and hot tempers of Saturday and Sunday and they will plunge their hands into the air at half-empty nightclubs and dance! They are unwinding!

(But what of us? Still we crawl. We’re somewhere in the vicinity of Victoria Station now. The start of another journey. The bus heaves great grumpy sighs. We’ll get home, eventually. We’ll order Chinese food and feel smug without even knowing why.)

The sky meanwhile turns the grim grey of a cheap suit and the sun sits heavy on the horizon, starts to sink.

❧

I.

This weekend I went on a treasure hunt in the study. I looked at all the books which are not ours, which might be the landlady’s, or a previous tenant’s. All the stacks of paper on the shelves which I had never before dared to investigate. These things have always been here, they’ve been here longer than us, and in a way I thought of them as furniture, or perhaps walls – immobile, flat.

But they are not like that at all. This house is telling other people’s stories all the time, if you listen. We need a box labelled “other people’s memories” to put in an empty room. The house is like a womb for the enigmatic, the wisps and shards that get left behind when someone has lived somewhere and then moved on. These things mean nothing to me, but they mean something to someone who does not even know that they are here.

Things like this: two copies of the same photograph, found in a copy of Seven Types of Ambiguity. Four people at a table in a strange wilderness. One of them gesturing.

Or the lecture notes for a conference on “The United States in the 1980s: The Reagan Years” (this house has always been a haven for academics). On one of the sheets of paper, a shopping list of sorts. “Roses. Wrapping paper.”

The manuscript, with the letter tucked inside, sent to this address, dated 26/7/91. Whatever became of this woman, her book? I could look it up, but it seems more poignant not to. I like the open-ended nature of it this way; anyhow, reading her letter (such a transgression! and such a thrill to read something which was never, could never have been, intended for you), it strikes me that the act of writing the book was closure enough for this woman (it “has done so much good,” she says in the letter), and it shouldn’t matter what became of it, or her.

So I’ve lived here for nearly three years and all the time these little (things? clues? stories?) have been here, like hidden emeralds. This is the thing. Wherever you are, however long you’ve been there: there’s always a journey you can take.

II.

Also there is Magdalen College. I have heard the bells ringing out and the choir singing from the tower on May Morning, but it is one of the Forbidden places in the city. Half of Oxford is Forbidden. That’s the thrill and the tragedy of it. There is a whole city here which we never see; the city, of course, that’s always been most written about, the city of college gardens and quadrangles, of cloistered walkways and great halls.

I’ve been in colleges before – a christening at Christ Church, for instance, or a dinner at New College during which I accidentally became so drunk (with wine, with admiration and fear) that I got lost on my way to the toilet and had to be retrieved by one of the kitchen staff who found me floundering in the larder. But it always amazes me that I can feel so intimate with this city and yet have seen so little of it.

And so after years of cycling past its entrance, I finally saw the cloisters of Magdalen College, the quadrangle and the gardens, the gentle path alongside the river, the deer all asleep under a tree. The hall, dark and empty, its entrance roped off, looking grim without the cheer of loud, gowned students and serious-faced academics passing port at the high table. I leaned against a wall; a couple passed, she was saying, “…and if you were a local resident here…” and I don’t know what the end of the sentence was, but I thought, that’s just it! and then didn’t know why I’d thought it. That’s just what? I am a local resident here. And yet I’m as enchanted by this place as the tourists, with whom I stand in sunlit admiration, and a kind of solidarity, watching the stones turning golden.

❧