I.

It’s that time of year when the rose hips near our front gate reach ripeness. I know it also by the sudden quiet, like a vacuum, a pause, after the tourists, before the frenzy of term-time. A new set of students moves in on either side of us; we feel like the constants, the clear, steady lamp post amongst a blur of pedestrians in a time-lapse photograph. There’s a softness in the light. I never know whether to be nostalgic or optimistic; all that summer (punting, picnicking, sweating in summer dresses) gone, all that autumn (wood fires, thick jumpers, ale in pub snugs, leaves like paper) still to come. And if we’re not yet in either place, where exactly are we? Suspended in September. Both waiting and not-waiting for something we both want and don’t want to come.

II.

Now is the time to appreciate the green of the trees: soon they will be the colour of fire and then they will be bald in preparation for frosts, for a heavy dousing or two of snowfall.

III.

But then in Oxford, it’s always the end of an era, the start of another. It’s a transient land. Nobody stays here or intends to stay here for long, so you can really only end up staying without meaning to.

Things change at a faster pace than they do elsewhere. Your friends from three years ago are not always people you know anything about now. It’s like being dislocated in time and space every time you leave and come back again. Very briefly disjointed, disowned, expatriated from everything. London is not just another city but another time zone, no, another universe. The trains are like rocket ships out of this town.

So here I am in the stagnant and yet not stagnant waters. Floating with Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. The tension between what’s preserved in aspic and what’s not is always the most beautiful part. Time is so confused here. Jan Morris writes: “Summer is more summery here than anywhere else I know; not hotter, certainly not sunnier, but more like summers used to be, in everyone’s childhood memories.”

❧

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.

❧

On the 17:36 to London Paddington. We keep passing those ubiquitous self-storage units. I associate them with trains now. Or perhaps it’s the other way round – I associate trains not with rolling countryside but with sprawling industrial amenities.

How can there possibly be so much stuff in the world that needs storing? Who rents these units, and for what purpose? It seems to me that once people become disengaged from their things, they cease to need them. For awhile I toyed with the idea of having some things in Oxford and some in California, but it really was pointless, and after a season I’d re-acquired everything I wanted but had left behind. The rest was duly carted off to the Salvation Army. What we own means nothing without us, not the other way around.

There’s a man who stores his furniture with us. No one really knows where he is anymore (Canada? Australia?) and it seems he has no thoughts for the things which gather dust in our house, though money continues to appear monthly in our account, like magic. Recompense for nothing at all.

So whenever I see those self-storage places I feel like I’m looking at these vast empty spaces. Even if they are full, even if people do use them – what’s the point? What’s inside is just abandoned stuff in its own abandoned world.

But back to trains. Air conditioned trains on a hot day, which always remind me of the summer I spent commuting from Goleta to Santa Ana. I was interning at the Orange County Transportation Authority (is there irony in the amount of time I spent transporting myself for those three months? Oh, yes!), spending three days down there before returning home for a long weekend. And on Wednesday evenings I’d buy a sandwich for dinner and change out of my suit and I’d catch the last train back.

Between Santa Ana and Los Angeles I’d watch the hot, pale sunlight turn into a Southern California twilight, and in that twilight we’d rush past the other side of things. People’s backyards – plastic toys, dirty pools, beer bottles. The tired backs of buildings, the places where cars go to die, the places where trucks go to stock up on goods. Warehouses and factories. A Spearmint Rhino with a neon sign and a mournful countenance.

But mostly self-storage places. They were everywhere – a part of the landscape, like rolling golden hills and stunning sea views.

You never really saw any people on that journey. A few stops out of L.A. it would suddenly be dark and you’d have to turn your eyes to the seat in front of you again, and outside there would be nothing but flashing lights.

❧

This time Fez is much less about us and much more about the place itself, the people here. Now I think it extraordinary that we came here when we did – only six weeks into our relationship, the future (our future, that is, he being English, me being American) only a cloud through which we could not even imagine passing. But we trusted each other completely here, and lay on our hotel bed taking photos of our sweaty, hairy, unclean selves.

Now we are staying with friends. But it is also different because three years of living together has made it so. It is lovely but also, weirdly, lonely. If you are no longer getting to know each other in such an active way (now I can make jokes about his past and he knows the geography of my history and there is much less exclaiming over a tajine: ‘oh, I didn’t know you’d done that!‘). It is sometimes almost like travelling with oneself. If he knows, now, that I like to wash my hands more than strictly necessary, and I know without thinking about it that he will smoke almost twice as much here, then there is little (nothing!) to try to hide, and even less to be grateful for the revelation of.

And this is such a sweet thing, but also scary – suddenly here we, this one thing that is a “we” but also an “I”, are, in a foreign country. Perhaps in a way this is why I slept badly last night – for, in spite of him being beside me, loving, handsome even in sleep, smelling and feeling more familiar than anything, than even myself, I felt a sense of being also alone. And perhaps also this is why people (eventually) have children – I had this thought yesterday, as we were discussing the merits of trans-national relationships: that at a certain point you become so close that you almost need someone else – who will be like him and like you but different and constantly, forever, surprising – again. Is that a strange thing to think? But then, everything is strange here.

❧