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.

❧

Every year is the same and every year I think it is different. The blackened trees stand defenseless against a pale sky and the parks are wet and the fog at night lies heavy, suppresses my breathing. The streets are littered with the pieces of plastic and cardboard that the wind stole one rebellious morning and even the shop window displays are bleakly ambiguous: jewel coloured party dresses (for a spring wedding!), bare shoulders, boots, murky raincoats that can’t decide whether to be warm or to be whimsical.

The whole world is brown and made of stone. One Saturday we decide to walk into town because it is sunny and warmer than usual, but there is a wind blowing, and if you sit outside for too long your fingertips start to go numb, so you have to keep moving: through the ceaseless throngs of tourists, the packs of Big Beautiful Blonde Undergraduates, the sporty types in shorts and college sweatshirts carrying lacrosse sticks or sacks of hockey gear. I start to hate them all. They look smug, though I only think they look smug because they look happy. The funny thing is that I probably look happy too, because I am happy, if I don’t think about them; I am in town buying underwear which is something I have been needing to do for a long time, and later the Man and I will go and buy a toilet brush together, and some coathangers, just before nightfall, in the dewey evening, and it will be one of the most strangely intimate moments we have ever had. But right now, in town, watching the parade, I say to the Man: everybody else is dressed better than I am, and what I actually mean is, I’m cold, let’s go into the Covered Market and buy some cheese. But that’s the other trick of This Time of Year: the way it steals the words you want to say and makes you say something else entirely.

I always think that at This Time of Year it would be possible to think that no one really lives in Oxford, that it’s just people passing through. Some of them, like the school group from Spain that cross the street as an unruly army, will be gone in a few days, while others, like the three friends meeting for a sandwich outside the Radcliffe Camera, will be gone in a few years. We don’t even see anyone we know, which is unusual here, because everyone pretty much knows everyone else, in a roundabout sort of way. But everyone is in hiding, or, more likely, is too self-absorbed, too completely engrossed in the drama of early February, or is it mid February, or does it even matter, to notice each other. I know I am, but I can’t really speak for anyone else.

On the Cowley Road, construction begins on a new supermarket, directly opposite the old supermarket. At night the darkness falls tantalisingly slowly, now, and students who have drunk too much in order to feel warm again are sick on the sidewalks. Even the pubs, which gave such comfort in the tilt towards winter, with their wood fires and warm glows and pints of bitter on a Saturday afternoon with a P.G. Wodehouse novel and the falling leaves outside, are now just loud and hot, the glow too bright, the fire a reminder of the cold, not an alleviator of it.

I wear torn tights and worn-out boots, not because that’s all I have, but because that’s all I have the energy to wear. In the mirror my face has become obscured by my hair, not because I have not brushed it but because I have brushed it in just such a way that it falls like a veil. The air inside is unbearably dry; my nose hurts – my nostrils hurt, my NOSTRILS! – and my lips crack. I stop shaving my legs because my razors are all too dull and because I have ceased to be able to remember what it’s like to have bare legs, even though every night I go to sleep with bare legs, even though hardly a month ago I was in California walking on the beach in shorts and a bikini top. I force myself to forget my own proximity to these experiences for the sake of feeling grumpy.

Every year I think this is the first time in the History of EVERYTHING EVER that anyone has been miserable in late winter. Every year I think that only my body aches and only my mind is tormented by the breath of summer’s memory in my ear as I sleep. Every year I think this is the first time I have felt this way, or else I think that I have not felt this way at all, that I’ve escaped! until one night I fall asleep realising that I have felt the same way I always feel at this stupid time of year – right before my birthday, right before the beginning of the period when you are allowed to start to Hope For Spring. Just maybe in different ways. And I start to be annoyed that I have framed even good things so negatively – I want to capture the sweetness of buying a toilet brush better, I want to say how beautiful and blue the sky was as we walked down Queen’s Lane towards the bus stop and what a relief it was to be home in the late afternoon before the darkness had fallen and how we had a cup of tea and cleaned the fridge out and pulled chunks of ice away from the sides of the freezer and laughed. But even being annoyed about that is a form of negativity and I worry I’ve been poisoned by the hot dry inside air.

Is it spring yet?

❧

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.

❧

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.

❧

The problem with Sundays is the inevitable slow march towards Monday. You can feel each moment sliding past like an adder at your ankles; dangerous, slimy, fickle. Hang the laundry to dry outside and already you are halfway through the day before you’ve even begun it (or so it feels). It always starts with such promise and then suddenly you find yourself deeply asleep on the couch while the sun beats down hot outside, too weary from the effort of trying to preserve each instant and enjoy it to stay awake any longer.

Today I find myself in just this position – prone, one arm flung across my forehead – when the Man walks in. I find myself shooting up through the black waters of sleep and am unexpectedly awake-but-not-awake. And in this tiny space – only a second, really, perhaps two – I find myself thinking how funny, or maybe how extraordinary, that there is another person who lives here (not just here in this house but here, in my life), who says as I sit up with my face creased and my eyes full of terror (the way I pop up like this reminds him of a meerkat, he sometimes tells me) not to worry.

Yesterday we did summer things. It was a sweet, slow day. We went to the farmer’s market and bought eggs, a free range chicken, vegetables, an old copy of an early P.G. Wodehouse novel. We sat in the shade drinking homemade elderflower cordial and snacking on lemon cakes. Later we did the thing which we often do on Saturdays – we have brunch (salad, sausages, flatbread, orange juice, coffee) and read the Saturday Guardian (I read aloud Tim Dowling’s column to him, he reads Lucy Mangen’s to me). Then we went out into the garden and picked cherries and watered the potatoes and sat in the grass and I tried to do the crossword but gave up on it. We ate brownies and raspberries in a pool of sunshine.

We brought the cherries to the pub and I had more homemade elderflower cordial, this time paired with champagne, because, well, why not? On the way home we stopped by Sylvesters and impulsively bought lavender and rosemary to plant in the garden, and some ropes with which to hang the hammock. I had half a nap on the couch and we heated up some pizza before going into town as darkness settled to listen to some music. At midnight we sat upon the hammock, the two of us, limbs folded, watching the star-drenched sky until some neighbors called us over, so we brought red wine and glasses and climbed the fence and met them for the first time, and a few hours later we were in bed with the heat of the day still palpable in the walls of the house.

❧