It was strange trying to adjust to what seemed to me to be two very separate existences. There was me at home and then there was me in London, on buses and trains and in the underground, in the crush, my bag caught in the barrier at rush hour, a matter-of-fact woman striding up to me, aggressively, resentfully helpful, yanking my bag out of the barrier and hoisting it over, saying nothing, moving on, and me saying nothing either, moving on, sliding past the suits on the escalator, sliding into a full carriage, making an unlikely space for myself beneath the raised armpits of a tall woman in a silk shirt and Nike trainers.

I was not a commuter, of course, I was not any different (or differently indifferent to the lure of the rush and the rush of the big bright city) than I had been elsewhere, at other times. I read books in between all other activities, tried to suppress the feeling of being a fraud but having to go through with it (whatever ‘it’ was) anyway. No, it was not like my life here was so different: it was just that my life in Oxford happened at such a different pace. For a start it was not just my life but ours – a conscious decision, a thing that seemed both sweet and necessary – otherwise, how would we survive the slow, long winters, the cold weeks between paydays? When we woke on a weekday morning pressed warmly together, the dawn having shimmered into day a few hours ago, most of the commuters already commuted and sat stiffly at their desks with the first cup of coffee, I thought things like: we don’t know how to pay our rent and we don’t ever stop working, even though there’s no guarantee that any of it will work out, but at least we have this. This is something other people don’t have, this is something other people want, maybe, but are too afraid to pursue. Whether it was true or not, or meaningful, didn’t matter: it helped.

There was also, in more general terms, the dreamlike quality of Oxford life. There was the sense of having been suspended – although not in time, exactly. In fact it was continually amazing to me how old I could be made to feel, even at just 25. Each year a new crop of kids asserted themselves as the rightful though temporary owners of the place, and each year I was – exponentially, it seemed – even older than them. Leaving the swimming pool one evening I overheard a boy saying earnestly to two friends: “But you guys are still so young, you know? It’s different for me, I’m already 23.”

The thing John Fowles had written about the Greek island Spetses, where he lived for a few years in the early 1950s, seemed a truth about Oxford as well – and he had lived here, too, so perhaps, even if just deep down, without realising, he understood its relevance to here too: “In no place was it less likely that something would happen; yet somehow happening lay always poised.”

In Oxford, I thought: even if I wanted to make something happen, I’m not sure how I could. But I went to the pub optimistically enough anyway: it seemed like some big, positive change was always about to occur, though really it was just the acrid smell of smoke and the sound of preliminary fireworks being set off.

Whereas in my other life, things were happening all the time; I was overwhelmed by things happening. I made things happen. That was the whole point. I strode hurriedly through parks, down side streets, lost but too busy, too rushed, to admit it. I was largely irrelevant here – invisibly unsettled, passing through, mostly anonymous. I kept being confused by the layout of the Bloomsbury, kept getting turned around. But I was starting to be able to locate myself on the map, to find my way. That was happening.

***

Night. Outside the drunken hordes stagger home from the pub. Inside the heating is on, the laundry is drying on radiators and bannisters. The house, indifferent to the change of seasons, goes on silently containing all the stuff, the multitudes, the cobwebs, the history, as it has for many years now, and many different occupants.

“Home, we may say, is the action of the inner life finding outer form; it is the settling of self into the world,” I read.

So I go to London and spend a few hours between meetings in the library and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the bus ride home. I look at sample spreads for the book and respond to queries from a copyeditor. And I make my money one blustery Wednesday by painting a large trellis, my shoes stained blue, my hair tucked under a wool hat, Radio 4 humming in the background. It’s nice to be outside, in the cold, to feel my hand cramping around the paintbrush, to be fed fresh coffee and homemade biscuits, to let the rain and the mud not really matter.

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For a bit of cash and human interaction, I work sometimes at a shop nearby. Occasionally the owner goes out to run errands, and I mind the shop on my own. I enjoy this, the banality of it, the notion of being, even if briefly, for half-hour periods, a shop-girl (I think of the Steve Martin film, of pale, elegant Claire Danes showing gloves to wealthy men; this is not at all like that, and yet in a sense it’s the same thing, really). Often nobody comes into the shop, and when they do I smile and say hello. A profoundly benign gesture, empty and yet also grand enough to bridge any gap: what kind of day is this man having? What kind of day am I having? Where does he come from? Where do I come from? Where are we going? But none of this matters, because all I have to do is smile and say hello, and in a little while, maybe, he will come and stand at the counter holding a card, which I cannot read too much into (he’s chosen an ambiguous one, a blank card, letter-pressed, it could be for a birthday or a celebration or a love letter or a bland note of thanks, for a wife or child or friend or brother), and I will say, “two pounds fifty,” and he will give me – what, the exact change? No, a five pound note, and I will operate the cash register with a confidence I don’t quite feel (the math here is obvious, but it isn’t always, and although there was a brief period of my life during which I was fluent (or fluent enough) in the language of calculus, I often stumble over subtraction, taking my time, trying to appear outwardly calm while inwardly my brain, instead of performing the necessary calculations, laughs at me for not knowing them automatically), and I will produce his £2.50 change. I will try to deposit the change in his hand as helpfully as possible. He will put it in his pocket, loose change, clanging around. We’ll both say thank you, although this transaction requires no thanks, particularly. He’ll leave. The music will go on playing. I choose music that I like. When the shop is empty there’s still the whir of traffic outside. We drink tea. I watch three men run past – lithe, athletic. The buses block out the sun as they pass. Boys, hoods up. A woman pushing a pram. Suits, leather jackets, parkas, parked cars, sirens, singing schoolchildren, drunks, a dull steel-grey sky, a row of red brick houses that look too large for their purpose. The sounds of acceleration and braking, the revs of engines as they pass, like the city is breathing.

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1.

“[An image] is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved – for a few moments or a few centuries.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing)

I’ve been sifting through the paper record of my existence. I’m in the process of renewing my visa to live in the UK and am required to prove various things – that my partner and I live, for instance, in “a relationship akin to marriage”, that we have lived together for at least two years, that the marriage our relationship is akin to is a genuine one – “not like a marriage of convenience”. These are trickier things to prove, as it turns out, than they sound. There’s plenty of evidence that I exist – bank statements, letters, a birth certificate. There’s evidence that he exists. But how much documentation is not here, has no corporeal form! Somewhere I read that it can help to include photographs of yourself and your partner with your application – proof, of a sort, that you’ve been in the same place at the same time many times. But the hard-copy photograph has been a casualty, at least for me, of convenience. I spent $900 shipping books across the Atlantic when I moved here, but felt fortunate that I had no photo albums to fret over. My pictures are on laptops or online; all of the images of the two of us together are in iPhoto, mostly unseen and thus forgotten; or else on Facebook, tagged, organized into neat albums, depicting holidays and long summer nights.

I do have a handful of hard-copy photographs, accumulated over the years, residing in a small envelope. Now I see them in a strange light: I consider each one, ask myself, what does this photo prove? I realize that none of them prove anything. None of them mean anything except what they mean to me. I dig through drawers, excavating my own study. There is a photograph of my partner holding a friend’s (then) newborn baby. That baby is now a wild-haired creature of two and a half, who leads his parents by the hands out of a café, proclaiming, “let’s go for a walk!” The photograph is a record, but seems not to represent a real thing: I can remember my amazement at holding such a small human, but that amazement has been replaced by my amazement at how that small human is bigger now, can express himself. Is the photograph of the baby or the evolution of our amazement?

On my computer are hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs. These photographs, suspended as they are in a kind of virtual space, have no narrative other than the one that context can suggest: you see what, chronologically, came before, and what came after. You see the photo you took hours or days before and the one you took hours or days or perhaps only seconds after. But each captured moment is whole without these dubious clues, too; each image is self-sufficient – like what you would see if you were to walk around with your eyes closed and then, at irregular, distanced intervals, open them, for just an instant.

“The camera relieves us of the burden of memory,” writes John Berger in About Looking. “It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

2.

Facebook bought Instagram. I don’t know what this says or what it will mean, least of all from a business or industry perspective. And I don’t think I need to speculate on it, because everyone with a brain and a blog has already done so – a perfect illustration of how difficult it is to keep up these days. Already what I’m writing about is old news, even if it’s something still ongoing; everything moves too quickly; it’s impossible to settle into one moment or one issue.

So you may already be sick of reading about how Facebook bought Instagram, sick of reading about any associated topics. But it seems to me (right now, in this moment) that technology – or, rather, our conversations about technology, our thoughts about it as a subject – is all about time. In fact it seems to me that our conversations and our thoughts in general – whatever subject we land on – are all about time these days. Manipulating time, prolonging the present, connecting with the past or the future or both, “viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past“, as Nathan Jurgenson writes in his essay on “The Faux-Vintage Photo”:

The momentary popularity of the Hipstamatic-style photo serves to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past. In fact, the phrase “nostalgia for the present” is borrowed from the great philosopher of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, who states that “we draw back from our immersion in the here and now […] and grasp it as a kind of thing.”

In a recent essay on “techno, dancing, and the augmented self,” Cheri Lucas writes:

In Generation Ecstasy, music critic Simon Reynolds writes that while techno can be performed live, it is seldom born in real time. Instead, it is programmed and assembled sequence by sequence and layer by layer, using synthesizers, drum machines, and other electronic instruments. Later, it’s the dancer who actualizes the sound in physical space, who translates electronic into corporeal and sensual. “Techno is an immediacy machine,” writes Reynolds, “stretching time into a continuous present.” The beats that drove us were quick and constant—a hypnotizing measure of time itself—and dancing was an intimate, often carnal, yet largely public interpretation of what now looked like.

When I started to write this post I thought it was going to be about photography, about the faux-vintage aesthetic and what it means. But as I began to write and read, I realized it was not about that at all, or at least, not all of it was about that. It was an essay on time, of course, and it was reading Lucas’ piece that convinced me of this. The quest or compulsion to interpret “what now looked like” is increasingly complicated. We can now reside in a “now” padded as heavily with what has been and what might someday be as we want, and yet in a sense “now” itself is obsolete. Already we’re moving on, even as we arrive. We’re nostalgic but not really looking backwards; we’re manufacturing the impression or representation of nostalgia, aware that we should or do feel it, but unable to pause long enough for breath to transform that awareness into anything constructive (or destructive), to let it sink in, pull us down or lift us up.

3.

So what about the faux-vintage aesthetic? “The cosmic significance of Hipsta/gram is not physical,” writes Matt Pearce in his excellent piece “Shoot Hip or Die”:

It ages digital photos for distribution in a digital world. But nothing really gets older online; the only aging of things here comes from the erosive force of changing human sensibilities. The black of that North Face jacket looks just as black, but the point of wearing it has faded a little. Here there is only the appearance of getting older because everything else has gotten much newer. The pixels do not outwardly become worn. They are like grains of sand. If one is destroyed, it’s too small for us to know it’s been annihilated. And there is so much sand.

Interestingly, both Pearce and Jurgenson allude to a supposition that “Hipsta/gram” (Pearce’s amalgamation of Hipstamatic and Instagram) is transient, a temporary aesthetic – a fashion, perhaps. Maybe they’re right; Instagram users, irked by Goliath’s purchase, are already lamenting the inevitable decline of the service – but maybe this resentment is really a mask for a more general change of heart. As my friend Ben Walker put it, “I was starting to get bored of the faux-retro photo style anyway (real retro photos are another thing entirely), and the new iPhone camera takes higher quality photos that don’t need retro filters to look good.”

Walker goes on to write of his own impending fatherhood, and of a corresponding attitudinal shift. “There’s so much great stuff on the internet, but very little of it is to do with what’s going on right now,” he writes. “These days […] I’m less and less worried about missing out on new stuff (new gadgets, apps, social networks, bands, memes) and more excited by finding and maintaining old stuff (organs, pianos, old gadgets, piles of wood). All of which sounds suspiciously like I’m getting old.”

Even to acknowledge that “I’m getting old,” as we all are, is to slip out of the rope-binds of the constant present, to evade the lure of online perpetuity. Nothing gets older online; the North Face jacket, as Pearce points out, never fades. But meanwhile I see wrinkles under my eyes that were not there when I first moved here, and a part of me is pleased when the Instagram filter obscures such details, casts a weathered sheen over a new image, makes it (by projecting it simultaneously into the past and the future) timeless. Why are we drawn to the evocative falseness of “Hipsta/gram”? For the same reason we may be about to reject it: because I am getting old, and you are getting old, too.

4.

“During the course of the play the table collects this and that, and where an object from one scene would be an anachronism in another (say a coffee mug) it is simply deemed to have become invisible. By the end of the play the table has collected an inventory of objects.” (Stage directions for Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia).

One of the photographs I encounter on my journey through the small envelope in my study is of my 12th grade English class in 2004, just before graduation. There are five of us, including our teacher; one student is missing, so in his stead we have written his name on a roll of paper towels and placed it in the center of the table. We lean forward slightly, to fit into frame. The photo was taken on my old Minolta; I know this because I can see the lens cap on the table in front of me, and because it’s in black and white. I used to use only black and white film – partly because it meant I could develop photos myself in the dark room and partly because the incongruity of it appealed to me, in the same way, perhaps, that now I tint my photographs with Instagram filters or manipulate them with HDR software.

I think of the tension between the accumulative nature of memory – the inventory of objects that collect on the metaphorical table – and the way an image seems to isolate a moment even as it binds it to either what is being represented or who is viewing it (or both). In another photo – one of my favorites – a good friend, wearing a formal black dress, empties bath salts into a tub at midnight in an expensive hotel. It was taken just after we had graduated from high school, and my memory of that evening is composed of linked-but-isolated episodes: sitting on the night-blackened beach with a few friends, gulping red wine from a lone bottle that had miraculously materialized just as we were about to give up any hope of finding something to drink; eating apples next to a swimming pool; watching a few disconcerting minutes of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And yet the photographic evidence of the evening reflects none of this; it reflects only the spaces in between the memories.

The photos I have from that evening are, in a sense, the frame or foundation for a structure of memory built to evoke nostalgia; I took them knowing full well that someday I’d be sentimental, and I knew this because part of me was already sentimental. As soon as you remove yourself from a situation, even if for an almost-unmeasurable instant, just to press a button, you give yourself the opportunity to see what “now” looks like from a different vantage point. What if I’d had the option to pre-fade the photos, create them with the scars and scratches that time has now given them? “Instagram enhances the narratives we weave by mimicking the materiality and randomness of old photographs,” writes Laura Fettig:

The hike you took, the latte you drank, the sunset you saw, that day at the park with your friends – these events become subtle markers for the kind of life you lead. Instagram isn’t just about sharing photos or networking: it’s about starring in your own movie. It’s about making sure your life looks beautiful, and not leaving it up to chance.

At the end of her essay, Fettig describes finding “fistfuls of crumpled and faded photographs” at her grandmother’s house. “I laid them out in good light and took a picture of each of them with my phone,” she writes. “50 years from now, or 100, or 200 – who will be able to tell the difference?”

5.

In Croydon, after a long period of waiting on glistening red chairs while children, in various states of hysteria, run screaming or laughing past us and a disembodied voice calls ticket number after ticket number to counter after counter, I’m invited to submit my application for further leave to remain in the UK. I have curated a large selection of documents that I hope prove all of the things I need to prove; I slide folder after folder across to the woman on the other side of the glass.

“Are these personal photos?” she asks me, holding up a folder that says, “personal photos”.

“Yes,” I tell her. I have gone through the special trouble of having them printed out, directly from Facebook, with URLs, dates, comments from friends and family members, still visible. I worry maybe it looks like I’m trying too hard, but in a sense, this is all the real proof I have to offer, even after five years of co-habitation. I know what a farce it makes of proof, but I also know that in all the implied moments between these photographs is everything they could possibly need to know.

“Oh,” she says, smiling soothingly. “You can take these back. We don’t look at photos.”

6.

Berger again:

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked – and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people.

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I remember a long time ago someone telling me about a girl he used to live with, who every single night without fail would blow her nose before coming to bed. He loved that about her. That was what he missed, now they weren’t together.

And I remember being impressed. I remember thinking, imagine knowing someone so well that you’re actually charmed–no, not charmed, something deeper than charmed–by their little human habits. The expulsion of snot, or some similarly banal act, becomes something to adore, something which reinforces the rightness of your union.

I also remember thinking, why? If you weren’t sick or allergic or a bit cold, why would you need to blow your nose every night? I remember thinking it sounded overwrought. Surely she didn’t. Surely he’d mis-remembered. Surely the whole thing was really a whole lot less sweet than I was making it out to be.

But now, some years later (not as many years as I’m pretending, maybe), I find that I’ve become someone just like that. Every morning I get up and go to the bathroom and the first thing I do is not to brush my teeth or relieve my bladder or study the pillow lines on my face and try to wash them away with cold water, but to blow my nose. I find that no matter how healthy I may be, or how mild the weather, I always have something in my nostrils to expel.

Perhaps it’s the effect of long-term intimacy. Perhaps we find routines, develop physical quirks, to mark each other out, to say, this one is mine, see, look, he does this funny thing and nobody else would know that and maybe he didn’t even do it before me, but now it’s a part of him, and so am I.

Now to the man I live with I am and always will be the girl who blows her nose every morning without fail.

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I’m intrigued by the Migration Advisory Committee’s review of the Tier 1 visa scheme. Am I surprised that money, in the form of previous earnings, is the most influential factor here–or, for that matter, that a higher degree of education counts for less and less? Of course not–the system has always been biased. Do I disapprove of the visa scheme? God, no–I wouldn’t be here without it. But do I think we should just start issuing anyone who makes upwards of £100,000 with an automatic, free, self-renewing pass to live wherever, and however, they like because they make so much money? At this rate, yes. Sigh.

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