I wake to a hot-air-balloon floating past the window.  We have been here before: the Circus, the Royal Crescent–but I hardly recognize any of it.  Only the glimmer of grey stone under half-sunlight sometimes, only the slope of a garden path.  We spend the day walking in circles.  The balloons going up all morning, all afternoon, all evening.  It smells like jasmine dripping from the petals of wet English roses.  And sometimes pizza, espresso, men soaked in ale, a woman’s sickly perfume (she must have bathed in it, showered with it, washed her hands with it, drunk it like tea for its fragrance to follow her so strongly).  At lunch a surly Thai woman wishes, we’re sure, that we’d never entered her restuarant, gives the flimsiest smile I’ve ever seen at every customer.  At the edge of night we walk to the park, where blue-and-white striped chairs, all empty, are having thier own party now that the loungers and the picnickers have fled the grassy banks.  Empty chairs, and the bells ring out for the empty hour.

And now the curtains are drawn to block out the last, late vestiges of June light and the cricket is on the television, and the balloons, I think, have all come down to rest, and up the hill from us the circus and the royal crescent sleep.

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For the past few weeks, I have been reading–by which, in this case, I mean something more akin to swimming in–W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.  This is, as Jonathan Raban writes in the TLS, “the finest book of long-distance mental travel that I’ve ever read,” and so is something which, like any long-distance journey, requires periods of rest to succesfully get through.  The closer I get to the end the more I feel myself to be in some strange shadowland, an overlap between Sebald’s mind and my own, with the unfamiliar geography of East Anglia as backdrop and the eerily blurred black-and-white photographs scattered throughout the pages of the book, always fuzzy at the edges, always just vague enough to imply that they might be anything and anywhere, should we want them to be, as ghost-like guides.

This feeling came to a head last night when I had a haunted sleep, in which, first, I was running down a series of narrow and gritty alleyways, pursued by the unknown and ominous chaser from one edge of a city built, it seemed, entirely out of channels between buildings (no doorways, wide boulevards, sudden squares or tree-lined parks).  Then onto a series of trains, which rushed along in an open-topped tunnel.  When I disembarked there was a field, and a rally, and beyond the crowd, the silhouette of a forest.  I knew myself to be on an island, in an archipelago; and as I raced towards the forest, I unfolded a map, which in old-fashioned style told me nothing of importance but gave me the shape of the islands: long and thin all, craggy like the outline of coastal Greece.

Exactly why I woke and felt immediately that this was a dream I would not have had if I wasn’t, in the moments before falling into slumber, reading Sebald, I do not know.  But at some hour shortly before dawn, I stirred in my wooded hiding spot and then woke, and felt convinced beyond measure that this was a dream akin in feeling to what Sebald describes during a harried crossing of a scrubland near Dunwich: “If one obeyed one’s instincts, the path would sooner or later diverge further and further from the goal one was aiming to reach…Several times I was forced to retrace long stretches in that bewildering terrain…I cannot say how long I walked about in that state of mind, or how I found a way out.  But I do remember that suddenly I stood on a country lane, beneath a mighty oak, and the horizon was spinning all around as if I had jumped off a merry-go-round.”

When I had rolled over, felt the Man snoring lightly beside me, drifted back into a half-worried sleep, I dreamt more overtly of the book.  I was discussing it with someone and, in that way of a dream where the familiar is all wrapped up in the foreign, the discussion was taking place via the interent, at a pub, and as I played with a sticky beermat a message appeared on the screen of my computer.  Specifics in dreams are never so spectacular when translated into waking life, but it had to do with hope in the book.  The first line (read the message), implies the tone that is followed throughout: one of desperation, obession with human frailty and transience.  But I disagreed; yes, I wanted to write back, it does–but it also powerfully evokes a sense of hope, with a single word.  What this word was I can’t remember; but now, in looking at the un-spectacular actual first line of the book, I see that Sebald writes both of “emptiness” and “hope”.

In the thick, knotted pages (each one nearly black with tightly-knit words, no paragraphs, no natural space to pause or breath) there are constant reminders of things coming to an end–it is hard to read something like that quickly and harder still to escape the way the mood (heavy, grey) crawls into your head at night.  But there are evocations in the strange and haunting light of springtime, too (I start to go a little wild, to feel recklessness, which I thought to be dead, stirring in my toes)–what I’m saying I guess is this is not a book I’d like to read in winter.

But then, seasons cannot explain everything, can they?  Today as I was running along the edge of Christ Church meadow, and the bells of Magdalen College were crying out for Sunday joy, I paused for breath at an artifical spot, a spot of my own choosing, half in the shade of a low-branched tree, so that I could perceive the new green that has flushed the area.  And I thought: this is a sign of summer, this new green, these fragile shoots and delicate blossoms, but for seventeen years of my life the signfier of summer was the drying out of grassy hills; green bled from the earth, not springing from it.  In a short period indeed I’ve managed to revise my internal understanding of the world, so that the growth that for so long meant the heavy rains of winter now means sunshine and rare warmth.

(I’ve been interrupted now too often; if there’s a flow between thoughts here, I hardly see it–but then, maybe that’s long-distance mental travel.)

❧

After we arrive in Bedwyn, I tell the Man that my right boot is still making funny sounds.
“Funny sounds?” he says.
“Yeah. Like a horse clopping down the road.”
I shake my right foot. I can feel something jiggling. I’ve had this feeling off-and-on since we came back from New York. He follows the movement of my leg.
“It’s because your HEEL IS ABOUT TO FALL OFF,” he tells me.
I look down. The heel of my boot is dangling from several rusty nails. Several questions pop into my head all at once. How have I not noticed this before? Why did I somehow think that the jiggling was coming from the toe of my boot? And, more pressing still: how am I going to cope with a broken boot in a village so small that the first cab driver we call says, “oh no, sorry, I’m just having myself a cup of tea, I can’t pick you up”?

In Avebury, where we end up after a pint and a perusal of the Guardian whilst waiting for the third cab driver we call to arrive, we meet up with friends and I am able to borrow the wellies of an 11-year-old boy whose feet are definitely at least a size bigger than mine. The Man gestures wildly as we stand on a windy ridge overlooking a circle of giant stones (only in England); he punches a hole in his Barbour.
“We’re a mess,” I say. I like our mess, but still.

It’s overcast and the children want to climb the stones, roll down the hills. A humourless pair of English hippies in moon-patterned trousers and tie-dye jumpers tries to stop them: in future re-tellings of this story (and there will be many), they say, Don’t climb the rocks. This is our temple; this is our Church. But in all truth they do not say this, just look disapprovingly, just bark . They remind me of the puckered old woman in the Great Tew church telling us: What do they think this is, a nursery? In my day children would never be allowed to play in a place like this. The hippies with their sour countenance, their wild hair and ugly demeanor, move on. Ned the puppy pulls me along the side of a hill. We have no time for hippy temples, for rules or regulations. Only time to stand windblown on a ridge, to watch children rolling so fast and so far it makes us fret (but briefly).

In Mildenhall which is pronounced Minal we sleep above the pub. There is no store in the village and no school; the people are rooted to the place only through a town hall and an eating-and-drinking establishment. We mention we might want a taxi to the train station after dinner.
“A taxi?” says the woman.
“Oooh I dunno about that,” says the man. We feel like the city-slickers, even in our torn Barbours, our too-big wellies.

So we stay; in a room which is the essence of the English bed-and-breakfast. Shabby floral curtains, pulled back to reveal the pub sign, the cobbled pavement, the thatched cottages across the narrow street. Upholstered chairs, worn and soft. An ugly purple duvet, a flowery third pillow.

“Why are there three pillows?” I want to know. The Man holds up the third pillow.
“Just look at it,” he says. Then he hits his head on the mantelpiece-above-the-bed.
“Why is there a mantelpiece above the bed?” I also want to know, but the simple answer is that there is no why; the why is in its existing at all. And in the morning, we have a greasy and delicious full English breakfast while the owners’ three black poodles wander around the front room like a trio of furry balloon animals.

Passing through Marlborough; the widest High Street in Britain, though you wouldn’t think it now. Just a parking lot now–a thick row of vehicles clogging up the centre. But look at a picture of it a hundred years ago and it is impressive. Like a sea between the two sides of the road.

Now past the place where the Thames starts.
“Look, you know the Thames, the Thames in London, this is where it begins,” says the boys’ mother, one hand on the wheel, pointing over the bridge.
“We know the Thames is in London,” says one of the boys, pouting, pressing his face against the side of the car. “You don’t have to keep saying, ‘the Thames in London.’”
“But look,” we say, “this is where it starts, isn’t that incredible?” And then the Man adds, “and it goes through Oxford, too. It splits into two, but it’s still the Thames.”

(And then we can’t remember, for a bit, which is the Isis and which is the Cherwell.)

Burford suddenly feels like home, because it’s the Cotswolds–Cotswold stone, Cotswold colour. I am lost in the map of England, it’s swallowed me completely, and every foray from the city where we live feels like magic and mystery (and so does every re-entry).

❧

So today, my results for the first term of my masters came out. As a certifiably competitive-geeky-academic-type (I don’t necessarily want to be like this, and I know it’s silly, but I always, always want the A), this meant lots of excitement and anticipation for me this morning. The first thing I did when I got to work was log in to check my marks, and sure enough, there they were…

It was only then that I realized I have absolutely no concept of the UK grading system. The numbers were meaningless. What a cruel irony for poor little me. An online search fixed the problem, but it also reaffirmed something that I have a tendency to forget these days: I’m not in Kansas (or, rather, California) anymore.

*Update 12/2: in a brilliant twist of irony, I managed to spell a number of words incorrectly in this post. Luckily I am not being graded on my spelling, but still, I am dutifully blushing…

❧

More mince pies than you can shake a stick at. If you liked them before Christmas, you sure as hell won’t want to see another one after, and if you didn’t like them before Christmas, well…I don’t envy you. A bout of “unseasonably cold” weather (you didn’t see this coming? after how many centuries? really?). Lots (and lots and lots) of subsequent talk about how cold it is. Very beautiful snowflakes. Weekend girls with bare legs, pretending that it isn’t unseasonably cold out. Lots of sniffles and coughs. Frost making art deco patterns on the cars at night. Stoic cyclists. Bare branches. A flurry over hot alcoholic drinks before Christmas (mulled cider, mulled wine…) followed by a general laziness about them after (who can be bothered?). Potatoes for dinner, every night. Root vegetable feasts and homemade soups. Log fires. Coal fires. The smell of log fires and coal fires on the streets. Scarves. Girls in very cool boots. Pubs, but not pub gardens. A brief glorification of the English summer (“oh, I can’t wait for June…”) followed by a berating of the English summer (“ugh, it’ll just rain the whole time anyway). A general sense of polite but vaguely uncomfortable waiting.

❧