We’ve become these people that, like, act almost kind of cool, and adult, and stuff. We lounge around with our Macs, in our slightly hip outfits (him: Croc sneakers–though please don’t picture these, because his are actually really, surprisingly groovy plus he bought them from a man on the street for the price of two pints–khakis, and a Banana Republic jumper; me: black skinny jeans (yes, I finally caved), slightly ethnic scarf, long cardigan (according to the Observer magazine, cardigans are “in”)–actually, the image almost disgusts me. We cook breakfast, have friends over for casual lunches. I sit under a duvet drinking lots of tea and eating clementines (and I’m not the only one) while he catches the second half of the Spurs v Portsmouth game. When he comes home we watch a few episodes of 30 Rock and order a curry.

“You’re not eating the nob of your sausage?” he says when I remove the end of my lamb and place it back in the container.
“No,” I say. “I got bored with it.”
He picks it up, eats it. I’m chewing and gesturing wildly, like I have something really important to say.
“You’re going to make a joke about the nob of my sausage,” he says. I swallow.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am.”

(Maybe not so adult.)

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The Man has just given me a piece of advice that I feel worthy of sharing.

“Don’t try to scratch your nose with a cupcake,” he’s advised me. “I just got cake in my nostrils.”

I’m going to join my cake-snorting love in the lounge, and resist the urge to scratch body-parts with baked-goods. I suggest you do similar.

❧

• Late night city walks
• The slightly smokey smell of September
• Finally being warm because it’s Autumn and I don’t have to pretend anymore that the weather is summery and wear skirts and sandals
• My new rust-coloured coat
• Watching bad television online whilst in the bath (glass of wine optional but always appreciated)
• Using the fireplace again
• Woolen jumpers
• My bicycle–avec recently pumped tires
• Walking through Radcliffe Square in the evenings and getting to think, I live here!
• Lazy, lounge-y Sundays with good friends and good food
• Knowing my neighbors (even just a little) and passing gardening equipment over the fence
• Wearing The Man’s scarf to work
• The way my coat flutters when I’m cycling
• Chocolate in the afternoon

• Being snuggled up when it’s cold outside

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I went to buy a new bath mat today, but they didn’t have any under £12.99 that weren’t all kinds of ugly, and I decided I’d rather not spend that much money on something I’m going to use to dry my feet off with after a lengthy soak. Too lazy to try anywhere else, instead I went down Broad Street and bought myself a few books–which came to a grand total of £13. But in retrospect, I’ll take books over bath mats any day.

We have other people’s mail coming through our letter box. Some of it I don’t know how to send on, so it just piles up on the second desk in the study. We don’t own either of the desks, but there they are, lit up by lamps that aren’t ours either. I think if you stripped the both of us down to our own true possessions we would have nothing but books and clothes, in that order. I can’t decide if that makes us free or just pathetic. But when you have somebody else’s furniture crowding up the house you’ve come to think of as yours, even when it isn’t, you start to feel tied down by things.

When I paid the tuition for my MA the other day, I swear my card looked weary when it came out of the machine. It looked up at me balefully as if to say: don’t ever make me do this again. I spent a full quarter of an hour marvelling at the fact that I had never ever spent that much money in one easy go before. And I wonder, in a way I’ve never really wondered before, how all those people with their fancy strings of degree initials actually manage to pay for that much education.

But I’m distracted by the necessity of buying new books, and pens, and stationary. Eighteen years in you would think this might get tiring but there is something eternally satisfying about the back-to-school season, and I don’t think that I could ever feel disappointed by the return to education.

It’s funny to think of the formative memories I have from my early schooling. Mixing raisins with my apple juice, with disastrous consequences (I was put off raisins for years). Being in the bathroom at preschool and wondering what it would be like to pee standing up, like the boys did. Mouthing the words to a song and having the teacher call me aside after. Her gentle, crushing admonition. Saying my favorite color was white, and not pink, just to be different from all the other little girls. Running across the tarmac at snack-time, falling, scraping my knee, crying, being helped by a boy whose name I have no recollection of. Making stories with felt cutouts. The teacher who limped and carried a cane and frightened me so much that I dreaded the days when my mother would tell me she couldn’t pick me up until after storytime. Children calling “na, na, na na na!” at each other on the playground for no good reason. Putting on a play I wrote in the second grade and later in the year coming home to my mother after discovering that King Arthur, our newest focus of study (we’d just finished a lesson on giants), hadn’t been a actual king and asking when we were going to learn about real things.

***

It almost almost smells like autumn outside. And it’s getting to be chilly. I wore a wool coat to a dinner the other night, and I wasn’t sorry. Inside we wrap ourselves in duvets (I’m wrapped in one now). We refuse to put the central heating on until October of course.

Mostly I am in the back-to-school daze, and everything I think to write has left my head by the time I make my busy way back home. The house has become a refuge. Which is funny really. A few weeks ago there was the house down the road which burst into flame; and the fight at the pub at the other end of the street which warrented what seemed to be an entire fleet of police vans. This weekend we were startled into wakefulness by a pair of voices–male, female–arguing in that way that only couples do, and just when we thought maybe they had had their last go we saw the ambulance coming down the road and the man got in with a book tucked under his arm. In the morning we saw the blood pooled outside the house directly next door, where the head wound he had inflicted on himself by hitting the door had spilt onto the concrete. And after all that was over there was an incessent rapping across the street, all morning long, it felt.

Sure, we stick our heads out of the door. We can see other heads poking out, too. But I feel like this is part of living here, and the truth is that I still think we have the most beautiful house in the neighborhood, just like I think I have the handsomest bicycle in Oxford; and we cosy up to the rush of September leaves together: he now only semi-bearded, me wearing thick jumpers. It’s winter in California, here: green, rain, cold sunshine, gentle light.

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In the old days, people would ask you how your crossing was–was it a rough crossing, or a smooth one? they would want to know. That was when the only way to get to Paris was over the thin, choppy stretch of sea called the English Channel, and it was much more of a production.

Now there is no crossing: only a long, swift, sweeping motion, like a wave of the arm–you fall asleep in Paris and wake in London, and there is just a tunnel, a fast train between two cosmopolitan cities. At the station everything is in French and English and all the announcements are made in both languages. Even at this early hour people are reading newspapers and preparing for their day in suits or swish trousers and high heels. It is impossible to tell why they are making the journey. I myself am making it to get my visa stamped.

“Is this your first presentation?” the man at passport control asks me about the visa, and I nod.

We stayed first in a cheap hotel and then at a friend’s crumbling, recently sold apartment. On our last evening there we were having a meal on the mattress–cheese, paté, wine–when a girl came into the apartment to take away all of the furniture. It was embarrassing because our friend had forgotten to tell us she would be coming and had forgotten to tell her that we would be there. We slept without a mattress that night (last night), in the August heat, but it was okay somehow.

We walked around a fair bit, but because he had sprained his ankle the night before we left we had to take it easy. I read The Flaneur by Edmund White; it reminded me that Ernest Hemingway was hungry and poor in Paris, too. There is a passage in A Moveable Feast that I had forgotten until I read The Flaneur; it’s long (less a passage and more a chapter) but the start of it goes: “You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food”. Then he describes how he used to wind his way around the city avoiding all the places that made him hungry and tempted to spend money. But also he writes: “We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.” So there’s that, and it’s a far nicer thing than being able to afford a fancy hotel with a mattress or to enter every museum or shop for souvenirs and clothing that will just take up space anyway.

We drank café au lait facing the street so we could watch all the people. Our biggest expense was coffee, not accommodation or food. It was a good thing he had bought me The Flaneur, really; “the flaneur,” White writes, “is…in search of a private moment, not a lesson.” And, “Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone.”

We had a kir each at Sartre’s café, Café Flore, across from the Lipp where Hemingway eats in A Moveable Feast. Because the drinks were so expensive we drew them out, sipping slowly and delicately, enjoying being able to rest our feet while other people walked on by. The waiter brought us a plate of green olives and I sucked them from a toothpick and we picked the pits out from our teeth.

There is probably a lot more I could write but I’m tired. We’ve been on the road for most of August, it seems. We’ve been to Cambridge, the Cotswolds, Brighton, and Paris. Oxford has emptied completely, taking a tiny breath before she fills with students for the term. Even the Cowley road this morning as we walked back from St. Clements seemed wide and quiet; only a few cars trickling past, hardly any other pedestrians. I’m uploading photos and going to have a nap. It’s September, and part of me doesn’t know how this came to be, even though I’ve seen it happen so many times before.

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