Didn’t start very encouragingly. Boxed red wine in the station (“it’s like being with a rugby team,” the Man kept saying). An impromptu train switch at Reading. The night already folding in on us. I’d been at work, then caught in a downpour, then at home, then late, then not late (a kindly friend had lied about the train time so I wouldn’t miss it). It was suddenly cold again; what happened to the almost-summer of last week? Another world. I needed gloves. And maybe socks. On the tube a toddler bounced between his mother and his father, every shift on the tracks a new hazard. Many stops later (or maybe not so many; I forgot to keep track), a part of London unidentifiable to me. We walked against the wind. Fulham. You hear so much about Fulham, but until last night it was just another London name.

Past a nursing home. Everything looked suburban. Not expensive but empty, tired, devoid of spirit. Around a corner, a sudden pub. We ate round a long table. Potted shrimp, scotch eggs, salmon, terrine, soft bread. Mashed potatoes, curly kale, slabs of bleeding beef. The Man looked especially happy. “Are you happy?” I said, looking over the top of my red wine glass. “Meat,” he grinned, reminding me of my dad’s 50th birthday (picture: a barbecue pit by the beach, some friends, and nothing to eat but pounds and pounds of tri-tip, which my mother had bought thinking it was the manly food to get). I even got past my fear of meat that hasn’t been cooked so well it looks black and enjoyed the tenderness (a little).

We sat on couches after. Shared an espresso, the Man and I, with a sugar cube. Back on the tube. We all shared no-hot-food-on-the-bus-back-to-Oxford horror stories (there are many). We were on the bus back before midnight. All so civilized. At St. Clements we alighted. As always I felt cold. I had to pee. I’d fallen asleep on the coach and my neck felt bent the wrong way. At home, relief, the sighs after a long night, but also a bewildered and delighted sense that neither of us had once considered screaming in frustration, this time.

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Does it always rain in London? Probably not. But there’s that cold, seeping into your bones, under the wool of your coat, settling beneath your skin. We stand on the corner under a droopy umbrella, wondering what the point of a droopy umbrella is. Later we sit in the heat of a friend’s restaurant, listening to the table beside us. They say things like, I can tell a good wine just by smelling it, and, In Canada we just drink beer, and, But you know what, whenm you go back, you’ll be all cultured. They are City people with a capital C, just slightly out of their depth, aiming just slightly too high, so enamored of their own image of themselves that they forget who they are, where they are, why they are.

Time passes more quickly in London than anywhere else I know. First it is just gone nine, and suddenly it is midnight, and then one. We splash down the street with our friend, who we haven’t seen for too long (but none of us has the energy to say this), we wait at a bus stop, we go separate ways. Gliding down Oxford Street it occurs to me that there is nothing sadder, nothing that makes me feel smaller and more powerless against the force of the Big City, than glitzy shops all closed up for the night. A kind of desparation creeps into view; the Big City isn’t so different after all, is it, I think; it’s just as sleepy and just as shut as anywhere else in this in-betweeen hour.

But earlier, on the tube, leaning nonchalantly against the plastic in the car with my headphones and my heavy coat, going to meet The Man, I had remembered how well I like the city-feeling, the knowing feeling; I had felt again the happy chills as I skipped down the escalator and waited for a train, for there is nowhere in the world but a big city that you can feel so a part of the world, such an insider, whilst being above it, too, outside of it.

We wait for the bus home. Now the cold has entered our socks and shoes, our very beings; we huddle close together. For the first time in I don’t know how long, we are not unhappy under this late night London sky, just cold, just waiting, just wanting, because it is late, to get back to the warmth of our house.

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I wish I could write, properly, but I have ANOTHER cold. I think this makes one a month since at least October. The Man suggested that maybe it’s because I’m living in a new country. I said, “Pooh. I’ve been living here for a year.” He said, “That’s not so long.” I guess it’s not. After all, he’s been living here his whole life.

Other excuses we’ve come up with: it’s winter. I work at a school. An international school, where we don’t just get the ordinary floating-around-Oxford bugs, but exciting colds from anywhere from California to Kazakhstan (really).

In my long, slow reading of Javier Marias’ All Souls (neither long nor slow by neccesity but by choice, a savouring rather than a devouring), I came across this passage:

“For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasping for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time.”

I find Marias’ book to be one of the most astute that I have found about Oxford. On reflection of course I’m forced to wonder if this is not because it is, by nature, so astute about the city–cities themselves are as subjective and mutable as the books written about them, after all–but because it is so astute about my city. That is, Marias and I are both outsiders here (he Spanish, I American) residing in a place that did not birth us, a place where, significantly, “there’s no one here who knew me as a…child.” So what he sees in Oxford, and writes up in his work of fiction, and which I years later find to be nougats of genius observation, might well be passed over by someone else–I don’t know.

This passage on London, though; on not existing in time: well, how often have I written about the London feeling, the dis-ease, the midnight anxiety and the trembling relief at coming home? I think of the walk from St. Clements to home, always taken in deepest night, in emptiness, as being cold, uncomfortable, but free: when we venture to London we are at the mercy of something else (real time, Marias might say, the world) and when we come back home to Oxford we feel liberated from these bounds.

I’m not saying we take the same view of the city, exactly–his is far more bitter, underscored by repeated assertions of the transience of his time in Oxford, how temporary his existance there. I’m only saying that there’s a necessary overlap.

I’m flicking through my music. I can’t find anything to fit my mood. I’m not sure there is anything, in all this world, to fit my mood. But the song that’s on now, it goes, “Oh September, where did you go?” and I find it possible to feel that now, in midwinter, when September, not so far gone, really, seems a million miles away. There was still foliage on the trees then, and a mild eruption of autumnal colouring in the parks.

It’s still beautiful here (I think–I’ve not been outdoors since Sunday). The reflections in the river are of such disconcerting clarity that the world looks upside-down sometimes. But I’m in such a state of self-pity at the moment that I refuse to notice this.

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It was a dizzy trip to London (as they all are, maybe); a disjointed evening, so that by the time we were in bed I felt like there had been several days between leaving and returning.

First we are late; then a few drinks at someone else’s expense. We move on to a party at the top of Centrepoint, only we are too late for the party and all that is left is the slop from spilled cocktails and a gathering of ultrahip young things, dancing as only the ultrahip can: without passion, without grace, without movement, almost. They are so cool, these young things, that I think they could kill us with their cool, if only they weren’t too cool to be bothered. They are so cool that they actually make me feel old, and frumpy. They are so cool, and so hip, that they do not even see us. We move through them and they part in beat to the techno music. There is so much cool in the air we can scarcely breath; we do not linger for a drink. We stand at the edge and look out over London.

The one good thing about this party is the view: and the city lit up, so that the stars in the sky seem to be below us, not above. Later we think maybe this view makes the entire misguided trip worth it. From up here it looks like the city runs all the way to the horizon and beyond. London loses its London-ness; it is a City, a gem of human endeavor. We are the only still things here.

Then we are walking on the street again. Towards a dingy underground private member’s club. It’s like descending into a speakeasy. On the stairs we are harassed by staff until it becomes clear that we are, in some way, affiliated with a member; then they are lovely and let us pass. Behind me, a lone drunk, tie askew, whispers, “Dunno what all the fuss is about. It’s just a bloody pub down there.” As we pass into the bar, he begs to be let in.

The light inside is green. There is something of the tikki-bar about the place, and film posters on the wall, and lots of young actor-types. We are no longer in the realm of the ultrahip but now in the realm of the ultracamp. In the back, behind thick tapestry curtains, several anterooms stand like invitations to the illicit. The figures on the wall are often pornographic, but ironically so: large phallic flowers erect in a garden, silhouettes of busty Victorian ladies.

Back on the street. The half-light of late London. We buy chips and a pita wrap from a kebab shop and get on the wrong bus, from which we embark at the wrong stop. We stand in the rain in a posh (and therefore empty) square waiting for another bus; it is nearly December now, and cold, and we huddle together and collectively wish that we had not left the sanctuary of our own small city, where just a few hours ago (or was it days?) we were having a drink with a friend at an uncrowded pub, were just a few minutes walk from our house, our warm, quiet house.

We get off at the right stop. We still have miles to walk, it feels. We skirt Victoria station, trying to find our way. I bump shoulders accidentally with a woman walking very quickly; she turns back, snaps something at me. I snap something back. I do not often feel aggressive, particularly for such a transient reason, but suddenly I think I might feel violent if i don’t move on quickly.

We sleep on the way home. It is nearly five by the time we alight at St. Clements. As always, a hush over the streets; the drunks at home or asleep by now, the workers still yawning their way awake on the fringes of the city. As always, I need a pee, and we are just far enough from home, and it is just bitterly cold enough, that the walk seems impossible. But of course it isn’t; that’s just the night speaking, still.

At home we strip and climb under the duvet. I had been bitter about London before, at the bus stop; I had said, “Who was it who said that you could never be bored in London, or else you were bored with life? He was absolutely right; you can’t be bored in London. You also can’t be fucking happy.” Now I start to soften, as if the warmth from the house has smoothed my edges. I murmur that it wouldn’t be so bad if only we had somewhere to stay the night; or that it’s only the cold, and the rain. I say that maybe next time we’ll do it better; and weren’t all those hip young people funny? And he says how beautiful the city looked from that one clear point, how absolutely beautiful.

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