The days of late have been English-hot.  We sit outside in the daytime and my dreams at night are infused with the images from other people’s stories.  Climbers on snowy Oxford rooftops.  A weather balloon in Padua.  African pelicans.  I wear my panama hat even indoors because it reaffirms the season.  This is the hat I bought to go to Morocco, I say, because once it was just a ladies’ hat in Marks and Spencer but the second I laid eyes upon it, two years ago almost, it became part of the journey.  A traveller’s portable shade.

Yesterday we fixed my bicycle, swept the entrance to the house, pulled weeds up, had an impromptu barbecue.  In the jungle of knee-high, hip-high grass that’s blossomed in our garden, frogs leaped from blade to blade and the smoke dissapeared into the dusky blue.  From the garden pathway, looking away from the house, towards the sun dipping, the trees heavy with their summer leaves, this might be anywhere.  This might be miles away, no, worlds away from anywhere else.  An island of green and smoke; a paradise for the dispossessed.  Very Heart of Darkness, I say, only cheerier.

We still haven’t unpacked from Wales, though we’ve been back a week.  As if it’s summer now, so that’s okay.  Seasonal lethargy, the usual wanderlust of these months.

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I wonder how much else I can not get done today?  It’s already early evening (though how could you tell, the quality of the light is so bland, has looked the same since early morning, nothing but grey, not even shadows to make the streets more interesting) and I’ve managed to avoid doing anything of worth, even thinking anything of worth.  In the rather optimistic hopes of being inspired (ha!  what a word for this day) I convinced myself to remove five books from the shelf.  I even convinced myself to open the books.  That’s a good step, right?  I smelled the books (generally helps me get things going), even read bits of them.  I noted a few helpful or interesting quotes.  Then I promptly moved everything but my computer to the other side of the couch, where I have taken up residence, and spent an hour staring over the top of my MacBook at the plants in our front yard.  And the To Let sign on the house opposite, thinking, as I always do when I see To Let signs, that I’d like to put an “i” in the middle of the two words.  And also thinking that it’s been available to let for about as long as I can remember, which is funny, because people seem to be living quite comfortably in it.  We once even saw what could have been nothing less than twenty students pour from its front door one morning, squinting and looking unmistakably hungover (if we’d opened the window we might even have been able to smell the stale remanants of last night’s booze).  Maybe they’re squattors.  But they had that coiffed-hair, popped-collar, Jack Wills-y look, and I don’t think people like that tend to squat.  Just a thought.

Now it’s Simon and Garfunkel again, because that helped last week, but it isn’t helping today, and apparently I’m bound to just work myself up into a small and useless panic about my own lack of productivity this afternoon.  Let the jolts of anxiety followed by bouts of self-pity followed by elated declarations of not caring commence…

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There are strange flowers blooming.  I’m watching the almost-rainy day unfold in the back garden (the dead-rat smell has dissipated enough now to make the study a viable place to spend time again).  It’s heavenly: things are green, or starting to be green.  The grass has new, fragile vibrancy; the trees, which have looked naked for so long, are budding tiny leaves at long last.  Weeds are springing up in the flower pots and when the wind ruffles branches and stalks it’s easy to believe that things out there are alive.  That maybe we’ll all start to thaw out, now.

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On the way to work, sudden blossoms. They came overnight. First the delicate yellow flowers outside our front door, now, on the trees, a bloom of white. It’s warm enough to cycle in ballet flats, no socks–that’s a good warm, it’s all I’d ask of March. Yesterday, we ate lunch outside, in the garden.

With these sudden blossoms comes, too, a sudden remembrance of my love for the city. I hope this infusion of affection seeps into the work I’m doing on the book. The freeze of winter has made me cold about the project, not lacking in theoretical enthusiasm but lacking in the ability to translate thought into word. I’ve been drawn into myself like a creature curled in its own shell. I wouldn’t want to make this malady specific, wouldn’t want it to lose its poetry by pinpointing it preciesely, giving it a name, say, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Then again, perhaps it’s like the aquisition of a degree: Miranda Ward, GAD, SAD. (Or, indeed, like a Dr. Seuss rhyme).

But I don’t think it’s like this. I think what I feel in winter is a choice. I like to wrap myself in the cocoon of my own worries, like to hibernate in my study, fretting, picking at my own fingers, sighing, watching the naked trees, thinking that my projects are languishing, my ability shrinking. It makes the transition to Spring sweeter, makes me feel like, as soon as the blossoms come, I can shed my ugly countenance, wear something nicer for the Summer.

I wasn’t always like this. I’m a California girl, you see; not obsessed with seasons, not even aware of them except for the changes in light and the subtle shift of colour. I write this often, so it must be important to me. I write, often, too, of how my time in Boston made me aware of something I’d never known before, about my own reaction to the malleability of days, my own obsession with the weather. (The Man says that when I enthuse about temperature or sun or rain in the way that I can, sometimes, I become in that moment almost perfectly British.)

But still, here we are, at the edge. I’m hoping that the expanding sunlight makes the work, too, expand, so that it fills the days like blossoms and warmth. Punting weather, garden weather.

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Because they had enjoyed Wales so well the first time they’d come to the UK, my parents took me there the first time I came to the UK. We spent a few days in relative wilderness, stumbling along Offa’s Dyke and being windswept at the top of rolling green hills, but then came one day to rest in Hay-on-Wye, a town my parents had specially selected for me, their strange 13-year-old daughter, because it is known as “the town of books”. In a matter of hours, I saw more independent bookshops than I had seen in my entire young life. They let me loose and I swept up every strange title I could. It was bliss.

The Hay Literary Festival is something else, though. We drove up with some friends, chewing cold pizza in the car and trying to discern whether the weather would hold. A few spits of rain hit our windshield; then suddenly the trees would open up to reveal a sparkle of pure sunshine. We arrived at our friends’ rented cottage just as it was turning dark; the garden in which we would be camping overlooked the Wye valley and the town shimmered purple, then indigo, with the sunset. To the right we could see a settlement of great white tents and a few flashing lights. We had enormous chunks of steak with wine and salad and fell asleep and then woke to a day that held promise: warm out of the wind, clear blue sky, and the possibility of books.

But the festival is–well, weird. We got there and were overwhelmed almost immediately. We stood in long queues to buy tickets to events that we weren’t even entirely sure we wanted to see (the Salman Rushdie talk we ended up at, for instance, was incomprehensible at best–why is this man showing us these pictures? I kept asking myself. What on earth is he trying to say to us? How can one of the greatest writers of contemporary literature produce something so utterly dry?–to keep alert, I tried taking notes, but all I ended up with were a slew of poetic half-phrases which, taken out of context, were only pretty, and empty). We walked under the shade of a dozen white tents and sipped lattés outside by a puddle of water, wiping fevered brows. We fought our way to the festival bookshop and then elbowed our way close enough to the shelves (a feat, I’ll tell you) to be able to read the spines of the books, and even bought a few but mostly, I suspect, so that we felt purposeful; but eventually we could take it no longer and went in search of lunch.

We walked back toward the town and alighted upon, quite by accident, a food festival; so we wandered close to the enticing stalls, which advertised venison burgers, a local cider bar, creamy ice cream, pastries, meat pies, nuts and berries of all ilks, wines and liqueurs. We settled for venison burgers and cider and sat on a grassy knoll in the sun, overlooking the shabby but appealing festival, and talked, what else, of books. We were with an author friend of ours who was in the process of revising her novel for publication in the US; call me shallow, but it had never really occurred to me that you would need to physically change the structure of your book to suit the states. Have we really become so disparate that there need be translators from one English speaking country to another?

She told me some of the things they had wanted her to do to make it more viable; I was fascinated. I mean, yes, I knew of course about the not-so-subtle changes publishers had made–the infamous Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone debacle, for instance; the title of the book, as I understand it, being changed because publishers didn’t think stateside readers would understand the allusion to the philosopher’s stone. I suppose they figured if they threw some alliteration in there, the books would sell more readily–but I think we are equally capable of buying whether we understand an allusion or not; and surely it’s unfair to keep a nation in the dark about basic cultural literacy simply out of an urge to make profit.

In the end I wasn’t sure I understood entirely why they wanted her to change things–the structure of things, even, structure being something, in my opinion, that impacts enormously the way you read something. If it really is all for profit, that’s one thing; but it being the literary world, you begin to suspect that also, perhaps, they–whoever “they” really are–genuinely believe that there needs to be some sort of translation or, if not translation, then perhaps transposition, between English books and American books. I’m inclined to say hell, let people figure things out for themselves; but I daresay the people whose jobs depend upon advising novelists how best to sell their work across the pond would disagree.

After venison and cider (strong stuff that made my head spin after only a pint), I lapped up some ice cream and we wandered into the heart of the town to peruse the bookshops. It was a blissful afternoon indeed, but the bliss had nothing to do, really, with the festival itself, and everything to do with circumstance, and company, and the myriad of enticing shops. We were three people who should probably not be let loose for any extended period of time in such a place; but were relatively safe within the confines of a weekend.

The next day it–it what? I would say “rained”, except that rained seems misleading. It implies something ordinary, everyday, a bit of British regularity. It implies a simple wetness, not a profound one like what we experienced. Wet to the bone, I think. We awoke in our tent utterly dry and by the time we had sprinted across the grass to the cottage my hair was dripping and my feet felt as if they had been soaked in a bath for hours. At the festival, the pathways under the white tents had begun literally to foam, and the squeak of wellies created an actual din. In a tent the size of the White House we listened to Salman Rushdie, watching not his tiny figure on the stage but a video projection of his head and torso on an enormous screen, and I shivered deeply, and couldn’t wait for tea, and warmth, and to be somewhere else.

Back in Oxford, we unloaded our bags and discovered that we had bought so many new books that we didn’t know quite what to do with them; so we left them temporarily on the trunks in the lounge to impress–or rather stun–our visitors, and felt oddly fulfilled, somehow.

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