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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Except for the part where I sank ankle-deep in a hidden bog on the southern edge of South Parks, my run this evening was unbelievably beautiful. The sky , and pink blossoms everywhere, and a rain of fragrant white petals, and a red sun over the spires, which, in the thick dusky light, looked made of silver and dreams, hardly real, maybe not real at all. All the big trees lining the park were still bare and through black boughs a wind came wafting.

I know it sounds strange to say (and not a little unhealthy), but sometimes I like going for a run when I’m already a little thirsty. That way the cool air feels like something to drink. I am drinking the city, I like to think. (Then I self-consciously remember that line from Belle and Sebastian’s “Stars of Track and Field”: “You only did it so that you could wear your terry underwear and feel the city air run past your body.”)

After I got a stitch in my side running down Divinity Road I walked for a bit. It occurred to me that I need more walks in my life. (They wash the mind, clarify the thoughts, allow fully formed sentences to appear like ghosts in my head.)

Home again, I took the laundry down from the line outside. Earlier we ate bacon sandwiches in the garden. I don’t know if the Man did it just to humour me or not, but we sipped pineapple juice, and he read me an op-ed piece on Obama while I read him Tim Dowling at the supermarket checkout. At one point I laughed so hard I worried the bite I’d just taken would drop right out of my mouth. Now the dark has sagged over East Oxford. The kitchen is glowing yellow (the yellow walls make that happen, I think). My very muddy shoes are in the middle of the hallway, and my left leg is spotted with dirt. I think I’ll have a bath.

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I suddenly feel weary with the anticipation of a Saturday. Here I am at my desk, which is not a proper desk but a slab of coarse wood, which used to be the kitchen table, staring out at the garden behind the house thinking thoughts of Springtime, Springtime which is still just beyond our reach. There are yellow flowers and a few misty buds, but the trees are still blank, the grass still pale, the dead leaves of last year still plastered to the frosty pathway.

We’re in the time-between-seasons; you wake up one morning and here it is, Spring, and you put on a light coat, you dispense of your winter boots, but by mid-afternoon it’s Winter again and shivering you cycle home against a fierce wind that belongs to January, not March.

I need a chair big enough to swallow me. I don’t want to sit at my desk with my legs crossed neatly, dangling toward the ground, I want to fold them beneath myself, I want them to have freedom and space. The thing is of course that none of this furniture is ours, but now that we’ve lived here–how long? nearly two years?–it fits us. It owns us if we don’t own it.

I think about this sometimes (I’ve probably written about it before, too). What anchors us to this house is not possession. All that we own, between us, is a bed. You could say that’s too symbolic to be true, but it is true, and the only reason we even own the bed is because some friends were getting rid of it and thought that maybe we would want to graduate from a folding futon to a proper mattress-and-headboard bed.

So we have a bed and our books. We sound portable. But I don’t think we are as portable as all that. Here is the site of our budding love. How do you take that with you when you go?–say, the memory of sitting on the kitchen floor, midnight, two weeks in, picking apart a chicken carcass from the fridge, sipping a gin and tonic; the memory of the first walk to the bus stop, the smell of early summertime and the sunlight and the way he puts his sunglasses over your eyes because it’s early and you need a shield, and a piece of insurance, something to tie you together.

Because the thing is that while we’re here, they aren’t just memories; I can actually see a two-years-younger version of ourselves sitting in the garden watching the nine o’clock sunlight fade behind the East Oxford terraced houses. I haven’t actually converted these things into memory yet. I know I need to start doing it, like a computer caches old emails (if that’s what they do), or my mind will start to feel cloudy and crowded, but. But.

(A little truth about myself: sometimes I mix up Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth. And Henry David Thoreau, because of Walden Pond. All those Ws. Even though I’ve been to Walden Pond. One sticky Boston summer. I ate potato chips on the way there, bikini beneath black dress, and it was clear as anything but when we drove up to the pond the world suddenly clouded over and a few drops of rain hit our heads and then a crack of thunder, a fissure of lightening across the sky. So we didn’t swim in Walden Pond after all.)

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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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Have just noticed that both my previous posts begin with bathroom commentary (now of course this one does as well, in a roundabout kind of way).  I’m tempted to suggest that this is indicative of some kind of widespread societal absurdist attitude toward “the loo”.  Perhaps it’s in the building codes somewhere: toilets must either be designed to mask their true purpose (Selfridge’s) or designed with such frank lack of taste that visitors want only to get in and out as soon as possible (the Marriott in Clevedon).  But very probably I’ve begun seeking meaning in something empty, and all the bathroom motif indicates is that I have a preoccupation with details.

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