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.)

Earlier I ran mundane errands. I bought ugly things, useful things. I hate to spend my money on ugly, useful things. Razors, shampoo, tampons, condoms. I went to the self-checkout because I did not want to be seen. Please let them not think that this is what I do, what I do, in my red pencil skirt, my leather heeled brogues, my rust-coloured coat, after work, on a Friday evening. Let them not think that this city and this life has become so prosaic for me, because that would be an unfair representation, and even if I buy razors and tampons on a Friday evening while the air and the light is shimmering all around us, I also…

…have this thought: cycling to work, early morning. The sun coming down the wide, empty (unpaved) High. I had forgotten how much I love to see the city in this light. The closed, sour winter-me, so suddenly self-obsessed, so willing to be saddened or hardened, moved by the temperature, the darkened days, had forgotten this very simple thing; but all it took was a touch of light upon my skin to remember it.

(Still, strolling down Turl Street, I see a stationer is closing its doors for good, and in the Covered Market, past the fresh meat and leather and hot cookies, several shops wear signs: Sale. Last few days. Everything must go. I have thought for so long that the economy does not touch me, because I am poor anyway, I am in the throes of youth, but maybe, I think, I will miss the stationer, where I once bought a set of notecards, and the shop in the covered market where I once bought a blue satin clutch to go with my dress for a friend’s wedding.)

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.

“Like Good King Wenceslas…he went down…”
“He didn’t go down…”
“He did, he went down. On Stephen. And gave him a good feast.”

Also, the response that George gives his significant other when she murmurs from the couch, “I’m tired”: “I know, but this is, this is rock n’ roll, this is the chance you take, going out with a rustic poet like me.”

Remember: quirky.

The Man fixed the electricity problem. I do love men, don’t you?

I’ve got three blog posts to write today. (Yes, I really am sticking to a schedule). I’ve spent the morning doing anything but work. I’m organizing old photos and music. I plan on making lists at some point, lots and lots of lists, but I haven’t even begun thinking about the lists. I’m watching the birds dig around in the wasteland that is our back garden in winter. They’re sending dead leaves and wet twigs everywhere.

My books for next term arrived yesterday. I’m quite excited to read W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, but otherwise I’m unimpressed. Beloved I read years and years ago and despised. I hope I was wrong about it, that I was just being a snotty teenager, but as I recall, my general impression was, why does Toni Morrison have to write like this?

I’m digging KCRW this morning. My tea is just the right drinking temperature and I’m bobbing my head around to the Dandy Warhols and Loudon Wainwright, and Michael Franti. Not the most promising way to start a day meant to be rife with accomplishment, but good fun anyway. I’ll check back later.

It’s how I feel. Not by nature inclined to meet people someplace I can’t be heard or seen, I’ve squandered my prime clubbing years by spending my time perched on park benches reading, and participating in other similarly docile activities, like evenings at the pub or long Sunday lunches. We tend to like to talk to our friends. We’re funny like that.

But last night, to celebrate the fact that I was feeling like a human being again, and not a weary monster made of snot and soreness, we went into town to meet up with a good friend who has recently relocated to London (which makes it feel like he’s on another planet, because, well, we’re basically old people in young people’s bodies). He was in town for the night and I thought a glass of red wine would aid the healing process (they say there’s good stuff in red wine, you know, and anyway, I couldn’t stay in the house any longer), so under cover of January darkness, buffeted by a city wind bordering on a gale, we left the house and headed for one of our regular pubs to share a bottle.

The problem with a Saturday night, however, which we so often forget, is that things get crowded, and there’s a sort of madness in the city right now, related I think to it being a New Year, a cold month, the heart of winter. After a charmingly frigid December, after all the Christmas trees have been taken down, Oxford in winter becomes a strange place, fitful, full of waiting. Bled of students, she waits for term-time to begin; bled of warmth, of light, she awaits a new season. You can feel on the wind that there’s an edginess, a nervous and mysterious force, but you can’t pinpoint where it comes from and you can’t escape it just by knowing that it’s there.

So the crowd in our pub was not an ordinary Saturday night crowd. It was someone’s 26th birthday (I know this because he wore a flashing badge that said so) and he had apparently invited all of his hairdresser friends: girls with black-and-white hair swept into contorted shapes, boys with slicked, spiked ‘dos and very tight trousers. The girls were barely dressed–that’s another thing about Saturday nights in the dead of winter here. Hotpants, backless dresses, no tights, high, high, high black heels.

Then another friend called and said she was at the nightclub across the street and wouldn’t we join her? And we said no, because we’re not like that, we object to nightclubs, they’re horrid places, they’re rank and foul and there’s no fun to be had unless you actually want to be dry-humped by a slimy stranger and then possibly go to bed with him (or her) later, which we definitely DON’T.

So it came as quite a surprise to me that, ten minutes later, we were maneuvering our way past about seventeen large bouncers in black jackets and neon armbands, climbing the stairs, ordering a drink. It came as an even greater surprise that we actually enjoyed ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong: it was loud, and dark, and I was beyond overdressed, but the music wasn’t the ordinary drab string of thump-thump-thumpy songs (they played the Proclaimers, and any establishment in which I can belt out, “and I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more…” without being asked to leave gets at least a small nod of approval), and we had a place to sit, and the best bit of it all was the people.

Next to us, a cowgirl-themed hen party (short denim skirts, plaid shirts, and fuzzy pink cowboy hats) was winding down; the women all looked nonplussed, almost businesslike in their consumption of alcohol, their trips to the toilets, their brief interludes of hip gyration. Most of the girls wore bare shoulders, or bare legs, or both, and heels so high you could practically call them stilts, and still, very few of them looked genuinely sexy. But over the course of a night you’re bound to find one or two who exude sex, who actually convince you (if only for an instant) by their walk, the sway of their hips, the way their eyes pass over you, that you’d go to bed with them, if they deemed you worthy.

The manager (a friend of a friend) gave us a bottle of champagne and as I sat sipping I thought I could almost feel, here, the draw of the nightclub. It’s about abandon, I thought, abandon, whether reckless or careful, abandon to the dark, to the movements of each limb, to the curve of the long night. It’s not about other people at all, in its purest form; it’s a kind of implosion. A long time ago someone tried to teach me how to meditate, and I’m not sure he suceeded, but I always remember the things he told me, the things about clearing your mind, about letting thoughts pass through your head, acknowledging them but not opening them–and isn’t that, in a sordid sort of way, what all these people, rapt with dance, are doing?

Drowning out thoughts not by silence but by sound–well, I suffer from more anxiety than some, I know that sometimes it’s not what you think but what you don’t that matters, that sometimes, especially when the madness of winter has crept up on you, it’s abandon and not control at all that you need. And it’s a cheap way to dull the senses, I know that. They’re still slimy, underneath it all–but for a moment I thought I could just about understand places like this.

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.

At Christ Church Meadow the Man calls, and we meet by the walls of Merton college, perambulate around the perimeter of the Christ Church playing fields while schoolboys in red rugby sweaters have a football game on the dark green grass.

Later, when he has gone for a coffee, I make my way around the whole of Christ Church meadow. I see three, maybe four other people on my travels, all of them solitary too, all of them shrouded also in a fog. I put my hood up to stay warm and watch the reflections in the green river, and the ice on a barbed-wire fence, and that soft white dust on the pathway.

The snow is kinder here. In Boston, I remember winters where it seemed fierce as a criminal, and just as evil. Even on a good day, it would coat the streets in heavy layers, become one with the ice and mud; and when it fell, it fell. Here it settles; it’s gentle on the wind, unobtrusive, and sometimes you think maybe you’re imagining it, that your mind has conjured it out of the cold. It’s quiet and pretty; as if, so English has it become, it’s afraid to offend.

The city looks more fragile these days. You can see the breath escaping the cold lips of every human here. We live this season in a city made of breath, and of frost, which fades under rare sunlight and cracks in the cold. The cyclists keep their eyes down, their scarves close to their mouths, but in spite of this there is a strange invigoration to be had in coasting down the High with a wind on your tail and your cheeks burning. Maybe it’s the only way to feel really alive, when everything else has gone so frozen: to move, to work up a sweat, to remind yourself that in spite of the ice, you haven’t frozen. There’s warmth somewhere here.

From the upper reading room of the Bodleian yesterday I watched the sun set over the Radcliffe Camera. It was the first time I had ever set foot in the Bodleian. All I did was read and write, but I think it changed me; I think I’m a different person, in relation to Oxford, than I was before I entered. The feeling I got inside is the feeling I think I’m supposed to get in churches, but rarely do: reverence, a resonance deep down in the heart. A sense of surrender and of abandon, but happy abandon.

But still, the last few days have been seen through a haze of alienation. I think it’s the fog, and the cold; but I blame the weather when conveniant, I know, and maybe partly it’s my own introversion, rearing its ugly head, trying to suck me back into myself, trying to turn my thoughts sour. Bits of things seem wrong, somehow, backwards or upside-down, like maybe the painting I’m in is askew. All the right bits are there, but they’re slanted, at wrong angles, and I haven’t shifted with them. We have hot chocolate at a café on St. Aldates and I feel that I’m in the wrong part of town, somehow, that I’ve left a bit of myself somewhere else; we have a drink in the pub, at a table close by the door that we’ve never sat at before, and I’m restless. There’s just a bit of me on edge, all the time. Even when I come back from the first truly satisfying run I’ve had in months (the kind that makes you literally grin while you’re still on the street, the kind that’s almost like sex, or drink, in the way it exhilerates you), there’s something in the greyness of the day and the midday emptiness of the house that makes my own thoughts seem foreign.

I see people I know everywhere now–in the library, in the street, in the pub–and I think this is good, it means that this place is starting to belong to me in the same way that I, for better or worse, belong to it.

I see people I know everywhere now and, in this cold time, this austere time, I feel we don’t quite connect, that we can’t until the Spring, the thaw; but we watch each other’s breath come in a cloud and are bound anyway by the beauty around us, enfolded in the city and her clever fog.

*Oscar Wilde: “I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one’s life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors.”

The city feels empty. It’s a gloriously sunny day, warm for December, the sort of day you’d like to enjoy by talking a long walk alongside the river and then warming up with a pint inside some cozy pub. But there’s no one here. On the roads, there are few cars and fewer cyclists; in town, the pedestrians seem sparse, and walk not in groups but alone (hurriedly) or in pairs. The Christmas cheer that came over town a few weeks ago, the lighting of trees, the late-night shopping, the wood-smoke smell, all of that is paling, waning.

Everywhere I ever go I have the sense that at Christmas, things start to implode: slowly the cities lose their people, as if no one lives here, as if this isn’t home, as if we all have to run somewhere else because we live here for 99% of the year and Christmas just isn’t Christmas if there isn’t movement involved, somehow. But the truth is that we do live here, this is home, there’s no need to leave.

Still, I like the emptiness now, the still, the quiet. It lets you see the city, and enjoy it, even. There are patterns to Oxford’s population, I suppose because in essence it’s a university town, at the whim of its flitting students. I’ve never before been here in December but I’ll tell you this: it’s a different place altogether.

The Man is making me a belated lunch in response, I suppose, to my pathetic sniffling. So the house smells warm, and good, and we’ll make our Christmas cheer together. It’s only a bit past three but already that refreshing sunlight is waning into dusk, and schoolchildren are trudging down the street, and evening rituals are being put into play. We let late come early, in this season.