More mince pies than you can shake a stick at. If you liked them before Christmas, you sure as hell won’t want to see another one after, and if you didn’t like them before Christmas, well…I don’t envy you. A bout of “unseasonably cold” weather (you didn’t see this coming? after how many centuries? really?). Lots (and lots and lots) of subsequent talk about how cold it is. Very beautiful snowflakes. Weekend girls with bare legs, pretending that it isn’t unseasonably cold out. Lots of sniffles and coughs. Frost making art deco patterns on the cars at night. Stoic cyclists. Bare branches. A flurry over hot alcoholic drinks before Christmas (mulled cider, mulled wine…) followed by a general laziness about them after (who can be bothered?). Potatoes for dinner, every night. Root vegetable feasts and homemade soups. Log fires. Coal fires. The smell of log fires and coal fires on the streets. Scarves. Girls in very cool boots. Pubs, but not pub gardens. A brief glorification of the English summer (“oh, I can’t wait for June…”) followed by a berating of the English summer (“ugh, it’ll just rain the whole time anyway). A general sense of polite but vaguely uncomfortable waiting.

❧

There’s this song by The Be Good Tanyas called “Light Enough to Travel” that I’ve always liked. It’s a good song anyhow but I find these lyrics especially pertinent to today’s post:

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.

❧

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.

❧

Instead of going home after work, like I say I will, I park my bicycle on The Plain and cross over Magdalen bridge under a dusting of the tiniest snowflakes I have every seen. I detour through the Botanical Gardens, hushed now, and still, a flowerless expanse full of only of sleeping things, frost-bitten leaves and naked trees.

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.”

❧

Back to work today. I can’t say I feel quite human yet, but I’m getting there.

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.

❧