Summer Nights

It’s nearly midnight but something about the quality of light puts me in mind of an earlier hour. It doesn’t feel fully dark yet. Perhaps it’s the warmth. My espadrilles make no noise on the walk home. I can see the flashes of people’s televisions, a few late night conversations over bottles of wine. Everyone seems civilised and subdued. Hush, says the moon, and we obey. The pubs are shut.

In the mirror I’m startled to realise that the brightness in my cheeks is actually sunburn; I’ve caught the sun today, somewhere on my walks from town and back, to a friend’s place for dinner where we sat in pools of twilight, candles staining our eyes with bright spots.

I wear a floral print dress. It’s ’40s, almost-frumpy, which fits my mood. My hair is messy. The glamour is in the not-glamour, or so I tell myself. The slightly sunburnt nose; I could get used to the way this weather makes me feel.

Last night was the summer solstice. A year ago I was with my mother in Bath. This year we celebrated, without meaning to, by listening to Stornoway in a hot, cramped upstairs room. They sang:

Oh and it’s a Monday night in June
And I should be sleeping
But it’s so damn warm inside
I’m in the garden dreaming

It was a Monday night in June. I should have been sleeping. It was so warm inside. And after, we lay dreaming with the window open.

Blogging Revisited

Here we are in that irresistible space between Spring and Summer. Everything smells good. The garden is a sea of green; the trees have shed their blossoms all over the table we used to sometimes eat dinner at on a hot night in August. We haven’t maintained the garden very well – the grass is knee high- but then, we haven’t maintained much else very well either. I have this sense that I’m sprinting to catch up with myself. We did the dishes just the other day, but now the cups of stale tea and dirty bowls have piled up again, although neither of us has been in the house much these past few weeks. Even my bicycle, yesterday, couldn’t cope; halfway down the High Street the chain fell off and I walked the rest of the way home with it limping along beside me.

I was in heels and the going was slow, but maybe this is good.

Ways of Saying: A Defence of Writing, Whatever That May Mean

Writers have it pretty hard. I’m not talking about money or status or the sheer hassle of it all – though there’s that too. I’m talking about the way in which they are talked about. To look at the discussion around writers and writing as a writer is to see yourself adrift in a sea of impossibility.

Literature – by which I only mean consumable words, be they in books or articles or blog posts – polarises people, and because it’s consumed so voraciously, so constantly, and so publicly, opinions are expressed vociferously, and often as articulation of fact, not belief.

The question as a writer – and indeed as a consumer of writing – becomes: who do you trust? The critics who say writing should be about writing? The critics who say that it’s all about telling a damn good story? The critics who say it’s all about message and meaning? Or or the ones who say a piece of writing must have all of these components, and more?

Surely it shouldn’t matter – write what you want, says the voice of reason, and let the world be judge only after – but the truth of it is that it does matter. I’ve written about this before. It’s easy, even natural, to feel compelled to take some opinion or advice under consideration. No man is an island, as the saying goes, and what another man feels can be integral to the development of a piece of writing. The difficulty comes in discerning what, after all that, you actually feel about your own work. The storm that results when two opposing opinions converge upon a paragraph of yours obfuscates your own beliefs.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. In a Books blog post on the Guardian website from 13th May, Andrew Gallix examines the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, writing, “The reality of any work of art is its form, and to separate style from substance is to ‘remove the novel from the realm of art’. Art, Robbe-Grillet reminds us, is not just a pretty way of presenting a message: it is the message” (a sentiment which calls to mind Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that “the medium is the message”). In this case, simply by choosing to write, the author is making a statement – and a commitment to that statement.

Gallix ends his piece with these thoughts: “Whenever an author envisages a future book, ‘it is always a way of writing which first of all occupies his mind,’ which leads Robbe-Grillet to state – provocatively – that ‘the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of saying.’ Creative writing classes should always start and end on that note.”

There are several interesting points in these concluding sentences, the most obvious of which is Robbe-Grillet’s “provocative” suggestion that writing itself – not the message or the story – is the true form of art. I’m not sure how provocative this is really – when we read books and poems in school, aren’t we (ideally) taught to look at phrasing, structure, word choice? Literary criticism itself rarely begins with what an author is saying, but rather discovers what the author is saying by first investigating the author’s method – Joyce’s stream of consciousness, for instance, becomes a window into his work.

But it is provocative enough – even radical – in the context of popular culture. Story is often heralded as the be-all-and-end-all of “good” writing (good writing on its own being empty of meaning), or at least publishable writing. So perhaps to be reminded of Robbe-Grillet’s statement that “the genuine writer has nothing to say” is alarming indeed, for it indicates that we have lost our sense of what makes a novel a novel, or even a poem a poem or an essay an essay.

The key is in the second part of the assertion, that, “He [the genuine writer] has only a way of saying.” A way of saying. Superficially, a voice. But contained in that way of saying, that voice, is much more. Meaning, story, urgency. Recently I read a review in the Observer. “There are poets who have nothing to say but a feeling for words,” begins the the author. “There are poets who have something to say but no capacity to say it. And then, rarely, you read poems…that have a tremendous, unshowy intent. The feeling is that they needed to be written.” As one commentator on Gallix’s piece writes, “Style over substance? Affect over story? Count me out.”

For my part, I certainly would not be inclined to argue that we should write simply because we like the sound of our own voices, or that we find a particular phrase too pretty not to share – but to ignore the importance of pretty phrases in the context of a writer’s way of saying would be an enormous shame, because it would be to ignore the medium entirely.

A further interesting point in Gallix’s conclusion comes with the seemingly arbitrary inclusion of “creative writing classes” in his final sentence. In a way it reads as a glib jab at those would-be writers who want to “improve their craft” – a phrase which, by the way, I generally despise, but feel is appropriate here. Certainly the very first commentator on the post, who simply quotes Gallix’s “creative writing classes should always start and end on that note” and adds, “can’t they just end?”, seems to have read it that way. This interpretation seems to be validated by Gallix’s own response to the aforementioned comment. “That would be a more radical solution!”, he writes.

The meaning is appropriately ambiguous – radical in a positive or negative way? a solution to what? – but it does bring up some interesting ideas about the study of writing itself. Classes and courses around creative writing are easy to dismiss as pointless, even harmful. “Can’t they just end?” is a common enough sentiment, often spoken with a tone of intellectual superiority – which may be deserved, I don’t know. The implication here is, again, that writing should come naturally, that it shouldn’t matter what others say about it – write what you want in the way that you want, and it will either be good enough or not good enough.

But this is rarely the case. Good writing – whatever I may mean by that, and however you may interpret it – is rarely a completely isolated enterprise. On top of the fact that we are often heavily influenced by circumstance, context, experience, and other writers, there is also the simple fact that any author will edit and revise his work, often a number of times, and for better or worse, before publication or presentation. Sometimes, amidst all this, advice – an exchange of ideas, a reminder that we are not alone – can be immensely useful, especially before we have learned to completely trust our own instincts. Moreover, practice itself is valuable, and there are those (myself included) for whom a class or a writing group or a degree is a way to grant themselves permission to practice.

I have my own reservations about creative writing classes – and I say this as someone who holds a masters in the subject. But my reservations are different, mostly rooted in experience. It can be dangerous, for instance, to let too many vultures feast upon the carcass of your confidence. Helpful suggestions are not always helpful when they come too frequently, and too frequently unmediated. Furthermore it is not always productive, as an artist or an advocate or whatever else a writer may be, to overthink things. Too much time wallowing, too many conflicting opinions shared liberally, too much consideration, will ultimately only help you produce a work which is ambivalent at best. So I understand reservations about creative writing classes – I live those reservations.

But still such classes are not something to be eradicated. Consider what Gallix has written about Robbe-Grillet: “Every novel, according to Robe-Grillet, is a self-sufficient work of art which cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that is ‘known in advance’. ‘The New Novel,’ as he put it, ‘is not a theory, it is an exploration.’” And if we start to look at writing as an exploration, it starts to make sense that some of us choose to explore our writing in an exploratory context.

What this all really means is simply that, as a writer, you’ll never win. You’ll never be immune to hard-hitting criticism (though why would you want to be?). If you’re too rooted to the past, too ahead of your time, if a sentence is out of place or a particular word not exact enough, you’ll have someone saying so.

The interesting space is the space between these criticisms – and this, I think, is probably why we should write. Between one extreme and the other is a whole world ripe for exploration. It may be that Robbe-Grillet’s “New Novel” has progressed again – “far from representing a rejection of the past,” Gallix writes, “the quest for a new novel was…very much in keeping with the history of a genre which, by definition, must always be renewed”. The new “New Novel” is not necessarily the novel itself but the area around the novel; indeed, the novel has been flattened, expanded, and democratized. Maybe it’s the internet – I can go online and read a blog about a French writer and filmmaker I’d never before heard of and in a matter of hours create and “publish” my own response. We all have a say now; we’re all in a creative writing class, and even those of us who wish such classes could “just end” are participants in it.

So I say again: writers have it pretty hard. They (we?) are standing at the centre of a battleground. It’s noisy and nerve-wracking – but I can’t imagine a more exciting place to be.

Stuff That’s Happened Recently

• As you may have gleaned from this post, I’m leaving the admin job that’s plagued me for the last two years. As with anything, this is not as simple as it sounds. I’ve resented most of the work I do there from the start – photocopying, filing, playing with databases and excel spreadsheets – but the people I work with have made it bearable day after day, and it’s strange to be leaving such a strong community. But I’m moving on to do something more writing and communications oriented, which is what I’m trained to do and what I enjoy, so I can’t say I’m not excited.

• I won a scholarship to the Matador network’s MatadorU, an online travel writing course. I’m very excited about this opportunity to focus on my travel writing, especially as I flail around in the creative vacuum that is the first year post-MA. I’ll be blogging my assignments over at my MatadorU blog if you ever want to take a peek.

• The gorgeous Lady Who Lunches has given me an award!. I met the Lady last month , but I’ve been reading her blog for awhile and always look forward to her new posts. She’s a fellow American expat and writer, and I’m very honored to be included in her list of inspiring female bloggers.

• LV from Anglophile Abroad has featured me in her Major Breakthrough series over at Studentstuff.com. LV is a very talented writer and a good friend, and it was great to be able to help her out with this series, in which she interviews former students about the way their major in college impacted them.

A Voice But No Vote: A Foreigner Watches the UK General Election

Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not complaining. Voting is one area where there really is – and should be – a difference between where you come from and where you are. But this week I have felt acutely the strangeness of my situation, which is that I can influence minute local elections in California (I haven’t been in California for two years) but cannot cast a vote here, where I live now.

It’s good to feel this powerless. I forget not to take things – like democracy, for instance – for granted. I have strong opinions about the general election in the UK. But I’m a child again, watching the adults make the decisions. More than that, I have the sense that I’m witnessing an intimate moment that I shouldn’t see. I’m an American voyeur, peering into the British bedroom, watching the politicians strip their clothes off, bare their fists. Watching the people do the same.

This is not the same thing has having no say. I still have a voice. I simply don’t have the right to tick a box. That box makes a world of difference to me, but the freedoms I enjoy would make a world of difference to much of the rest of the world. I know that. I also know that I made the choice to live here.

And I believe this is just, that my own powerlessness is deserved. But I would be lying if I told you that on Thursday, I didn’t feel just the tiniest bit of resentment. In the morning, reading other people’s accounts of stepping into voting booths, my eyes welled up. I always get a bit like that about elections, but this time there was something else. This was not pure love for the democratic system, or a thrill at seeing it in action. There was a sadness, too. Voting brings people together. There’s a whole community out there this week – a whole country – that I’m not a part of and never can be.

There’s something else, too. There’s anger, I think. This is more irrational. But it has to do with the sense that it had just got started. They didn’t left enough time for us to process everything, let alone decide (I say “we” but I mean “them” – and that’s at the heart of it, I hate that there’s a “them” again, just when I was getting used to it being “us”). This election only really kicked off a few weeks ago; where I’m from elections last years. And that can be exhausting, but it’s what I’m used to.

Here, they’re analysts. I’ve watched my friends and my colleagues suddenly become mathematicians, statisticians, logic-minded advocates. They understand marginal seats and tactical voting but there’s not that same idealistic sense of individual power.

What I keep thinking, really, is this: that I may not have a vote but I still have a voice, and how could I have used it? Why didn’t I use it? My own ignorance left me feeling bound and gagged for too long and now suddenly here we are, and the time for action has passed.

I remember going to a rally for a popular gubernatorial candidate in Boston once. A friend of mine, another politics student, met me outside the Hynes Convention Center and we smiled our way past the security and up into the balcony, where we watched the candidate make a rousing speech. It was raining confetti. Oh, it was a spectacle. It was empty. The fact that this man could rally such an enthusiastic crowd says nothing about his qualifications to lead a state. But it felt good, and now I know why: it felt good because I was a part of it. Because the following week I could go out and make my decision, and have that mean something.

So my challenge now is to learn how to make my voice feel more like a vote; to learn how to translate opinion into action in new ways. And maybe, too, I should consider what I said at the start of this post – that this is one area in which it really does matter where you come from, where you’re registered. That sounds so clinical – to say that I’m registered to vote in California and therefore that’s where I should be voting – but maybe it’s only because I’ve forgotten, over the last few years, how important it is to feel involved.

Shared Geographies

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time – T.S. Eliot

I want to say that I don’t believe in fate. Coincidence, maybe. Yes, I’ll accept coincidence–this happened and so did this, what a coincidence. But then in a certain light, from a certain angle, things start to look ridiculous and too improbable. There’s that whole funny thing about me meeting a man–the man–my first day in Oxford, and then it gets even funnier when you learn that before me there was another American girl called Miranda with the same initials who studied the same things in college and it’s almost as if we were literally meant to be and maybe he’d got the wrong one the first time round–but really, who believes that? I don’t believe that. I’d like to, but actually what I believe is that we happened one night to meet in a pub and we got along. And later it turned out that he happened to once have had a girlfriend who shared my name and initials and nationality. Maybe it says a lot about him—that he’s consistent, that he has a type–but more likely that’s just the way things are.

But then this: this street. This street that I’ve been working on for more than two years. In my life, my twenty-something life, that’s a lot. I’ve held this job longer than I’ve ever held another and now I’m leaving it. It was not an arbitrary appointment, either–no more than anything else is arbitrary. Because it’s where he went to school (and also where she–the other Miranda–went to school). Because he had good things to say about it, I applied for a job there. You can’t even say I applied for a job there. More like: I wrote a desperate email and they responded saying yes, what a coincidence, we do have an opening, would you be available for an interview next week?

And that street. What a funny street. Tucked away in North Oxford where I would never ordinarily go. Except that I did go there. My first week in Oxford, three years ago, long before I was hired. Because just around the corner is where my tutor’s house was. And we would sit and drink tea and discuss the political history of the situation in Iraq.

And then it turns out that Pico Iyer went to school just down the road. The Dragon School. Once I had to go there to deliver some errant post. Pico Iyer has been one of my favourite writers for a long time and I’ve always felt this stupid sense of connection–because he lived in Santa Barbara, where I’m from, because he was schooled in Oxford, where I love–and then to think that he walked down this street where I have spent five days a week for more than 728 days. Well, that’s funny enough.

Then tonight. Arbitrarily, because if you remember this is all arbitrary–I look up the name of an author I once wrote an email to. I’d loved a book of his and I had a question–who knows what it was, I was in high school–and he wrote back within hours and I thought it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. I remembered his name tonight, for no good reason at all. It popped into my head as I watched an episode of Dr. Who so I typed it into my computer and pressed “search”. And you know what? Paul Watkins went to the Dragon School too.

How do I express the strangeness of this? I can’t tell him–can’t say, retrospectively, I’m writing to you and in ten years I will share a very specific geography with you . I don’t write it to him now, because the time has passed for that sort of thing. I wouldn’t write to him now, I couldn’t, because I am an author too, and the letter would be tainted by that–no longer an innocent high school girl seeking advice and giving praise, but a bloodsucking competitor trying to network. And yet–

And yet–

And yet here we are. We share a street. We have that street in common. You know who else lives there? Roger Bannister. Who was the first man ever to run a sub-four-minute-mile. 3′ 59.4″. And my first year in high school that was the name of my favourite album–Four Minute Mile by the Get Up Kids, who, if I listen to them now, sound like noise and nothing else and I feel very little except for some obligatory and very vague nostalgia. I used to listen to that noise coming through headphones every night. Four minute mile and Roger Bannister, and I played with the idea of being a track star myself and I listened to Belle and Sebastian and thought idly, though I never imagined it would ever actually happen, that when I was free of the shackles of high school I would move to Britain and set up a life there which was a million miles away from where I knew, and it would be good–

–And it is good, and feels spontaneous. But then if you really look, everything points to it. Everything points to that one damn road–the road where I’ve spent hours making photocopies, constructing files, answering phones–I share a knowledge of that road with other people–and maybe Four Minute Mile wasn’t so much about the noise but about something else.

But then I don’t believe in all that, do I? Do I? On nights like this I’m tempted to say yes. Yes I do.

And that’s the magic of it–that you never know. All the signs point to this–whatever this is. This moment in East Oxford with the ever-evolving draft of my first book in a special folder on my desktop and the knowledge of that road with the Dragon School at the end, and the man who sleeps beside me every night with his heavy breath and his soft beard. But the signs could point anywhere if I wanted them to. It’s like that film Pi where you start to see 3.14 everywhere, and the more you think about it the more it appears in obscure places. It takes over your everyday life.

And here is everyday life. Early mornings, muesli drenched in organic milk from the farmer’s market. Cups of tea and pints of cheap cider. Kisses across the table. A street, another street, another, all the way to and from work. A bicycle locked up in various places all across the city. Everything is arbitrary. You love every minute. Things shift at the back of your mind–maybe this was meant to happen, maybe this just happened, but definitely it doesn’t matter which. You curl up with the window open and the duvet up against your chin and a warm body beside you. Never mind all that. This is now.

Islands & Volcanoes

I dream I’m on the island again. I dream we never left. There’s Swahili coffee and still heat in the morning; wind and dust and the stickiness of salt in your hair in the afternoon. Over and over again. It was months ago that we left this place but it has wormed its way into my deepest consciousness. It’s not a love for the place, or a haunting, or a yearning–just that something about the clarity or perhaps the foreignness of the air on an island stays with you for a long time, maybe forever.

I grew up in a country that has very little sense of what it’s like to be on an island. The width of an entire continent is our playground, and the places we visit on holiday–Catalina, maybe, Martha’s Vineyard–are places detached from the mainland only in geographical terms.

So in my mind there’s a sort of lore about islands. Prospero is there always, throwing spells, glowering, remembering, conjuring. When I went to Greece I had been recently captivated by John Fowles, which maybe is why I was so ready to believe in a kind of magic. We hopped from one sunny, rocky, enchanted isle to another. The sky and the sea were so clear it was as if you could see right through the whole earth, the entire universe. The daytime heat and the incessant buzz of the cicadas at noon made the nights balmy, gentle by comparison (the beer helped too, I’m sure). Love became, like everything else, something transient–you could fall madly in love with anything or anybody without regard for consequence or reason, and the next morning the feelings might be erased. The only constant was a heady sort of beauty, which might, I suspect, be dangerous for any length of time–like being exposed to a poison–but we were only tourists, so we were fine. We went back to California. The madness faded, though the magic stayed under my skin for some time.

But now there is the volcano. I live on an island, but I had forgotten this until now. And suddenly, after one morning, I remember. We are floating in an ocean, isolated, confined. Everyone is conscious again of what technology had allowed us to ignore: our geography. The vastness of the earth is perceptible again.

Lists

My life seems at the moment to be made up entirely of lists. To-do lists mostly but other kinds, too–grocery lists, mental lists, lists of people and places and times. So here’s a list of things-that-have-happened-recently, in no particular order.

1. My parents are visiting from California. We talk of the ranch and the weather. We go for walks, have pub lunches, eat pizza and watch television. When people visit me here, but particularly people I’m close to, I start to feel that time expands to include them. I cannot imagine what it is like living here without my family close by, though this is what I do, most of the time; their arrival, only a week and a half ago, seems like something very faint in the far reaches of an old woman’s memory (I met them on my bicycle and we ate Indian food, that day).

2. I had the pleasure of meeting the lovely Lady Who Lunches–and her charming boyfriend Jock–in real life. We had pints and burgers and talked about life in a foreign country. I forget, you know, that this life–my life is a life in a foreign country. The foreignness has faded and when you wake up and go to work and later you walk to the shop and wave hello at a few familiar faces and you pay your bills and you go for a run and have a shower it’s so easy to imagine that it has always been this way. Then every so often the sun glitters in a funny way and you remember that you’re not from here. And so it was comforting to have real contact with someone who had until then existed purely online; even more comforting to remember that my particular situation is not entirely unique. Read her write-up of the evening here.

3. I’m working a lot. This is good in one sense–in more than one sense–but bad in the sense that, in my enthusiasm for all these new tasks, I’ve neglected my book (and my blog).

4. A volcano erupted.

5. I started, as I always do this time of year, to suffer from hay fever, and now spend several minutes every morning sneezing.

6. I graduated. At least, I donned an enormous gown and hood and walked down an aisle and shook someone’s hand, and then stood in the sun playing with the billowing sleeves while people hugged each other and took elaborately staged photographs. I felt lucky; my parents were there, the Man was there. Privately we laughed at the whole affair, which was cheap and stuffy and full of obscure members of the Oxford Brookes faculty wearing ermine cloaks and court-jester-inspired hats, but I can’t pretend that there wasn’t a really thrilling moment when, for the first time, I caught a glimpse of myself in academic dress.

7. The sun has come out and the trees have blossomed and the garden is suddenly overgrown. I even wore a skirt with no tights, once.

Saturday, Late Morning, Springtime

The way people get about the weather here! There is so much giddiness. On the way home from town I stop to try on a pair of ball dresses. Why? I have never had occasion to wear a ball dress in the past; but there they are, swinging on a breeze, £10 each. I try a gold one on first. It looks good. I have never worn a long gown like this before. It fits me perfectly except around the bust where it is too tight and will not zip all the way. The women in the shop don’t know quite what to say. I could have it altered, they suggest, except that will be expensive. It’s such a shame because other than that it looks so good. The other dress is far too big. I look like a mermaid swimming in a turquoise ocean and I feel like Goldilocks. So I don’t buy a ball gown after all.

A Good Night for Walking Home

It’s a good night for walking home. The night that follows the first really truly warm day of the season: that’s always a good night for walking home.

In the streets around Summertown, everything is hushed and the lights are out in the houses, or maybe everybody has just drawn their curtains shut, and there are fallen blossoms under my boots. Even the cars as they slide down the road seem to be saying, shhhh. Be reverent, be gentle.

The warmth is fading a little but when the sun was out it got trapped under my coat, so maybe it’s stored up, and my limbs feel different.

On Broad Street the big issue seller suggests that if he can’t have my spare change, maybe he can have the yellow flower pinned to my coat. And why can’t he have my spare change, after all, I think? Because 20p is too little and 20 pounds too much, and that’s all I have in my pocket, and besides, yesterday I tipped a man in the bike shop £2 just for pumping my tires.

(In retrospect that seems backwards, but then, maybe not. I don’t want to feel guilty about my generosities. They’re too tiny as it is.)

And also, once I actually bought a Big Issue. I don’t know what came over me. I was exiting a shop and it was a bright sunny morning and I thought, well, okay, I guess you’ve got to do it eventually. But then I got to the office and couldn’t figure out what I should actually do with the magazine itself. Not read it, surely–it’s a symbol, not a consumable, a receipt, a badge. But I couldn’t throw it away either. That would be a true waste. So in the end I tucked it behind the scanner on my desk and then found it eight months later and went through the same process of thought before deciding that, actually, I could bin it, so I did, but not before I offered it to everyone else in the office. They politely declined and I think for half a moment as I dropped it in the recycling I felt a little fickle, as if I’d committed myself to this thing and now I was breaking my commitment. Why do we care about objects so suddenly and irrationally?

Three figures pass under the Bridge of Sighs. They look like shadows. Sitting outside the entrance to Hertford College is a young man in a red t-shirt crouched on the ground, flipping through a magazine, which is barely illuminated by the lamplight. A girl takes a photo of her friend; I hear her say, “that’s almost perfect, you know,” but there are so many things about which she could be talking about.

Speaking of almost perfect, I don’t suppose you could ever grow tired of Queen’s Lane. There’s that view of the back of All Souls and the windows of St. Edmund’s Hall and sometimes some music coming from somewhere (once, late at night as the Man and I were walking home, it was real proper jazz-age jazz played on a piano and I probably danced, a little bit).

On the High Street, the candy shop looks funny all asleep. You can’t see the colours of the candy and it’s like Willy Wonka dreamed in black and white.

In the end it’s a funny relief to be on the Cowley Road. Those North Oxford streets–they’re so beautiful, so big. It smelled heavenly up there, all pink and white blossoms. It was black and deserted and it would be easy to imagine yourself the only inhabitant of the entire area.

But here we have something else entirely. Chefs standing outside having their cigarette breaks. Girls in heels, shorts, and leather jackets (not even as sexy as it sounds, not even close). An ambulance, parked, lights flashing, no driver, outside a darkened house. An ice cream shop, a burger joint, a cinema, a chinese restaurant. A woman walking her dog with an open bottle of cider pressed to her lips. It all smells a bit greasy. I like it.

On James Street. Next to the pub where an open mic night is going on. I pause and peer inside just to make sure I know someone inside; I do; that’s good, I think. I won’t go in but at least I still belong. As I’m peering someone outside, smoking, recognizes me and we exchange a few words. Then I keep going, past the Conservative Club, out of which drips balding blokes and strange music.

Then our street. Always a little cramped, this street. Sometimes I can’t walk my bike on the pavement at all–how very unlike those wide North Oxford boulevards! And there, on the corner, is the house with the tall fence. Last summer I was thought the man who lived there was under house arrest because he used to stand next to that fence, eating his dinner or draping his arms over it and asking passers-by for a cigarette. Now I can’t imagine why I was so convinced of that. Harmless little house, harmless little man.

Our house, when I get there, smells of laundry. The curtains have not been drawn. The Man will come home from football soon. It’s one of those nights when I feel like it’s been an odyssey just to get from one end of the city to the other.