My 2008 in Quick Review

We started off the year with Fidel Castro's cigars at the top of a hill overlooking the Pacific, near the Western Gate, windy. I got my university diploma; it was very large. Then it was back to England for an austere few months of late winter cold-ness. I hunted for a job. I got a job. I re-discovered how little I like office work. The Man did research for a BBC 4 radio show, and became a temporary commutor to London. I started cycling everywhere; first shakily, winding my way round the neighborhood for practice. I went to my very first hen-night; I had a fairly significant birthday; my parents came to visit us in Oxford; the Man turned another year older. We tried to handle the cruel transition from winter cold to tempting spring almost-warmth with as much grace as possible, but I still underdressed a lot. In a green silk dress and a kilt, we attended the wedding of two friends deep in love. We celebrated our first year together. I decided once and for all to be a writer, and to go back to school. As summer settled over the city we headed back to California, where we lounged our way through a heat wave, tasted lots of wine, did our best impression of surfers, and got a nice tan. I also applied for a student visa, drove to Burbank and back in one day to ensure that it was received in good time, and, thankfully, was granted one.

Back in England, it was midsummer and beautiful. I hung the washing outside and wore sleeveless dresses, and visited the botanical gardens, and the parks and meadows, often. I went for long walks. I was out of work until September, so I became very, very, very poor. I had to admit that I've been foolish with money in the past, and take out a loan for school. We visited Cambridge, and Brighton, and at the end of August, with the barest hint of autumn in the air, we went to Paris, where we watched people unabashedly for several days straight. I started work again. I started school again. The city revealed itself to be beautiful in autumn, too. The days got colder, and shorter. We looked after a veritable menagerie in the countryside, feeding pigs and staying warm by a log fire. We celebrated the election of Barack Obama and I went to my first bonfire night. Several friends moved away, seeking fortune in London. Time began to seem like a blur, like something running towards Christmas full-pelt.

And I didn't go back to California for Christmas. For the first time ever. We went to carol services and ate mince pies and mulled wine; we bought presents for people and tried to hide what we'd got for each other. We went a few miles out of town for a week, and had Christmas with the Man's family, and unwrapped gifts and ate lots and lots of turkey, and slept in, and stayed warm, and read books, and when we came back, though we'd had a very nice time, we were also happy to be home again.

There are things I've misesd, I'm sure. But for now, we're off to the Isis for a drink and then to dinner with friends to celebrate the new year.

Best to all, and hope you enjoy this last evening in 2008...

My First Christmas Abroad

I think I've been dropped into the middle of a circus. We're making turkey pie. Without a bottom, because it's hard to make a pie "without a soggy bottom, and we don't want soggy bottoms."

This is after my very first English Christmas. We went to church in the morning, which is not something I regularly (or, frankly, ever) do (the Man opted to stay at home and help cook the Christmas lunch). The church was a beautiful English village church, wood-beams, stone walls, but inside, it had been carpeted, which made it feel too soft and comfortable; too much like the modern establishments of my own youth.

A pair of boys handed us a bright leaflet with carols to sing. Scattered amongst the traditional songs were photographs of smiling children from disadvantaged backgrounds in the Middle East. The children were all called things Mohammad or Mehmet or Moshe and in spite of having families from Islamic or Jewish backgrounds every single one was holding a cross, or decorating a Christmas tree, or pointing at a picture-book bible.

The other leaflet, a green folded paper, let us know when we were meant to say things like, "Glory be to God," and, "Jesus is the truth, allelulia!" Midway through the service a woman stood up to distribute gifts to a few children in the audience, each time asking the child, "and what have you done for me today?" and each time receiving the rueful mumbled response: "Nothing."

And she would say back, "Nothing, exactly. You've done nothing for me, but I'm giving you this gift anyway. So this is a token of my love." Like most good religious messages, it turned out to be a metaphor: God loves us, the woman was saying, even though we've done nothing to deserve it.

"Oh yeah," said the Man when I returned home, feeling I'd been suitably guilted for the day. "That's standard C of E. That's not really considered religious."
"Have we really done nothing to deserve God's love?" I said, forgetting, in my religiously-coloured guilt, that I'm not even sure what I believe about God. "And how on earth is that not religious?"

As it turns out the English have just as curious a relationship with religion as the Americans. As far as I can tell, the Church of England is not so much a Church-with-a-capital-c as an establishment with some tenuous and primarily historical links to some tenuous and primarily historical religious beliefs. But it's pervasive. If you go to a church wedding in England every single member of the audience will know not only the words to all the hymns but, more impressively, will know when to stretch certain words that don't look like they should be stretched, or when to take a very long pause that isn't written into the music, or when to forgo breath because everything needs to be squeezed into one beat. They all know this because regardless of whether their education was public or private, they grew up singing these songs in school.

You couldn't, on the other hand, logically sing a song with the words,

Remember, Christ, our Saviour
Was born on Christmas day
To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray

in any American public school and not risk an uprising of mothers quoting the constitution. We have that famous so-called separation between church and state, you see; but actually, the English are the ones with the real separation. God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman (or any other carol) isn't seen, as the Man so aptly pointed out, as religious--just as traditional. If half the audience on Christmas morning had stood up and pronounced themselves Jews, or Athiests, I don't think anyone would have blinked--or thought it odd that they were sitting in on a Christian ceremony.

Our relationship with religion in the states, however, is just as bizarre. We claim to have severed the tie between religion and governance, but elect our leaders based on their religious ideals and affiliations (any political pundit will tell you that if you want to be president, you need to seem to have a good Christian family, regardless of how religious you are). We inspire an actual fear in our children that saying the words "Christ our saviour" means that we believe in something that might be objectionable to someone else, but one of our nation's most impressive artistic legacies, gospel singing, is a form of worship. What we forget, I suppose, is that we founded our country based on having the freedom to worship any way we wish, not on creating a secular society.

***

But regardless of the religiosity, or secularism, of English society, this was Christmas as I have never seen it before. For the first time ever, I set out snacks for Santa before going to bed (a glass of port, a glass of milk, two mince pies, two carrots--"why the milk?" I wanted to know; "in case Santa wants a choice," the Man informed me). The next day at breakfast we opened our stockings; after church we spent hours (no, I am not exaggerating) opening gifts, adhering to strict rituals of present-distribution. We commented on missing the Queen's speech. We took a very lenghty nap after a very heavy lunch. We played cards and sipped gin and tonics. We ate crackers and fruit and cheese for supper. We went for a starlit walk, our noses numb from cold.

Today I sit on the sofa in the lounge, South Pacific on the TV in the background. I hear a woman singing: "And they say I'm naive to believe anything from a person in pants..."

And because we are adults, but still not very adult, the Man and I giggle.

So yes, I missed my family this Christmas, and even the incongruous California warmth (when I was a child it angered me that Christmas came every year so hot and sunny); but here we are, and we're very, very happy, and we're together, which, as I told the Man when he suggested that Christmas was ruined because he had a cold (only a man would say that) is the most important thing of all.

"Here," the Man has just said to me. "Taste the beer-and-cheese sauce I've just made," and waved a spoon at me. I think it's time for me to rejoin the circus.

Look What I Did!

For those of you interested in reading me warbling on about living in the UK, check out my expat interview...

The City at Christmas

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.

More Winter Madness

Still suffering from A Cold. Here's what I have done today:

• Slept well past noon;
  
• Cycled into town to deliver clean trousers to The Man, who got his muddy this morning whilst chasing a dog (who was chasing a chicken) through a country garden;
• Cycled home and collapsed on the sofa feeling sorry for myself;
• Heated up some canned soup for lunch;
• Watched many episodes of this seasons' Spooks even though I've already seen them because a) I can't be bothered to find something new on television that actually interests me and because b) as the Guardian's "Chart of Lust" rightly pointed out recently, women everywhere are developing an obsession with Richard Armitage, and his nose, and the absurdly cool spy he plays. I've got a cold and midwinter angst; I'm allowed a small celebrity crush. Deal with it.
• Realized that the show called MI5 that I used to watch back in the days when my parents had a TV and I was trying to avoid my AP calculus homework is, in fact, simply Spooks re-named for an American audience;
  
• Had a long bath whilst listening to Classic FM's Smooth Classics at 6; "your relaxation station." Considered being embarrassed by this; thought better of it;
• Made something that resembled dinner out of pasta, half an onion, a huge clove of garlic, a carrot, and some cheese. Neglected to clear anything up after;
• Wondered if all this time alone in the house is making me a little crazy;
• Listened to the same Goo Goo Dolls song about twelve times in a row whilst perusing www.dooce.com
• Decided that I am definitely going a little crazy.

Note the absence of having got any work done. Or, for that matter, any Christmas shopping. I keep thinking that I'll start feeling really Christmas-y soon and start looking forward to my favourite holiday with fresh zeal, but for some reason every time I think about it all that happens is that I get unnaturally exited for the fact that I'll have a whole week off work. I want to be able to sleep in with my love and wake up and have bacon and eggs, and mungle around the house with neither of us having to go to work, or get work done; it's the prospect of that which excites me.

The Tyranny of Winter

I have another cold; it's bleak midwinter outside, all grey and frost and bare, spindly-limbed trees. It's Christmas, almost, but it doesn't feel it: I have the sense of running at full speed towards something that I can't see, that's just, perhaps, over-that-hill-there. We were meant to babysit tonight but because I'm feeling so rotten I'm staying home to soak in the bath and drink cup after cup of tea; somehow the prospect of spending the evening without The Man seems dark to me, even though I know I have a lot of work I need to get down to doing, anyway; even though I'm not great company at the moment anyway. I think this is what they call man-flu, maybe--but I'm not officially admitting to it, just throwing it out into the ether as a suggestion.

But in my avoidance of work, which today so far has taken the form of perusing The Guardian's Books section (a far more highbrow form of avoidance than usual, to be honest), I came across this, which amuses me to consider. But my problem is not so much all the books I've bought but refuse, for some reason or other, to read, but all the books I've bought and would really really like to read but haven't yet because other books keep getting in the way.

Take George Steiner's My Unwritten Books: I've been on page three for nearly six months now, because I keep reading other things. Or Oil! by Upton Sinclair, Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, The File on H by Ismail Kadare, all of which are lingering near my pile of "books I'm currently reading," as if they, too, want to be included; all of which I've dipped tentatively into at some point and then withdrawn so that, in their stead, I've finished Orlando, The Night Climbers, various novels by Colin Dexter, and an über-academic text on Walter Benjamin's writings on The City (as a literary idea, so therefore, in my mind, it deserves unecessary capitals).

Then again, maybe I'm just in denial. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me that actually, I don't really want to read these books, in spite of the fact that I think I do. Or maybe I should just buckle down, concentrate on one thing for longer than fifteen minutes without finding something else more interesting, and actually read them.

But somehow, I think none of this is going to stop me from buying oodles of books this holiday season.

Oh! You Pretty Things...

It was a dizzy trip to London (as they all are, maybe); a disjointed evening, so that by the time we were in bed I felt like there had been several days between leaving and returning.

First we are late; then a few drinks at someone else's expense. We move on to a party at the top of Centrepoint, only we are too late for the party and all that is left is the slop from spilled cocktails and a gathering of ultrahip young things, dancing as only the ultrahip can: without passion, without grace, without movement, almost. They are so cool, these young things, that I think they could kill us with their cool, if only they weren't too cool to be bothered. They are so cool that they actually make me feel old, and frumpy. They are so cool, and so hip, that they do not even see us. We move through them and they part in beat to the techno music. There is so much cool in the air we can scarcely breath; we do not linger for a drink. We stand at the edge and look out over London.

The one good thing about this party is the view: and the city lit up, so that the stars in the sky seem to be below us, not above. Later we think maybe this view makes the entire misguided trip worth it. From up here it looks like the city runs all the way to the horizon and beyond. London loses its London-ness; it is a City, a gem of human endeavor. We are the only still things here.

Then we are walking on the street again. Towards a dingy underground private member's club. It's like descending into a speakeasy. On the stairs we are harassed by staff until it becomes clear that we are, in some way, affiliated with a member; then they are lovely and let us pass. Behind me, a lone drunk, tie askew, whispers, "Dunno what all the fuss is about. It's just a bloody pub down there." As we pass into the bar, he begs to be let in.

The light inside is green. There is something of the tikki-bar about the place, and film posters on the wall, and lots of young actor-types. We are no longer in the realm of the ultrahip but now in the realm of the ultracamp. In the back, behind thick tapestry curtains, several anterooms stand like invitations to the illicit. The figures on the wall are often pornographic, but ironically so: large phallic flowers erect in a garden, silhouettes of busty Victorian ladies.

Back on the street. The half-light of late London. We buy chips and a pita wrap from a kebab shop and get on the wrong bus, from which we embark at the wrong stop. We stand in the rain in a posh (and therefore empty) square waiting for another bus; it is nearly December now, and cold, and we huddle together and collectively wish that we had not left the sanctuary of our own small city, where just a few hours ago (or was it days?) we were having a drink with a friend at an uncrowded pub, were just a few minutes walk from our house, our warm, quiet house.

We get off at the right stop. We still have miles to walk, it feels. We skirt Victoria station, trying to find our way. I bump shoulders accidentally with a woman walking very quickly; she turns back, snaps something at me. I snap something back. I do not often feel aggressive, particularly for such a transient reason, but suddenly I think I might feel violent if i don't move on quickly.

We sleep on the way home. It is nearly five by the time we alight at St. Clements. As always, a hush over the streets; the drunks at home or asleep by now, the workers still yawning their way awake on the fringes of the city. As always, I need a pee, and we are just far enough from home, and it is just bitterly cold enough, that the walk seems impossible. But of course it isn't; that's just the night speaking, still.

At home we strip and climb under the duvet. I had been bitter about London before, at the bus stop; I had said, "Who was it who said that you could never be bored in London, or else you were bored with life? He was absolutely right; you can't be bored in London. You also can't be fucking happy." Now I start to soften, as if the warmth from the house has smoothed my edges. I murmur that it wouldn't be so bad if only we had somewhere to stay the night; or that it's only the cold, and the rain. I say that maybe next time we'll do it better; and weren't all those hip young people funny? And he says how beautiful the city looked from that one clear point, how absolutely beautiful.

Notes

Notes from the Botanic Gardens, November 9 2008

This is the one place in Oxford where I always feel that I am on the inside, looking out.

The river is green, the trees are yellow.

What is it about a garden? All around me are signs of Autumnal decay--a wet and barren landscape, the scratching of leaves against a cold ground. And yet I think that, in the presence of things which have grown, will grow, we can suddenly believe that we, too, grow.----There in the murky pool we see peace, or hope, or both; our thoughts become un-crowded, we start to believe in the permanence of the trees and the transience of all else. We have a clouded sense of happiness--not perfect, or impure, but unusually tangible.


(I go for a run today. The sky is heavy, the grass has turned a deeper shade of emerald, and the yellow leaves have all fallen from the tree outside the study window. Every season is the most beautiful season, here.)

Bonfires & Remembrance

My first bonfire night on Wednesday. We walked down the river to the Isis. There was no Guy but there was a bonfire made of old boats, and mulled cider with bits of apple in it, and sparklers, and homemade lentil and chestnut soup served in paper cups. There were fireworks splattering the sky, and the Man and I agreed that our favorite part of the fire was not the flames but the sparks that were drawn up, like red stars fading fast. We wrote our names in the air with the sparklers and when the bonfire had died down and all the men were trying to revive it, I went to the edge of the river. The night was wet and windless, and the water itself stood black and still, so that the reflection of the trees looked almost more real--starker certainly--than the trees themselves. Jerome's three men (and a dog) may not have paddled down the river in November, but for a moment I could feel them sleeping on the shore here. Then we all went inside again, to warm our hands and lean against the bar.

The fireworks have been going ever since. On my walk home tonight I see them blazing above my street; sitting here in the house, I hear them going off with imperfect but inevitable regularity.

We still battle this cold; blowing our noses, overcome with lethargy and a need for fruit. This morning I woke up and suddenly wanted to make myself toast with honey and bananas, which was something I ate a lot in my first year of university; first I stilled myself because I am not like I was then, but then I thought: we do not have to erase every memory just because it is not the way we are now, and I cut up the banana into slices and placed them on my toast. But we had no honey after all.

***

In the waiting room at the doctor's the other night, a white-haired woman with a cane broke the English code of silence amongst strangers despite the open book on my knees. First she said she wasn't here for herself.

"I'm here for a friend," she said. "She's got dementia. She can't take care of herself. I've known her oh--eighty, seventy--sixty years, if not seventy. We were very close. It's horrible to see her like this. I still care for her but her family won't take any responsibility. It's all up to me. I am feeling resentful today. Today is my day, for me. I'm having to miss my afternoon rest which I'm all but ordered to take. I could have sat at home and read a book."

She looked at me. "I suppose you're too young to have to deal with this. You're of--another generation."

I said I was, yes, but that still, I knew people who were struggling with the same thing. She nodded.
"It's everywhere, isn't it."
"Horrible," I agreed. Then she asked what I was doing here.
"Studying?"
"I'm doing a masters," I told her. "At Oxford Brookes."
"I've got two grandsons here at Oxford, and another at Oxford Brookes. And my daughters went here, and I was at Oxford as well, you know. And my mother was here! She was here before the War, the First War. She left in 1912 and do you know when she was given a degree?"
I smiled; I did know the answer to this one. "Not for quite some time after, I would imagine," I said.
"Not until 1928," she said. "Can you believe that?"

Then she was silent for awhile, and I tried to read about the origins of human creativity but my head felt full and my nose dripped. I coughed into the turtleneck of my jumper.

"My uncle was in the first war," she said abruptly. "He lied about his age to join up, in 1917? Or 1918. But he died. It always seemed to me that they didn't know what they were fighting for, then. In the other war at least they had Hitler to rally against, but that first war, it had no--direction."
"Yes," I said.
"It's been coming up a lot recently," she said, touching the red poppy pinned to her breast. "All that generation is gone."
"Yes," I agreed.
"And my husband--before we were married. He was in the second war. He joined the Air Force and was there in the Battle of Britain. And it's strange--I remember that summer. I was at Oxford, you know. And we were throwing our mattresses out of the windows so we could sleep outside, it was that hot--and the men were coming across from Dunkirk. The College authorities must have been worried about us, you know, but they let us do it, they let us put our mattresses outside because they knew what we were going through."

Then the doctor called her in.

And I thought: to a shell-shocked soldier the blasts of fireworks or the cracking of the bonfire might mean something very different than it means to the rest of us.

Discipline and Punish, Or, Foot Massages for All!

I think this is brilliant. But I have two questions:

1. What happens if a child has extremely ticklish feet?
2. Could this new method of discipline actually lead to an ironic rise in bad behavior? (Cheaper than the local day spa, anyway)
   

Whatever Happened to that Other Crisis?

I'm amused (and maybe even a little incensed) by the recent spate of columns, features, and everything in between about how to deal in the current economic crisis. Timely they may be, and maybe even necessary; but they are also, in large part, overwrought and insincere.

Overwrought: "If, for the fashion-forward, instead of Prada and Primark it's now all about feel-good car-boot sales, charity shops, free-cycling and frock exchanges, for the rest of us it is an hour in Tesco fossicking for the two-for-ones and the nearly-past-their-sell-by reductions, putting £20 worth of petrol in the car instead of filling the tank...growing herbs on the windowsill, making lots of shepherd's pies...and saying 'no!' (possibly for the very first time) to the kids when they demand stuff at the checkout...so not only is it exactly how it bloody well ought to be but it is all the better for being without smug self-righteousness or a gleeful need to be somehow au courant with 'recession chic'."

This is Observer columnist Kathryn Flett's version of a now very familiar tune: the "oh-my-gosh-they-tell-me-the-economy-is-failing-so-now-I'm-going-to-panic-and-buy-less-stuff" song. But Flett's own amazement should have tipped her off to something: "as I ambled from Tottenham Court Road to Oxford Circus and down Regent Street," she writes, "I was faintly astonished, given that the financial blight formerly known as The Crunch is now officially The Recession, to find that instead of tumbleweed and stumblebums the Street was heaving with shoppers, laden with bags, wearing the glazed expression of hardened consumers in search of their fix."

Insincere: What exactly is there to be astonished about, I wonder? In the Sunday Times Style magazine, editors suggest a "skinted" (i.e. "affordable" version) of a £7,000+ designer cocktail dress which costs a mere £50 from a popular high street shop. This is an increasingly common phenomenon--"credit crunch friendly" shopping advice--but let me ask you this: is £50 really affordable, if all is going to shit like they say it is? Do we really have any right to express shock at our fellow consumers, who flit in and out of the Oxford Street shops as readily as they did "before" (as if there was a before; as if poverty was not always a vague and distant threat, as if the mentality that Flett describes is not merely the same state of mind that the young and strugglign are in always)? I don't think we do; even if Vogue is handing out suggestions on how to live an affordably fashionable life, instead of merely a fashionable one, it's still Vogue, and we're still human.

We're seduced, you see--as Flett alludes to--by the idea of recession (wartime chic, growing our own onions, snuggled in a sparsely furnished lounge with nothing but our own fires to keep us warm in the darkening winter). The Sunday Times Style magazine, this sunday, features "The Joy of Thrift: India Knight's Brilliant New Book on the Glory of Make Do and Mend" on its cover, with an impossibly beautiful blonde in a 1950s-era outfit, pretending to knit; but is this actually what we want to do? Of course it isn't, as Colin McDowell rather ironically points out in the same magazine: "Clearly the way forward now is austerity," writes McDowell. "Thrift shops and dress agencies immediately come to mind, but it is wise to remember this: one of fashion's golden rules states that all the most God-awful garments in the world are destined eventually to sink to the thrift-shop clothes rail, which is fashion's equivalent of Skid Row. Avoid. Just as definitely, do not go into that murky world called home dressmaking or--even darker-alterations. And under no circumstances start to knit."

We could translate McDowell's paragraph thus: "Clearly the way forward now is austerity--pretend austerity. Thrift shops may come to mind, but it is wise to remember this: there is no real need to be actually austere, so for God's sake stay as far away from the charity shop, the sewing machine, and the knitting needles as possible. A failure to do so will mark you out as unfashionable and, even more horrifically, genuinely strapped for cash; so do your bit and head on down to the affordable high street shops."

With this in mind, Kathryn Flett's concluding paragraph seems suddenly thin. What exactly is wrong, we wonder, with "feel-good boot sales" and charity shops? Why shouldn't we feel good--and how is this worse than frequenting the ethically dubious Tesco and putting--you poor thing--just £20 of petrol in the car? Surely recycling items is not only "recession chic" but actually necessary. In her own panic, Flett seems to have forgotten that we have another crisis on as well; and a less glamerous one at that, for there is no chic precedent for an environmental emergency.

I'm tempted to say we should combine our crises: if we're so concerned about pinching pennies, why not put our money where it really matters and nowhere else? Why not visit Oxfam occasionally, instead of Topshop or New Look? The beauty of fashion, I've always thought, is that it is what we make it, and nothing else--if "recession chic" is in, then let's use it. Why not grow herbs on the windowsill--and potatoes in the garden, and onions and lettuce, and then invite our friends over to sip wine and warm the house? Why feel that we can't spend an extra few pounds on local, fresh foodstuffs, that we have suddenly to be slaves to Tesco and Asda just because the politicans tell us that money is in short supply and Wall Street has fallen?

Don't get me wrong: I'm as shopping--happy as the next Young Thing, and yes, I like my clothes. A few months ago I made a silent challenge to myself: to buy no clothing except underwear and stockings new; and it's working remarkably well. I probably won't cease consuming altogether--I'm too young, perhaps, too insecure--but I'll happily forgo an extra pint at the pub or this seasons' It-Outfit if it actually means something. We simply can't afford empty gestures anymore.

Things at the Moment

I have a lot to write about, but no impetus to do it. I'm suffering from a miserable cold and though they've finished work on the house little things still seem to be out of place: my bicycle is naked without its basket, the mirrors are still not up, we have more laundry than seems humanly possible for two people to have. We spent a few days out in the country, both of us coughing and groaning, feeding pigs and then sitting close to the fire catching up on our television-watching (as we don't have one, every time we're in a place with a TV, we become a bit scary). I appear to be useless at the moment; all I can manage is to suck on Strepsils, feel sorry for myself, flip through the Observer, watch snippets of Lord of the Rings (why that, I couldn't tell you).

It's been rainy and cold lately, but in general, the city has taken on a hue of almost heartbreaking beauty: late autumn, and though dark falls early, to catch the sunlight glinting off the windows is a reaffirming experience.

I'm formulating new ideas on literature and politics (more to come), aided by a quick and almost careless line in Joyce's The Dead: "He wanted to say that literature was above politics" as well as by various more overt articles. I'm rearranging books and looking forward to making the house nice again. I'm listening to music and buying all my winter clothing secondhand. Next week is election day; so I remember four years ago, being in Boston and walking in a chill November fog to Copley Square where thousands were rallying for John Kerry. I remember going to sleep with the nation still undecided and waking up to dissapointment, and having to change my outfit because I was irrationally afraid that people would think I supported George Bush because I was wearing cowboy boots. Our own minds are very strange sometimes.

Also, my first Guy Fawkes night coming up. It's going to be a very political week.

Things I Have Tried Unsuccesfully to Do This Evening

• Spend more than a half hour at any time away from my new favorite couch in the lounge
• Clear out the kitchen for the painters tomorrow
• Read Jane Austen
• Read anything
• Write
• Go for a run
• Go for a walk
• Do the dishes
• Fold the laundry
• Look at my to-do list
• Take a long, lazy bath
• Go round to the shop to buy a bottle of wine
  

Things I have successfully done:

• Listened to the same music over and over again
• Nearly cried over an episode of Gossip Girl
• Thought about how lazy I'm being
• Eaten dinner
• Answered the door once (next-door-neighbors letting us know about a party tomorrow)
  
• Fallen asleep on the couch at an awkward angle, leaving my neck sore
• Wondered whether or not I'm suffering from a temporary sort of ennui, or at least having a minor existential crisis, as everything just seems to difficult to bother with...
• Wondered whether or not I can be bothered to go upstairs and get into bed or not

...and when I say "tried to do" I mostly mean "thought about doing".

Oh boy, it's half term...

October

There is a rhythm. On Thursdays I am always slightly late chugging up Divinity Road, and then, seven hours later, I come back down. Tonight there is a mist, and a bracing wind that makes me think of being on a ship. I buy soup and a toothbrush at the shop on my way home.

Our house is being painted, so all the mirrors have been taken down. I live an existence without reflection; I don't know what I look like when I leave. In a way it's liberating: I take less care getting dressed, am quicker, more decisive. There's a strangeness in the house: the table from the bathroom in our bedroom, the bookshelf from the hall in the spare room. I have to climb over a trunk to get to my clothing. In class I ask if I smell of paint, because I imagine I can still smell it. There's a ladder on the stairs. There's no point in cleaning up the clutter in the study because everything is uprooted anyway. We float around; we sleep in; we take a nap on the couch side-by-side even though the couch is, technically, too small for such a maneuver. I would say it was a sense of upside-down-ness, but it isn't an unpleasant sense, if that's what it is.

I watch the laundry dry in the lounge. In our Lewis Carroll universe, all of this matters; but outside things go on as usual. Friends are coming to stay; we are going to the country for half-term; our vegetable box continues to come every Tuesday. In the mornings when I cycle to work I am often doused with a showering of leaves; they coat the pavement wetly. I read that in my hometown the temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit; here there is a chill in the air and it is almost not October anymore--you can actually feel this, even if you didn't know the day.

Here is what I know (or what I have learned?): writing requires immense courage.

And A Piece of Advice...

The Man has just given me a piece of advice that I feel worthy of sharing.

"Don't try to scratch your nose with a cupcake," he's advised me. "I just got cake in my nostrils."

I'm going to join my cake-snorting love in the lounge, and resist the urge to scratch body-parts with baked-goods. I suggest you do similar.

Strapped for Cash

If I wasn't already consumed every moment by anxiety, I would be by now. Even The Guardian had a "Crisis Special!" in its Money section. When The Man's parents dropped by yesterday evening for tea, pizza, and some draught excluding, his mother casually wondered if the credit crunch was going to impact people's essential curiosity (actually she'd wondered if it was going to impact the success of TV show/business QI, but as I'd just suggested that the reason such an enterprise works is because of people's endless craving for knowledge, it was as good as).

If I played a drinking game--one sip for every time the word "crisis" comes up--I'd be pissed before breakfast. If I got a penny for every time, I'd be rich--but that wouldn't be very credit-crunch-likely, would it.

So, all this in mind, alongside my constant awareness that I am a relatively new adult and, as such, perpetually poor, I volunteered to invigilate the SAT examination yesterday at St. Clare's. As one of my co-workers put it: "It's mind-numbingly boring, but by midday, you'll have made £50." Every word of that is true.

What my co-worker couldn't have predicted, however, were the flashbacks. I took the SATs, you see, not so very long ago (although long enough ago for me to have forgotten how many HOURS the process takes), and trapped in a room with fifty-odd teenagers and their No. 2 pencils, it's impossible not to remember the Dunn School edition of the same exams.

Then, I remember envying the proctors. At least they're not taking this god-awful test, I thought. Yesterday I would gladly have taken the test. At least they've got something to do, I thought enviously of the students. I kept having what I believed to be brilliant wisps of thought, one-after-the-other, but as I had no way to write these thoughts down, they've all gone. I'm a writer, not a thinker, you see. To fill the expanses of time, I started coming up with names for the students. I played with my bracelets, my ring, my earrings, and it occured to me that possibly jewlery was actually invented not to adorn women but to give them something to amuse themselves with. I lamented the fact that my new wool tights are a full size too big, and therefore slightly saggy at the knees. I stared deep into the eyes of the two enormous drawings of handsome, well-cheekboned youths, and tried to decipher if the one on the right was a boy or a girl (the lips were all woman, but the nose unmistakably masculine). I got very, very hungry.

When I was taking the same exams at 16, I was as these students yesterday were: nervous and well-behaved. The SATS are designed, I'm convinced, to make pupils so anxious about whether or not they're filling in the tiny answer bubbles correctly or have written their name down correctly that they forget anything they've ever known about reading, writing, and mathematics. "Nervous and well-behaved," I said to my father when he asked me how the students had been ("Did you catch any cheaters?" he wanted to know, but the closest I'd come was having to tell an especially anxious-looking girl that she couldn't have her ruler on the desk. "Why not?" she rightly asked, and for some reason, although it would have been completely out of character, I desperately wanted to tell her: "Them's the rules, sweetheart. Them's the rules." Instead, I shrugged and apologized six thousand times.) "Gee, who does that sound like?" he said back.

Nervous and well-behaved. Yep, that was me at 16. For the entire third year of high school, I moved around with tiptoes and whispers. Constantly afraid. I don't remember taking the SATs; but I remember dreading them. I remember finishing them and thinking, well, thank God that's done, now I can actually get on with my life. I had stopped caring about my scores long ago--all that mattered was that I put the experience behind me.

Yesterday, I walked out of the testing room enveloped in an early-afternoon gust of wind, cycled into town, and flopped down exhausted next to The Man while we waited for lunch.
"I feel like I've just taken a test," I told him. By evening I was so weary that I didn't know what to do with myself. To counter my oncoming headache, I went for a run, but it started to rain middway through and by the time I'd gotten home again I was drenched, so I took a bath and finished a particularly mindless book, and ate cold pizza whilst browsing through vintage clothing online. I tried to have a glass of wine, but after a few sips I was too sleepy to go on, and crawled upstairs to wait for The Man to come home from work. Cash crisis. Energy crisis.

Demand Nothing but the Best

I found this article, (it's a bit of an oldie) on Sadie Jones, author of the bestseller The Outcast, rather interesting:

"She is every publisher's dream – good-looking, husky-toned and, what's more, she can actually write. Her debut bridges the tricky gap between literary and commercial writing: shortlisted for the Orange Prize, picked as a Richard & Judy Summer Read (which sent it to number one in the book charts), and there was even talk - which eventually came to nothing - of a Booker Prize longlisting. "The Richard & Judy/Booker Venn diagram crossover – no, I don't think they've ever done that," she says wryly today."

As you may have guessed, I'm not an enormous fan of the divide (no, make that abyss) between what's perceived to be "academic" type literature (i.e. cryptic at best) and what's perceived to be "trash" (i.e. anything found on your way out of Tesco). So I like that Ms. Jones, as a successful writer, is willing to make a wry comment or two about the perceived disparity between Booker-worthy literature and Richard & Judy-selected books.

What worries me, though, is The Outcast itself, which I read some months ago (one of the perks of being attached to someone in the book industry is the acquisition of proofs) without judgment. I knew nothing about Jones, and I knew nothing about how the public would react to her book. All I knew was that I read the book fast, and obsessively, and that I didn't like the writing very much, but I thought she could tell a damn compelling story. It's not that the writing was poor; it was perfectly adequete, even lovely at times. But it lacked the sparkle of well-used language, and I fret that, though we're making steps towards the "The Richard & Judy/Booker Venn diagram crossover" what's got lost in the meantime is appreciation of craft, and that what we forget to value is an exceptional ability with words, because, unlike an exceptional ability with characters, such an ability cannot stand alone.

***

On a more political note, we can hardly find this surprising, though it's refreshing to see it in print:

"In 17 countries, the most common view was that US relations with the rest of the world would improve under Mr Obama."

Things That Have Recently Made Me Smile

• Late night city walks


• The slightly smokey smell of September


• Finally being warm because it's Autumn and I don't have to pretend anymore that the weather is summery and wear skirts and sandals


• My new rust-coloured coat


• Watching bad television online whilst in the bath (glass of wine optional but always appreciated)


• Using the fireplace again


• Woolen jumpers


• My bicycle--avec recently pumped tires


• Walking through Radcliffe Square in the evenings and getting to think, I live here!


• Lazy, lounge-y Sundays with good friends and good food


• Knowing my neighbors (even just a little) and passing gardening equipment over the fence


• Wearing The Man's scarf to work


• The way my coat flutters when I'm cycling
  


• Chocolate in the afternoon

• Being snuggled up when it's cold outside
  

addendum

If I sound overly melodramatic about the state-of-the-political-world it's only because I am. This distance, put between me and the circus quite consciously, is making me crazy. I went to a Democrats Abroad meeting in the pub a few weeks ago and felt bolstered; I listened to a young student from San Diego deliberate with herself and felt like the world was coming to an end.

All in all, I think I'll feel better when it's over and we have a new leader.

In the meantime I've started school again. I'm sinking rapidly into the feeling that what I want to do more than anything else is wrap myself up in words and swim in the sea of Academia and sunbathe in the fruits of my research. (Mixed metaphors, anyone?) So I'm formulating a vague plan.

On a happy note, the Man has returned from his sausage-making expedition smelling of pork and bearing 22 lovely-looking sausages. Moreover, he assures me, we have some more in storage, waiting in a friends' freezer. It's a good world, all in all.

The 2008 Presidential Election as Greek Tragedy

This being the first and only write-up on last night's presidential debate that I've read so far, I'm coming from a distinctly uninformed standpoint here. But never mind that. There are only three points which I wish to call attention to, and I don't think any of them requires a higher degree of credibility than I have:

1) I can pretty much guarantee that Senator McCain's almost-decision to "suspend campaigning" in light of the current financial crisis was a purely political move, likely cooked up by advisers to make the Senator appear sympathetic to the crisis and more concerned with his country's plights than his own campaign. But it's a catch-22: if he had suspended his campaign, he would STILL be campaigning. The very act of suspension would have been an act of campaigning. Once you enter the presidential race, you don't leave until someone's been declared victor. EVERYTHING that you do is part of the act.

2) From the Post article:

"Later, McCain's voice dripped with derision as he questioned Obama's statement that he would meet with the leaders of rogue foreign countries, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"So let me get this right: We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, 'We're going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,' and we say, 'No, you're not'?" the senator from Arizona said."

Oh, I know what'll help the USA interact with the world at large: cutting ourselves off from it! No, Mr. McCain. I think it takes a lot of guts for Obama to say something like that on national television (in this era of frighteningly instinctive, "gut-based" electoral politics, Obama now runs the risk of being unhelpfully associated with the Iranian President). I also think that he's absolutely on the right track. Forging relationships--however tremulous--is something we clearly haven't tried to do as a country for the last eight years; and I fail to see how a simple willingness to meet with other leaders--however terrible they might be--can be detrimental to us now.

But I think it all stems from a fundamental difference in worldview that was highlighted later on in the debate...

3) Also from the Post: "The two candidates had an emotional exchange over the bracelets they each wear in memory of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq, underscoring the deep divide created by the war." I think staff writers Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray are wrong here: this is not a divide created by the war. This is a divide that always was. See here:

McCain wears the bracelet of a 22 year old soldier killed outside of Baghdad. McCain recounts the plea of the soldier's mother: "But Senator McCain, I want you to do everything -- promise me one thing, that you'll do everything in your power to make sure that my son's death was not in vain."

Obama wears the bracelet of another young soldier. He says of this soldier's mother: "She asked me, 'Can you please make sure another mother is not going through what I'm going through?'"

I couldn't help, in my circuitious mind, to think of Euripedes' play The Trojan Women, which might be the most powerful anti-war narrative ever told. It's not about the soldiering, or even the war itself; it's about how it effects the women left behind, and it's painful. McCain wears a bracelet that symbolises finding meaning in war--a defeatist attitude, as if the act of war is inevitable and all we can do is not seek to prevent it, but merely make sure that it is "not in vain". Obama wears a bracelet that symbolises the possibility that future generations of mothers and sons, of human beings, will not have to suffer the rigors of battle and its gutting aftermath.

"I have left the gates of darkness where the dead are hidden and Hades dwells apart from the gods, and come to this place," says Polydorus, son of Hecuba and Priam, appearing as a ghost, opening Euripedes' play. The candidates are in the "this place" of the play; a place not where the dead are hidden but where the living roam, where "future" and "possibility" exist, where the human mind may still be swayed, or opened. Let us hope that we move towards light, and not closer to the gates of darkness.

Found in Moleskine

"If this is love...there is something highly ridiculous about it."
Virginia Woolf, Orlando

After the crowded late-Summer bustle of Brighton, Oxford seemed full only of ghosts if it was full of anything: the streets wide and empty, the people, when they came, very quiet. Gone were the calls of the Hare Krishna as they marched, the yelps of excited babes and the storms of hip young traffic. All old; all calm.

As I sat waiting for the clouds to part overhead (they showed some inclination to do so just over Blackwell's), it seemed to me that all of Oxford was bathed in the most precious of blue-grey light, which made the walls shimmer and the air, though quite cool, as in a dream.

At last I began to feel cold, sitting there on the steps, and glancing idly to my left saw that tiny pub, The White Horse, and thought, just as idly, that I could go and sit in the warmth and have a half-pint of cider and be quite content for a time, especially with a book; and so struck was I with the idea that I leapt up almost at once and began to make towards the place, whose windows glowed appealingly yellow. I was tired of sitting on the hard stone, of watching everyone on their way, of being unmoving; tired of waiting for a friend or acquaintance to pass, and quickly, happily, found myself inside where all smelled of wood and ale. It was warm, too, and this warmth meant a great deal to me, for all the air of summer seemed to have been bled from the day, leaving only a soft Autumnal chill and a grey haze over the city. I asked for a half of cider.


"Just a half?" said the barman, but without any humour. I might easily have been cajoled into a pint by a cheerier 'tender, but so dry seemed this one that I simply said:
"Yes, just a half," and took it and sipped, and sat down upon a high bench near the window.

Clown and Pelican, Entertaining Crowd

A few weeks ago, I experienced my very first St. Giles' Fair. Surely this must be some kind of secret Oxford induction: in the dead-quiet of early September, when the leaves are on the cusp of changing and a hush has come over even the busiest streets, suddenly the flame of festivity erupts on one of the city's most charming tree-and-college-lined roads. In my research, I read that, "since the nineteenth century, St. Giles' Fair has been held on the Monday and Tuesday following the first Sunday after St Giles' Day (1 September)"—a fittingly circuitous formula for a circus-esque display.

Here's what John Betjeman wrote about it in 1937 (in An Oxford University Chest):

"It is about the biggest fair in England. The whole of St Giles' and even Magdalen Street by Elliston and Cavell's right up to and beyond the War Memorial, at the meeting of the Woodstock and Banbury roads, is thick with freak shows, roundabouts, cake-walks, the whip, and the witching waves. Every sort of fairman finds it worth his while to come to St Giles'. Old roundabouts worked by hand that revolve slow enough to suit the very young or the very old, ageing palmists and sinister, alluring houris excite the wonder and the passions of red-faced ploughmen…. Beyond St Giles' the University is silent and dark. Even the lights of the multiple stores in the Cornmarket seem feeble…. And in the alleys between the booths you can hear people talking with an Oxfordshire accent, a change from the Oxford one."

It isn't so very different today, fundamentally: "Beyond St. Giles' the University is silent and dark...".

Historical photos of the fair show ladies under wide parasols, in sweeping black skirts and busty white blouses. The men wear caps at jaunty angles and plus-fours, or suits and bowlers. There are striped tents and little girls with ribbons in their hair. The great stone walls of the University are all but hidden. Elaborate, fairy-tale structures have been erected where once was only an empty avenue.

The caption of one photo, taken in 1895, reads: "A large crowd gathered in St Giles during the annual fair to watch the Fair Days Menagerie. A clown and a pelican are entertaining the crowd waiting to enter."

When I attend the fair, the outfits are t-shirts, scarves, and denim, and nobody carries a parasol, though they wouldn't need to anyway: it's a day as grey as they come. A mist settles on my bicycle as I wheel it through the crowd. There is none of the frivolous accordion music you expect at a fair, only the heavy thump of electronic beats and rock bands (the Man, who works in an office on St. Giles itself, came home that evening looking frazzled and as if he never wanted to go near the place again). The only people on the whirling carousels are white-haired women being photographed by their white-haired husbands, reliving the glory of their childhood one musical spin at a time. Today's young prefer the faster-paced rides: the roller-coaster outside the doors of a college, the things that spin and shake you into a state of blissful oblivion.

I am reviled by the prospect of such things, though a lifelong attraction to bumper cars is rekindled as soon as I see the shiny floor of the Dodgeum ring. Enormous stuffed animals, arcade games, and the universal sweet smell of the fair (cotton candy mixed revoltingly with fried foods) accost the senses at every turn. I have the sense that I have stepped off my cycle and into a Fellini film. I don't know quite where to look: at the Haunted House? The giddy teenagers in their tiny straight-leg jeans and pixie haircuts, cigarettes protruding from underage lips? The enormous pink polar bears on display, the food stalls, the patient tweed-clad fathers trying to keep up with their eager, bounding toddlers? I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to see a clown and a pelican holding court. Part of me is disgusted, but another part of me can't help cracking an enormous grin.

**

When I get home I check the news, as if there might be something new, but there isn't. There's doom and gloom and the circus of the presidential election--McCain/Palin (a clown and a pelican?) making gaffes wherever they go, Obama making speeches, pundits and political analysts making predictions, everyone else making noise. The whole world appears to have been swallowed by the same Fellini film that took over St. Giles for two days in September.

that good-old-back-to-school-busy-season

I went to buy a new bath mat today, but they didn't have any under £12.99 that weren't all kinds of ugly, and I decided I'd rather not spend that much money on something I'm going to use to dry my feet off with after a lengthy soak. Too lazy to try anywhere else, instead I went down Broad Street and bought myself a few books--which came to a grand total of £13. But in retrospect, I'll take books over bath mats any day.

We have other people's mail coming through our letter box. Some of it I don't know how to send on, so it just piles up on the second desk in the study. We don't own either of the desks, but there they are, lit up by lamps that aren't ours either. I think if you stripped the both of us down to our own true possessions we would have nothing but books and clothes, in that order. I can't decide if that makes us free or just pathetic. But when you have somebody else's furniture crowding up the house you've come to think of as yours, even when it isn't, you start to feel tied down by things.

When I paid the tuition for my MA the other day, I swear my card looked weary when it came out of the machine. It looked up at me balefully as if to say: don't ever make me do this again. I spent a full quarter of an hour marvelling at the fact that I had never ever spent that much money in one easy go before. And I wonder, in a way I've never really wondered before, how all those people with their fancy strings of degree initials actually manage to pay for that much education.

But I'm distracted by the necessity of buying new books, and pens, and stationary. Eighteen years in you would think this might get tiring but there is something eternally satisfying about the back-to-school season, and I don't think that I could ever feel disappointed by the return to education.

It's funny to think of the formative memories I have from my early schooling. Mixing raisins with my apple juice, with disastrous consequences (I was put off raisins for years). Being in the bathroom at preschool and wondering what it would be like to pee standing up, like the boys did. Mouthing the words to a song and having the teacher call me aside after. Her gentle, crushing admonition. Saying my favorite color was white, and not pink, just to be different from all the other little girls. Running across the tarmac at snack-time, falling, scraping my knee, crying, being helped by a boy whose name I have no recollection of. Making stories with felt cutouts. The teacher who limped and carried a cane and frightened me so much that I dreaded the days when my mother would tell me she couldn't pick me up until after storytime. Children calling "na, na, na na na!" at each other on the playground for no good reason. Putting on a play I wrote in the second grade and later in the year coming home to my mother after discovering that King Arthur, our newest focus of study (we'd just finished a lesson on giants), hadn't been a actual king and asking when we were going to learn about real things.

***

It almost almost smells like autumn outside. And it's getting to be chilly. I wore a wool coat to a dinner the other night, and I wasn't sorry. Inside we wrap ourselves in duvets (I'm wrapped in one now). We refuse to put the central heating on until October of course.

Mostly I am in the back-to-school daze, and everything I think to write has left my head by the time I make my busy way back home. The house has become a refuge. Which is funny really. A few weeks ago there was the house down the road which burst into flame; and the fight at the pub at the other end of the street which warrented what seemed to be an entire fleet of police vans. This weekend we were startled into wakefulness by a pair of voices--male, female--arguing in that way that only couples do, and just when we thought maybe they had had their last go we saw the ambulance coming down the road and the man got in with a book tucked under his arm. In the morning we saw the blood pooled outside the house directly next door, where the head wound he had inflicted on himself by hitting the door had spilt onto the concrete. And after all that was over there was an incessent rapping across the street, all morning long, it felt.

Sure, we stick our heads out of the door. We can see other heads poking out, too. But I feel like this is part of living here, and the truth is that I still think we have the most beautiful house in the neighborhood, just like I think I have the handsomest bicycle in Oxford; and we cosy up to the rush of September leaves together: he now only semi-bearded, me wearing thick jumpers. It's winter in California, here: green, rain, cold sunshine, gentle light.

Sunday News Roundup (A Trifle Late)...

Just one on the agenda today, because, let's face it, apart from all the doom-and-gloom predictions about how shit the economy is, and how much shitter it's going to get, there's really been only one constant this week, and her name is Sarah Palin.

I have but three things to say about Ms. Palin (the very sight of whose name makes me feel anxious in a way I haven't since High School, when I was consumed with worry every day).

1. SHE IS A CREATIONIST. Who just recently acquired a passport. No, ladies and gentleman, this is not the latest Miss America, this is the potential President of the United States.
2. When, how, how and HOW did various (fairly respectable) media outlets decide that she not only isn't that bad, she's...er...an invigorating choice for VP? Am I living in an episode of the Twilight Zone?
3. Did I mention she's a CREATIONIST? Who just recently acquired a passport? 'Cos, see, we have this thing called the separation of church and state, and I'd quite like to see that upheld. Moreover, we have this thing called FOREIGN POLICY. Foreign. Policy.

If Ms. Palin is allowed anywhere near the White House—anywhere near—then I shall suggest a mass exodus from the USA.

In other news, the St. Giles fair is on in Oxford. I'm now of the opinion that you can't fully comprehend the word "surreal" until you've seen a roller-coaster shooting by the austere walls of an Oxford college, a Merry-Go-Round beside the Martyr's Memorial.

Crossing

In the old days, people would ask you how your crossing was--was it a rough crossing, or a smooth one? they would want to know. That was when the only way to get to Paris was over the thin, choppy stretch of sea called the English Channel, and it was much more of a production.

Now there is no crossing: only a long, swift, sweeping motion, like a wave of the arm--you fall asleep in Paris and wake in London, and there is just a tunnel, a fast train between two cosmopolitan cities. At the station everything is in French and English and all the announcements are made in both languages. Even at this early hour people are reading newspapers and preparing for their day in suits or swish trousers and high heels. It is impossible to tell why they are making the journey. I myself am making it to get my visa stamped.

"Is this your first presentation?" the man at passport control asks me about the visa, and I nod.

We stayed first in a cheap hotel and then at a friend's crumbling, recently sold apartment. On our last evening there we were having a meal on the mattress--cheese, paté, wine--when a girl came into the apartment to take away all of the furniture. It was embarrassing because our friend had forgotten to tell us she would be coming and had forgotten to tell her that we would be there. We slept without a mattress that night (last night), in the August heat, but it was okay somehow.

We walked around a fair bit, but because he had sprained his ankle the night before we left we had to take it easy. I read The Flaneur by Edmund White; it reminded me that Ernest Hemingway was hungry and poor in Paris, too. There is a passage in A Moveable Feast that I had forgotten until I read The Flaneur; it's long (less a passage and more a chapter) but the start of it goes: "You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food". Then he describes how he used to wind his way around the city avoiding all the places that made him hungry and tempted to spend money. But also he writes: "We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." So there's that, and it's a far nicer thing than being able to afford a fancy hotel with a mattress or to enter every museum or shop for souvenirs and clothing that will just take up space anyway.

We drank café au lait facing the street so we could watch all the people. Our biggest expense was coffee, not accommodation or food. It was a good thing he had bought me The Flaneur, really; "the flaneur," White writes, "is...in search of a private moment, not a lesson." And, "Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone."

We had a kir each at Sartre's café, Café Flore, across from the Lipp where Hemingway eats in A Moveable Feast. Because the drinks were so expensive we drew them out, sipping slowly and delicately, enjoying being able to rest our feet while other people walked on by. The waiter brought us a plate of green olives and I sucked them from a toothpick and we picked the pits out from our teeth.

There is probably a lot more I could write but I'm tired. We've been on the road for most of August, it seems. We've been to Cambridge, the Cotswolds, Brighton, and Paris. Oxford has emptied completely, taking a tiny breath before she fills with students for the term. Even the Cowley road this morning as we walked back from St. Clements seemed wide and quiet; only a few cars trickling past, hardly any other pedestrians. I'm uploading photos and going to have a nap. It's September, and part of me doesn't know how this came to be, even though I've seen it happen so many times before.

My Age of Anxiety

I was flipping through the Observer magazine yesterday when I came across this article, by Harriet Green, which begins with black, bold lettering: “Welcome to the era of anxiety”. It goes on: “Generalised anxiety disorder is the world’s biggest mental health problem. But do we really have anything to worry about?”

On the facing page, the author holds up a sign that indicates she is worried about the credit crunch, global warming, drinking too much, her sex life, the price of her house, and, of course, being worried.

I waved the magazine excitedly at The Man (who has, if you’ll notice, graduated from being The Boy as his beard has reached an epic stage and he could no more be mistaken for a boy as I could).

“Look!” I cried, pointing. “Who does this remind you of?”

We had a good giggle.

But, as Green points out, “I accept many of my concerns seem unserious. And in public I make light of them, happily casting myself as a kind of female Woody Allen. But when I’m at home those ridiculous concerns can take over.”

Mine took over in spring of 9th grade, when I suddenly and seemingly spontaneously lost the ability to sleep peacefully, something that up until that point I had had no trouble doing at all. My body shook, my head spun, and I lived in a sort of bubble of terror.

To confound matters, I had just acquired my first boyfriend (which is not a term, at the age of 14, that necessarily means the same as it does later, and in this case it meant someone to make out with in the library stacks and hold hands with between classes, more a social rite of passage than a romantic affiliation) and I remember thinking, as I lay awake at night wondering if I was ill or just an insomniac: I have to get to sleep. I can’t be sick. If I don’t get to go to school tomorrow, I don’t get to see him.

To be in darkness was unbearable; I left the light on all night (almost a sin in our solar-powered house) and sometimes, when I thought I could hear the silence crawling into my ears and playing in my head, I put a CD into the boombox and listened to celtic guitar, or medieval chanting, at a volume just quiet enough to not float through the floor and into my parent’s bedroom. I was just old enough to recognize the shame in waking them for such a trivial matter, but just young enough, too, to wish that I could.

This was when I discovered that nights are twice as long as days, and a thousand times as lonely. By dawn I would drift into a state of half-sleep, and the singing of the alarm clock an hour later sounded like relief to my soul.

To comfort me, my father told me that when he was little and trying to get to sleep, he used to get the feeling that the corners of the room where forever receding; but by nighttime I felt alone again. I didn’t try to make a connection with my mother’s famous highway panic-attack, which crippled her driving confidence for years (only recently has she begun making the trek down to Orange County again on her own), or the stresses (mostly social) of my first year in high school.

Instead, I sought rescue in routine, and a host of obsessive-compulsive activities. I started sucking on “Moonlight Mints,” homeopathic, supposedly-sleep-inducing sweets my mother had picked up in an airport at some point, each evening, trying to convince myself that they were in some small way making me weary.

If the sleeplessness passed, the worry certainly never did. Five fretful years later, I found myself in a doctor’s office. I had passed from innocently anxious to severely obsessive-compulsive and back again. On the eve before I started a new job, I awoke with a jolt to all my old symptoms: the walls of my room seemed to be receding before my very eyes, I couldn’t be sure if I was nauseous or not, my heart beat fast. I went upstairs (I was staying the summer in my parents’ house) to the living room and flopped down on the couch. I fell asleep re-reading the same dull passage in Cosmopolitan about how to make your guy lust for you even more, but all summer long I battled with sleeplessness and shakiness, until one panicky evening, my father suggested that I might be suffering from an anxiety disorder.

“What?” I said.
“You know, panic attacks, that sort of thing,” he said. “Look it up.”
I went online. I couldn’t believe this had never occurred to me before. Every single one of my symptoms was named as an indication of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I felt instantly, physically better just knowing this.

I told the doctor that it wasn’t the worry, so much, but the physical symptoms, that I needed help with. I wanted some kind of reassurance that this was normal:

“I’m just amazed at how physical the manifestations are,” I told him. He was a physician’s assistant I had never seen before, our family doctor being on holiday, and he looked at me kindly.
“There’s no need to be embarrassed about it,” he said. “It happens to a lot of people.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to decide if this made me feel better or worse. I wanted to tell him about the way the room spun, the way my stomach churned and my heart raced how I shivered even in the heat of a California summer, but part of me worried (yes, worried) that he would tell me how unnatural this was. It had certainly not occurred to me, however, to be embarrassed about it.
“Sure,” he went on soothingly. “It even happened to me, when I was going through a really stressful time. You are talking about loose stool, aren’t you?”
I wanted to laugh with relief.
“No,” I said.
"Ah," he murmured. And I fancy that, despite his advice to me, he was slightly embarrassed now.

He gave me some pills, which I took home and promptly stashed away. I was genuinely afraid to take them. I read the possible side effects (always a mistake). I flipped through my copy of Overcoming Anxiety for Dummies so often that the pages started to look tired, trying to convince myself that what the doctor had prescribed me would help. Finally, egged on my parents, who I think were growing weary of having a 19-year-old worry-wort wandering the corridors at night, I swallowed the first pill. I awoke in a panic several hours later.

“Um, I think I’m having a bad reaction to the pills,” I told my parents, holding out my hand to show that it was trembling.
“I think,” my father suggested delicately (bless him), “that you might just be worrying about them.”

A few weeks later I wondered why I had made such a big deal of it.

But Harriet Green adds another perspective to her article, which I take to heart because, well, it’s really aimed at people my age: “we are entering a new age of anxiety. As the economic situation worsens, so fretting in the general population rises. In the past year, oil prices have risen by 50%, basic foods such as rice have soared by as much as 70% and house prices are plummeting at a faster rate than we’ve seen in a long time. Those in the know are starting to whisper that we’re heading for the mother of all recessions.” Or, as Merryn Somerset Webb, editor of MoneyWeek, so comfortingly puts it: “People are anxious, and they are right to be…People under 40 are not used to losing jobs or being made redundant.”

In other words: this is a hell of a time to be a newly-indoctrinated adult. Adulthood, I’ve recently learned, is hard enough (who knew that paying your own rent could be so painful?—let alone paying for, say, a second degree from, say, a foreign university?). But being told that in the current climate, we’re right to be anxious adds another layer to it entirely. A new age of anxiety? But I thought I’d already had my age(s) of anxiety.

So I’m starting to think that what remains to be done is follow the advice of Tom Hodgkinson (editor of The Idler, who, if you’ll remember, was partly responsible for the pig-roast in a London traffic island): “Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food—the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away,” Hodgkinson is quoted as saying in Green’s article; he “encourages us to take matters into our own hands and simply shed the burden.”

Yesterday, we went and pulled up all our potatoes and had a gorgeous Sunday roast, complete with chilled rosé and a peach-and-shortbread pudding. Of all the places I’ve lived (and, granted, there haven’t been so very many), England has perfected the art of the Sunday: shops close early still, and the most famous tradition (apart from churchgoing, which frankly I can take or leave) is centered around eating, and, in our young lives, good friends. I know I’ll always have a battle with anxiety—and maybe it’ll be a bigger battle because of the environmental and economic climate, I don’t know. But I do know it’ll be an easier battle with things like long, lazy sunday lunches to look forward to.



"Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy."
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Sunday News Summary Volume I

It occurs to me today that Sunday is, without doubt, one of the best days of the week.  You can, for instance, as we've done today, have tea in the morning, read the Observer Magazine, then head to the pub down the road for a cheap lunch (and a pint) whilst perusing the rest of the paper.  And all this before the frenzy of potato-picking-and-washing (fresh from our garden, some of the tiniest potatoes I've ever seen!), cooking, crossword-doing, chattering: a wine-soaked evening ritual that ends inevitably in a serene sigh, a weary sinking into bed, half a chapter read before eyes droop and drool crawls out the corners of our happy mouths.

In my afternoon's perusal of the Observer today, however, I started doing that thing.  You know the thing I mean, for even if you don't do it yourself, someone you know inevitably does: the half-mumbling, the sighs, the frustrated slap of hand on paper, the shaking of the head.  The Man was watching the football and I was leafing through the news section.  We ate our sandwiches (roast beef and horseradish sauce and bacon and brie, respectively), salads, and chips in contented, domestic happiness, but a cloud started to come over me as I reached the end of the paper.  It's not that I expect--or even want--reporting of nothing-but-the-happy-bits.  No; what I want is to be able to vent at my newspaper.  So with that in mind, a summary of the day's stories, as selected by, well, me:

In this story, we learn that Oxford University has decided to give a better chance of being selected for an interview to applicants who live in low-income areas of the country.  It sounds nice, I suppose--state-school educated youths given a chance to breach the iron gates, handed a golden key to a previously inaccessible city of eternal learning.  But what I suspect this policy will actually do is hurt upper-middle class youngsters, whose families may not have the monetary clout to send their children to posh schools but who otherwise have known no real financial hardship.  Such students might perform just as well as their counterparts on both ends of the financial spectrum, but now they're left out completely, while advantage is given to the very poor and the very rich.  Like affirmative action before it, the policy has admirable roots but suffers from flawed implementation.  (Bear in mind this is all speculation).

This one just makes me angry.  No, no, no, and no again: offshore drilling in the USA is NOT the answer to the energy crisis.  John McCain can champion the cause till the cows come home, but Nancy Pelosi should know better than to hint that "she might allow a vote on the drilling ban if it was part of a wider energy agenda," and Obama too--it could be part of a new energy strategy, in theory--but on its own, "more oil" doesn't sound especially new to me.   And I know the high price of gas has hit people hard; I know it's painful, and I'm thankful that I live in a place where not having a car is a viable--even a preferable option--and yes, I feel for the families and the individuals who have struggled as a result of rocketing prices, but I have also felt that there's one good thing that's come from all of this, and it's that for once, people have started to think about alternative energy, and alternative (read: public) transportation not in the hazy terms of dreamers and environmental radicals, but as real possibilities.  Why squander the opportunity to turn this into strong action?

This is just ludicrous. 

This article makes me wonder where the balance lies between the most basic quality of life (just having a roof over your head) and the slightly less basic, but no less desirable, kind of qualities, like having a garden behind your house.  If we have to destroy people's green spaces in order to give other people a chance to own a home, then the line must be very fine indeed, and as someone with a lovely garden (and an enormous appreciation for the things), I hope there's another solution somewhere.

And in the 7 Days section, we learn the following things: that Sam Cameron, wife of Tory leader David, has "had rave reviews for her newly designed handbag...retailing at a mere £775"; that "the world's most expensive house" has just been purchased by an anonymous Russian for about £400m; that a king penguin (yes, you read that right--I had to scan the paragraph several times to make sure) has been granted regimental knighthood by the Royal Guard in Norway; and that olympic swimmer Michael Phelps adheres to a 12,000 calorie-a-day-diet (again, you read that right).  

This is truly the stuff that the Harper's Index is made of.

Joe Allen at The Cellar/The Community of a Street

So it turns out that the violinist-who-used-to-live-next-door (occasionally we could hear a few notes floating through the walls and into the kitchen) is actually part of this group, who we heard last night at the Cellar.  As per the wonderfully circular world of Oxford, Joe Allen works at the Corner Club, neé QI, which almost everyone we know has connections to.  I like this sort of smallness: not stifling but familiar; large enough still to be surprising, and pleasantly so.

The Cellar would probably more aptly be called the basement.  Cellar implies wood, and warmth, and (quite possibly) wine; but the place reminds me far more strongly of a friend's spacious under-house hideout--a dingy, dark, sticky-floored hollow perfect to listen to music by.  The beer is cheap and the ambiance appealingly sparse; and all confounded by a sense of wonder that you can be here, underneath ancient alleyways, listening to a thoroughly modern selection of youthful, pretty musicians.

Joe Allen, accompanied by Angharad Jenkins on the violin and Chrissie Sheaf on the drums, has a sound that reminds me of Damien Rice, or possibly Stephen Fretwell, with operatic elements (and the shining sounds of an electric violin, which I'm starting to think is something no band should be without...).  The threesome has clearly mastered the art of performance: that is, their music is, in rare fashion, actually enhanced by their physical presence.   At one point I was smiling so widely that a friend looked at me curiously (presumably thinking the £1.50 Foster's had gotten to my head); it was just that good, in a heart-soaring kind of way.

In bed later that night, we were aroused from our half-sleep (books on our chests) by a series of bangs, followed by shouts on the street which sounded distinctly different from the drunken yelps of late-night returners, or the fierce calls of virile men aching for a boozy fight; so we rose on our knees and peeked our heads out of the window.  Down the street, not half a block, we could see an enormous, orange crown of flames pouring out of an alleyway; billows of white smoke came running down towards us and we smelled the acrid flavour of something wrong, something electric.  

Firefighters had arrived on the scene silently, and we watched their figures dart and flit until the smoke had been shrunk and the fire reduced and our necks had begun to ache from craning.  A father and son went out into the street to assess the danger, but otherwise no-one showed any signs of stirring.  We could have gone on sleeping and never even known.  

The whole street seemed precious then, fragile, but ours: the violinist next door, who you know only from the sound of her strings and her Welsh voice, turns out to make you smile harder than you've smiled all day; and firefighters do their job with austerity, guided by the blinking blue lights of their trucks; and we are somehow in the middle of all this.