Hurst Street, Springtime, 6 am

I wake at the unfamiliar hour to animal sounds. Noises like foxes fighting; exotic screeches carried down the street by wind or proximity. You are asleep until I stick my head out of the window, peering left and right past the dawn-bathed terraced houses.
"That sound," I say.
"Cats?" you say. Fall asleep again. I go into the bathroom, where the window overlooks a single street lamp. As I am watching it, through the blinds, observing the sallow glow against the almost-bright morning sky, it goes out. Apart from the emptiness it might be mid-morning.

Back in bed, the fox-sounds have stopped. Now it's only birds. Doves? In that way that early-morning birds have of making repetitive songs with their hoots and growls, they are like the worst pop song on the radio. Over and over again in my head (I'll forget the tune by afternoon). You are still asleep, and I ponder getting up, going outside, to see the street before anyone else sees it. Sunday mornings are best for this; no early commuters whistling past on bicycles, smugly more productive. All the drunks have gone to bed. For the first time in a long time I perceive how ugly all the cars are, lined up nose-to-tail, cows going to slaughter, in various shades of modern, various kinds of disrepair. There was one last year with a smashed-in window, that sat on the corner of Leopold Street and Hurst, and for months if you wanted to walk past it you had to pick your way through broken green glass. The houses still look bare--even the ones with gardens out front are still suffering the effects of winter gloom.

The thing about this street is, it wears its shabbiness well. Last night as we rounded the corner I said to you how I fond I was of the place where our street meets Magdalen road--of the pub with her bicycle rack, her evening-yellow windows, the red-and-green facades of the bookshop and the café, the weary half-rendered lettering of Silvesters ("E TERS STORES"), with its pots, its herbs, its kitchenware.

Not a soul about this morning, and as I try to fall asleep my mind is suddenly full of a Boston autumn, the crispness of the Charles River and the smell of rich people's houses in the Back Bay. Couldn't be further from where we are now. I close my eyes to picture the promenade in October better, the strange dome of the half-shell in afternoon light, the runners, the girls in skirts and light coats, stretching the days of sensible dressing out as long as possible. I think for certain I won't fall asleep but I do, with you and the pop-songs of the morning birds and the empty river of street that runs between James and Magdalen.

The Cold of Early Summer

I have a cold; it’s a nice day, and I have a cold, and I’m grumpy about it in that “there’s nothing I can do, and it’s not even a bad cold, but I’m going to harrumph about it anyway” way. Last night I lay awake trying to decide if my throat hurt; when it decidedly did hurt, I lay awake trying to decide if it hurt in a coldy way or a just-kidding way. Having spent my lunch in the garden trying to convince myself that it’s a just-kidding way, I have a feeling it’s not. Ah well.

I’m also at work. This is not what they pay me to do at work, as you might have guessed. Ah well.

One year ago, I had a cold, too. I went to the Summer Eights and sat reading near the river in the shade of a tree near Christ Church Meadow and sucked on lozenge after lozenge pretending that I was just jet-lagged. I did this because there was a boy I’d met who I wanted to go on seeing, and I couldn’t bear to miss out on a date because of a cold, a lousy cold. Before we met up in the evenings I blew my nose furiously, took several ibuprofen pills, and put on a brave face, and since things were so exciting, I never once noticed my illness until the next morning, when we would wake with gin-soaked heads and I would have to swallow about a gallon of water before I felt able to speak, and then I would tiptoe to the bathroom and blow my nose furiously again and apply masses of careful makeup so that he would think, this boy, that I woke up not feeling hungover but feeling radiant and looking blemish-free.

I wore lots of skirts and dresses and shorts, not because the weather permitted but because it was summer, so one morning when I woke up and saw it pouring rain outside, he had to lend me a jumper to wear with my shorts, which was large and red and warm and had two neat holes in the armpits.
“All my jumpers get holes there,” he told me sheepishly.
“Sweaters.”
“What?”
“All your sweaters get holes there,” I corrected him. It was a thing we had about jumpers and sweaters, because I thought jumpers were actually the little onesie things you put small children into.
“Yes, well,” he said.

My cold disappeared, not aided by the late nights, the drinking, the way I felt all the time, which was happier than happy and full of youthful energy. He called me for dinner one night—proper dinner, he said, at a proper time (we tended to eat at midnight, generally). When I arrived he said he had a rotten cold and he hoped I wouldn’t get it and I felt too awful to admit that of course I wouldn’t get it, I had given it to him in the first place, so I said, “I probably will, but I don’t care!” and kissed him very deeply and wetly to prove it, because I hoped secretly that he would have felt the same way if I had admitted my own sniffly condition earlier. We drank several bottles of wine and watched High Society, which may or may not be one of my favourite films of all time purely on its laughter value. I never told him the true source of the cold--so I’m sorry, my love, to have made the truth so public now.

I remember sitting by the river during Eights Week so clearly. I don’t mean I remember the details—I can’t even recall what I was reading, though it may have been 100 Years of Solitude which I abandoned when I realized that the fluid, breathless, running tone was going to carry on throughout, unable to make my mind concentrate on it; I know what I was wearing, but only because I had picked it deliberately to impress him (a sheer, flowy white-and-blue floral summer dress), but I don’t know the day, the time, the circumstances of my being there. I had made my way to the river to see tradition in the flesh, and having found it (crowded riverbanks and boathouses spilling spectators onto the paths) I retired to a spot of warmth-and-shade with a strange glow of contentment, for the first time not because of anything but my own personal satisfaction.

Lemons, Lemmings, and Love in Winnebago Country

“He has the social skills of a small lemon,” he says—at least, I think he says at the time. Actually I’ve misheard.
“He has the social skills of a small lemming,” is what he’s really said.

“Oh!” I say back. What can you really say, after all, to someone you think has just described another human being as a small oval-shaped yellow fruit? I picture the man whose social skills are akin to something that tastes nice sprinkled over hummus puckering his lips and crinkling his nose. His head his egg-shaped, pointed at the top like a Conehead, and his skin is rough and leathery, and thick.

(Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it, to get through the day unscathed?)

Later, I will wonder: are small lemmings necessarily any less socially capable than their larger colleagues? Don’t they all just march along, without regard for future or past? But it’s the sort of thing you say when you don’t have all the time in the world to think it through, and in your head, you hear the voice of logic saying, “what could be more socially retarded than a runt lemming?”

A small lemon, apparently. And then I wonder: would a small lemon, as opposed perhaps to a large lemon, have some shame in not being as juicy, as fruitful as it could be? (Whereas a small lemming can be just as lemming-y as a large one.) And maybe this inferiority complex is what leads it to be so antisocial: that constant reminder of being less of a lemon is too much to bear. It becomes a hermit lemon: sulky, moody. Misanthropic.

(Only it can’t be misanthropic, can it, because it isn’t, as much as I may try to personify it on paper, human. It becomes the lemon equivalent of a misanthrope, anyway.)

The funny thing is, that a week later, I will remember thinking that he says, “the social skills of a small lemon”, and realizing after that he has actually said “lemming”, but I will not be able, for the life of me, to recall who has the social skills of a poorly sized fruit-or-silly-animal. It’s funny how things like that work; well, how memory works, anyway. Like a sieve: only it forgets to catch the relevant details and gets lemons and lemmings instead.

In the fruit bowl, there may or may not be blood oranges. We are not sure how to tell, without cutting them all open, but there’s something nice about not knowing what kind of orange you will get until you’ve begun to peel it. When I was a child I thought that blood oranges looked like I imagined pomegranates to be (I'd not yet seen one in the flesh): something approximately the color of a faded ruby inside, soggy and full of dark, running juices; and because in my mind pomegranates were always associated with poor Persephone, bound to Hades because of their seeds, so too did blood oranges begin to tie themselves to an ancient Greek myth.

Again, funny how memory, and connections, will play tricks on you. Here’s another one:

At the dinner table in QI a man tells his friend of a dream he has, to drive a Winnebago through the American countryside.

“I have such a fondness for the Winnebago,” he says. They commune over what seems to be a mutual affliction: love of one of the world’s most bizarre inventions. Then the other one sighs wistfully, starring into his cloudy glass of white wine, through the haze of golden liquid looking out over the warm wooden dining room while the towers of a dozen different Oxford colleges hang against the night sky behind him. They are caught up in the drama of another world: of driving an obscenely large vehicle through dusty country roads, past cornfields and IHOPS and Wal-Marts big enough to swallow entire towns whole; past crumbling barns, shiny new skyscrapers, under big skies on big roads in a big, big country.
“Ah. It really is Winnebago country,” one of them breathes happily.

And I think: when I was a little girl, my idea of the perfect possession was a motorhome, a Winnebago. I thought that having one’s home be so portable would just be right somehow; and being a child, I was too young to understand all of the cultural implications of motorhomes and trailerparks or the ennui of a life spent on the road. It had simply occurred to me, in a very basic way, that portability of home can be an asset to one’s own essential self.

So now I take books everywhere, and think that in some strange way that I can explain in words to no one (and how ironic is that!), this is almost the same as having a home on wheels. Words travel better than almost anything else I know.

And because it’s Valentine’s Day soon (or possibly already is), there’s one more thought that seems unconnected to everything else but important to say, and important to say now:

There’s a song I’ve been listening to a lot lately, because I heard it in a film and it caught my attention in that way that certain songs do—you think to yourself, in a theatre crowded full of people: this song was written for me! And part of it goes like this:

“If you were a wink, I’d be a nod; if you were a seed, well I’d be a pod. If you were the floor, I’d wanna be the rug; and if you were a kiss, I know I’d be a hug.”