There's no place like home
Sep. 20th, 2004 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4Talking of Wolvercote, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vinaigrettegirl reminded me of a walk I did with one of my partners when we were living in Oxford, before the -- and the -- and when we -- and then it all -- and, and.
We walked from Marston to Wolvercote, and from there down over Port Meadow, picking our way through the remainder of floods in the gathering dark, and by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Jericho and environs. A lovely walk, just at this kind of time of year, with the air bright and knife-edged and glittering with yesterday's rain. And thinking of that takes me back to a later time, crossing the river in the fog with a new partner on the way to watch a meteorite shower, and I felt that we were standing in a place out of time, on a bridge between worlds, bound up in clouds and the hopes half-glimpsed like indistinct shapes in the darkness, and he felt ... well, I never really knew what he felt at all.
The conversation that reminded me of this started with Kidlington, though, and I've never really been to Kidlington, only passed through it one time when I started cycling North because it was out of Oxford, and I had no idea where I was going except Away but I got to -- what's the one after Kidlington? -- before giving up and turning round because it was dark and cold and raining. And on the way back I passed a sign to "The Midlands" and burst into tears because The Midlands was the closest to Home at that point, where my parents were, and I wanted more than anything else in the world to go home.
I can't remember why I was feeling like that, there were so many things that hurt in those days -- was it me who broke my heart? did I have a heart to break? -- but I'm older and harder now and if I have to run away and hide I stay out in the open where nobody can tell I'm hiding. But I think it's just that sometimes you just have to go as far as you can go in one direction before you remember that you don't have anywhere else to run to because the things you are running away from are tied up in a bundle of rags on your back and the things you are looking for are right there in your own back yard. And if they weren't there in the first place, why then, you never really lost them.
vinaigrettegirl reminded me of a walk I did with one of my partners when we were living in Oxford, before the -- and the -- and when we -- and then it all -- and, and.We walked from Marston to Wolvercote, and from there down over Port Meadow, picking our way through the remainder of floods in the gathering dark, and by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Jericho and environs. A lovely walk, just at this kind of time of year, with the air bright and knife-edged and glittering with yesterday's rain. And thinking of that takes me back to a later time, crossing the river in the fog with a new partner on the way to watch a meteorite shower, and I felt that we were standing in a place out of time, on a bridge between worlds, bound up in clouds and the hopes half-glimpsed like indistinct shapes in the darkness, and he felt ... well, I never really knew what he felt at all.
The conversation that reminded me of this started with Kidlington, though, and I've never really been to Kidlington, only passed through it one time when I started cycling North because it was out of Oxford, and I had no idea where I was going except Away but I got to -- what's the one after Kidlington? -- before giving up and turning round because it was dark and cold and raining. And on the way back I passed a sign to "The Midlands" and burst into tears because The Midlands was the closest to Home at that point, where my parents were, and I wanted more than anything else in the world to go home.
I can't remember why I was feeling like that, there were so many things that hurt in those days -- was it me who broke my heart? did I have a heart to break? -- but I'm older and harder now and if I have to run away and hide I stay out in the open where nobody can tell I'm hiding. But I think it's just that sometimes you just have to go as far as you can go in one direction before you remember that you don't have anywhere else to run to because the things you are running away from are tied up in a bundle of rags on your back and the things you are looking for are right there in your own back yard. And if they weren't there in the first place, why then, you never really lost them.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 02:12 am (UTC)But the city... sigh.
Sometime I want to spend a day or two just walking around the city, remembering old things and noticing new things. Maybe alone, or maybe in quiet company; maybe with a camera, or maybe just with my eyes and my heart.
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Date: 2004-09-21 03:46 am (UTC)I've always felt like that in Oxford, although, oddly, less so now now than when I was working for the University. Back then, I really did feel excluded, as almost everyone I was working with was a fellow, or somesuch, of some college or other.
but that's more to do with feeling at home in the city as a whole.
There a few cities in the world I feel really at home in. Of the ones I've actually lived in, first is Glasgow, as I was born and brought up there. It is viscerally part of me, like a deep and scarlet scar. Edinburgh is like an old pair of well-worn, but terribly expensive and well-made, shoes - comfortable, familiar, and smells a bit funny. I still feel like a stranger in Manchester, familiar though it is, even after my years there. Nice somehow manages to be foreign and familiar, abroad and some kind of home all at the same time; it's probably the city I feel most ambivalent about.
But Oxford is different. Perhaps the tangential, and oddly pivotal, place it's had in the arc of my life has something to do with that. I always end up in Oxford on the cusp of large changes in my life. [sorry for the tortured geometrical allusions in there]
Even the first time I visited the city - in '77, I guess it must have been, on a canal boat moored behing Worcester. Hythe Bridge Street must have been my first sight of Oxford. I was captivated. I wonder if I though I'd ever return to live there? I certainly never harboured any ambition so study there. It was such a long time ago.
Sometime I want to spend a day or two just walking around the city, remembering old things and noticing new things. Maybe alone, or maybe in quiet company; maybe with a camera, or maybe just with my eyes and my heart.
I can be very quiet company.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 04:27 am (UTC)Burton on the Wolds is an odd one, though; I hated the primary school I went to there, I felt utterly trapped in the village when I was chasing the holy grail of a Social Life as a teenager... but now the space it occupies in my psycho(moo)geography is just endless summer, playing fields and dens and penny-sweets and bicycles and sunlight falling on the hedgerows, and the thick, heavy quiet.
I'll write about it in a separate entry, maybe ... or a book ... too many images drowning me as I try to think about it.
first sight of Oxford
I first went there when I knew I was going to be applying to study there. It was pouring with rain, and I didn't care, I was in love. Every brick and every door and every small green square of grass. It was real in a way that I still can't quantify -- a sense of the sublime? A sense of human history? -- and I felt as though I could be part of it, and it could be part of me. And when I finally got there it was everything I thought it would be, and more. I suppose it's the first place I truly loved ... which is probably why it had the power to break my heart so utterly and devastatingly so many times, but also why my mind keeps coming back to it.
Maybe one day I'll move back there, and open a second-hand bookshop, and keep lots of cats, and challenge random strangers to games of Scrabble in the Harcourt Arms.
I can be very quiet company.
*smile*