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August Moon day 4: duologue

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So I had a conversation with my shadow. Couldn’t put it off any longer. I turned to face her, felt the sun on the back of my neck, said, ‘So how come you’re following me?’

‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘it’s all down to you. I live for you; you must know that.’

I looked at her, lolling against the wall like some insolent chit, and I said, ‘We’re only joined at the feet, you know.’

‘Not always,’ she said, and I swear she’d have winked, if only I could have seen her eyes.

But I won’t be made to blush like some Victorian miss by my own shadow, and so I agreed. ‘Not always.’ And sat down, to prove my point. It did very odd things to her legs, and her neck bent at right angles when she got to the wall, but she didn’t seem to mind. ‘Talk to me,’ I said.

‘I belong to you,’ she said. ‘Where you go, I follow.’

‘You stretch,’ I said, ‘and you shrink. You’re one,’ I said, ‘or you’re many. You’re sharp or you’re fuzzy.’

‘Ah, my dear,’ she said, ‘that all depends on you. If you go out in the morning I’m tall, and if you stand between two lamps then I’m twins.’

‘You come out in the sun,’ I said, ‘and in the darkness you’re not there at all. How can I trust you?’

‘The darkness,’ she said, ‘belongs to me and all the shadows, and all the shadows are one. In the darkness,’ she said, ‘I’m no longer fixed to you, and I wrap around you like a blanket. In the darkness,’ she said, ‘you’re quite safe.’

Sometimes I think that she’s cleverer than I am. I don’t quite see how that would work, but perhaps she knows.

August Moon day 3: betting with pennies, calculated risk

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It was a gloomy day, or perhaps it just felt that way because I did.

In fact, I’m not sure that I could tell you what the weather was doing. It wasn’t raining; I’d have heard that. But I didn’t go outside. The curtains stayed shut. I moved from bed to computer to bed to television. Only very late in the evening I looked out of the window and saw the last rags of sunlight just brushing the tops of the leylandii.

I was refusing to feel guilty about it. I was ill. Not seriously ill; just the irritating sort of sore throat that made it hurt to talk much, and the lethargy that made venturing outside the house an exhausting prospect. I could have pushed myself, I knew, but I would have suffered for it later. I’d done that through the working week, taken one sick day and ignored two others I knew I needed. Better a day of utter boredom than months of never quite being well, of always being tired.

This had happened the year before, you see. I’d gone away for a few days and been ill when I came back. And somehow I’d never got better, and before I knew it summer had disappeared and autumn was hurrying after it, and Christmas was a burden I couldn’t shoulder. A year before, and here it came all over again. I couldn’t face it. I went to bed and shut the curtains.

You’d like to know, wouldn’t you, what was the end of the story. You’d like to know what would have happened if I’d dragged my shoes on, gone out to buy a loaf of bread. You’d like to know if I recovered faster because I let myself rest, or if I would have just got over it if I’d only pushed myself.

So would I. I don’t know. It was only yesterday.

August Moon day 2: the room with the doors

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Let me tell you what I am afraid of.

I am afraid of getting shut in. I am afraid of shutting myself in. I am afraid of closing any door, for fear that it, and only it, will turn out to have been the right door to go through.

I am afraid of shutting the door and being left in the dark. It’s possible, of course, that when the door shuts I will see the cracks of light around all the other doors, the ones I didn’t even know existed. But what if I don’t?

I am afraid of making the wrong choice, of knowing that it is my fault that things have gone wrong, because I made that choice.

For a long time I have known, in the part of my mind that knows facts, that staying in that cramped little room is as much a choice as walking through any of the doors, that if I stay there long enough the doors will open or close without my hand touching the handle, that I will have chosen without the privilege of choosing.

It is only this week that I have come to understand deep in my bones that the house is mine, and that I am free to choose walk through or to ignore any door I like. Even though I don’t know what’s on the other side…

I’m scared of what might be on the other side, yes. I think, though, that it might be slightly less terrifying than finding that all the doors have locked themselves while I was stuck in the middle of the room, thinking that I wasn’t allowed to touch them.

August Moon day 1: scared of the dark

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We begin our journey in the darkness. I am feeling… apprehensive.

There is so much out there that I don’t know. Standing here with one foot on the threshold, about to step out into the unknown, I can’t even begin to imagine what’s coming. The person who will experience the adventures of a month, a year, a decade hence, knows more than I do, has dimensions of wisdom that are far beyond me.

It’s a luminous, velvety, exciting darkness, full of unknown unknowns, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it coming, so you might as well meet it with curiosity and the intention to enjoy it.

I only realised the other day that I have been stopping myself wanting things for most of my life, declining to express preferences out of politeness or fear or goodness knows what. Setting out on my fourth decade with permission to make choices based on what I actually want… now there’s an adventure. I’m still in the dark as to what I want.

And then there’s the actual, literal, darkness. It’s out there already. I had to turn my bike lights on this morning. It’s been a wet, grey, day, and it’s a dark, dank evening. No moon, and no chance of seeing it even if there were one. Autumn is here already, I think.

I am one of those apparently rare people who prefers Greenwich Mean Time to British Summer Time. My mood is so tied to the sunlight that when the mornings become dark I find the arguments for getting out of bed less and less convincing. As the nights lengthen I look forward to that magical Sunday when the clocks go back and the morning is suddenly light again. It doesn’t last long – a fortnight, perhaps, before the darkness crawls back in – but it’s enough; it keeps me hanging on until the solstice, when I can tell myself that things are going to get better.

There’s a petition going around Facebook at the moment asking for permanent British Summer Time. It’s a genuinely terrifying prospect. I would lose the whole winter.

I am scared of the dark. I am scared of the dark that’s coming. The dark that’s already here is less intimidating, but more awesome.

Sleeping Beauty

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When I woke again, it was high summer,
the trees in full green leaf, green
on the altars, and you,
beside me, smiling, diffident,
having stopped by
to see if
you might be of assistance.
I loved all that I saw in that waking
and you, being then in the foreground,
could not help but be loved. Love springs
from the heart unasked-for, clings
to the one who stands ready
to bear it. You and I
(when I’ve become more than the end
of a quest, and you
have retreated somewhat, into perspective),
you and I will have learned
what to do with this unforeseen,
blazing, implacable love,
and then we’ll begin.

Once More in Paradise

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Heaven, I sometimes think, must be
where I grew up – mid-August,
the raspberries run wild and ripe,
hens scratching in the yard,
the house dim and cool,
red tiles under bare feet;

where, all the long afternoon,
those whom I love and will love
arrive, sleepy, stretch out on the lawn,
washed in the sunlight after the long drive,

and, after, talk late round the kitchen table,
plates pushed aside,
with song and red wine and laughter,
the world set to rights.

Personal Ad for a Handbag

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(Or two handbags. One in black; one in brown or blue. You could be the same design in different colours, or you could be different designs, both of which match my specifications.)

You have a decent square or oblong base, and you are sufficiently bottom-heavy that you don’t tip over when I put you down.

You will fit into my bicycle basket without having to be put on end or tilted.

You have two handles, long enough for you to be carried comfortably over my shoulder, but not so long that you drag on the ground when I carry you in the hand.

You can be closed completely, but you are deep enough that stuff doesn’t fall out of you if you aren’t.

You can carry a large paperback book and my Filofax simultaneously, or a pair of size seven ballerina flats. You have a pocket for my purse, phone and keys, and another one for my work pass and travelcard.

You don’t have tassels. You don’t have writing on. You don’t have an ostentatious logo.

Any metal trim is silver coloured, not gilt, and there isn’t much of it.

I buy you in a shop. I don’t buy you online, and nobody else buys you for me.

You are made of leather. I want you to last.

Thoughts from the end of twenty-nine

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I think I’m a bit scared of entering my thirties.

Thinking back to myself at nineteen, staring twenty in the face, and how much I’ve done and how far I’ve come since then… I think I’m scared by the prospect of the next ten years, knowing that I won’t recognise myself at the end of it. No, that’s not quite what I mean, but knowing that by the time I get to forty I will have grown and changed in ways that I cannot imagine from where I am now, at twenty-nine.

I remember myself aged goodness knows how old, say ten, thinking I’d never go to university, because at that point I couldn’t imagine having the intellectual capacity to cope with university. I hadn’t learned that knowledge and wisdom accrue day by day, that by the time you actually get to wherever it is you have all the resources you need to be there.

I grew between ten and twenty, I’ve grown between twenty and thirty. I’ve discovered whole new dimensions in which to grow. The same thing will surely happen between thirty and forty, and it makes sense that it will happen in ways that I can’t see from where I am now, and it makes sense that I would be a little bit scared of that.

This, I think, is why people get so irritated about people who are younger than they are stressing about their next big birthday. There are lots of people who have got to forty who know that their thirties were brilliant and amazing, and they have forgotten that they didn’t know that at the time.

More on Cambridge

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In the latest round of the never-ending quest to sort my head out, I have been going through old diaries, and I found this, from about eighteen months ago:

Cambridge is cold and windy, and beautiful in the winter light, and a little bit aloof.

That was when I was living in Guildford and going up to Cambridge once or twice a month to see Tony, and wondering whether I would ever actually be able to live there. I found the city terribly intimidating: it’s so old, and so full of terrifyingly clever people. In all fairness, I was intimidated by Guildford when I first moved there: so full of terrifyingly rich people.

I’ve been in Cambridge a year now, and we are beginning to become acquainted. There are some parts – my cycle ride to and from the station; the section of the Cam from the Green Dragon in Chesterton up to Baits Bite Lock – that I pass through daily or weekly. I can find my way around the city centre without a map now. I’ve been doing lots of walking – I always explore a new place on foot, if I can. But there’s still an awful lot that I haven’t discovered. There’s probably a lot that I’ll never discover.

One of the loveliest things has been discovering Cambridge with other people. One of them has known Cambridge longer than I’ve been alive, and dragged me off to Fitzbillies for the best Chelsea bun in the world. One grew up in Cambridge – and gave me a long list of pleasant places to eat and wander in. One had never visited before – and we downloaded a walk from the internet and found all the colleges. My father came to stay and went for a drink in the Mitre – where, he casually mentioned, his grandfather had almost certainly drunk before him. That made it better.

I like Cambridge. I like the cherry blossom and the pale yellow stone and the rowers. I like the way that everybody cycles and how ridiculously easy it is to get to London. I like the college arms that line the staircase in Boots. I like the Te Deum windows in Great St Mary’s. I like the Renoirs in the Fitzwilliam and the Chelsea buns in Fitzbillies. I like the charity shops on Burleigh Street.

There are probably all sorts of other things I like, but I haven’t got round to them yet. No matter. There’s plenty of time.