The countryside of the south: greener, more crowded, but gentler and more civilized. The truth is, I’d probably be more at ease down here, rather than the raw, chilly north where I’ve landed. The sheer density of people seems to soften things: making, I’m sure, more crowded resentments – but also, always, more alternatives, more alternate paths, to allow one to get away from what is unbearable. Maybe that’s the answer….
Another answer, which has lately been appearing in my imagination: as we write and rewrite this grant to work with and in South Africa, I think: what if, in four or five years – assuming this grant is successful – I were offered a job down there? Especially in Cape Town, which could be the replacement for all my failed dreams of life in Sydney. Just think of it….
***
Stopping in Exeter. I think of the strange image that Exeter people, and especially Exeter girls, have in the British popular imagination – trashier and more inane than any colonial would expect from anyone growing up so near to London. And in such utter contrast to A., who is herself an Exeter girl – but all charm, like those-lovely-people-next-door, full of sweet British middle-classness, a peaches and cream complexion, and plump, friendly pleasantness. Nothing like the alley-cat stereotype: the example that disproves (?) the rule…
[CORRECTION: two weeks later... V. has told me that A. is not from Exeter, but Essex, adding: "As far as I know we don't make fun of Exeter girls." Ah well: my grasp of British geography, as always a bit shaky – do you know, I still don't really get the difference between Birmingham and Bristol?... they're both in the south somewhere....]
***
Along the southern coast of this island, we ride, look long at the sea: a calmer, less northern sea than the one off Northumbria – one that would be a bit easier to live with, I think. Boats. Bridges. Houses nestled in small harbors along soft hills and inlets. Fields outlined in hedges – that schematic of cultivated land that divides spaces up into fields and meadows that can become such easy friends. The northern lands are dramatic to visit but, unlike my colleagues who have grown up there, I haven’t been able to discover any real comfort or affection for them – it would be easier to live here, I think.
And, of course: a southern, quasi-tropical ocean would be even easier than that….
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