A Fat Purple Fig

Tuesday announces our outing to Winchester, and its famed cathedral. We walk to Woolston station, in the first stage of a carefully-planned day. I am reminded of how much I love trains, not so much for their mechanics, as for the way they support a community at work and leisure. Social norms are reflected in public transport, in the way people share close quarters with one another, although, here, I spy nothing of particular note.

Easter Sunday brings a heavy hangover and, mercifully, a late barbeque. Our driver is cooler than us, and mans the stick shift like a weapon. As we tear down Southampton’s streets, I try to pinpoint the key differences between the suburbs here and those at home, and particularly those in the inner west of Sydney, where there is a multitude of terraces and space is at a premium. I am familiar with the narrow streets and limited parking, and the compact rooms and squares of outdoor space. It is different here though. We may have more vegetation, and they may have more exposed brick, but it’s hard to say.

Part I

‘We’re going on a little walk’, my cousin announces, as I open the front door. Marley, her enthusiastic Labrador, pushes past me with an excitement that I struggle to match.

This post has been standing over me for months, frowning in disappointment. I’m not sure why it has been so difficult to write. One possibility is my tendency to leave the final episode of beloved shows unwatched, so that they don’t end, and there need be no line drawn beneath them. Another is that, upon returning home, I lose the nirvana of writing without the competing forces of stress and tedium pressing me at every turn.

Of course, I can also be a lazy shit…so there’s that.

After a bit of a reading drought, I have just finished American Dirt, purchased, off-the-cuff, at Waterstones in Dumfries, along with Wolf Hall, which suffered such extremes of absorption and abandonment on the flight home, it will eventually require a re-start.

Morning brings a Starbucks coffee from a building they don’t deserve, and a disorderly plan that begins at Lower Slaughter, winds its way down to Bath, then heads to our final destination, Southampton.

I feel sorrowful as we strip the Scottish-scarf hooks in our Longtown home, farewell the post-box wearing his jaunty tam-o-shanter (almost!), and set off for Broadway, in the Cotswolds.

What to do on our last day fuelled much discussion. Kirkcudbright for seafood? Exploring Kenmure Castle? The Glasgow Mural Trail? Unfortunately, our plumber had different ideas, with his time frame to replace Jimmy’s leaking pipe encompassing most of the sunlit hours of the day. In retrospect, we should have declared our need to explore more of Scotland an emergency.

‘Ye’ll be wantin’ tae see castles then?’ Jimmy asks, as he polishes his shoes and reaches for his shoe horn, ‘Aye, right.’ And we are off for our drive, the sun peeking momentarily through patches of cloud to tease us with the promise of light and warmth.

There comes a point in a new environment when you begin to truly inhabit it. We have achieved a rhythm of living in Dodge City; waking and writing, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, and watching Britain’s Best Home Cook on Netflix, in the brief moments between changing into pyjamas and falling, exhausted, into bed.