Back to Bath

What to do when a particularly stressful second semester turns your brain into a pancake (and I mean the thin holey kind, not the fruit-and-syrup-clad puffed up American kind), and leaves you unable to form one coherent thought, let alone write?

Breathe life into a three-year old draft!

Actually, these pictures have some kind of relevance, albeit tenuous. It's almost exactly three years since I took this trip to Bath for my 21st birthday. Everything glowed in that June light, glowed with promise and contentedness. I was older, wiser, happier. I wasn't tired of taking photographs or writing about them. I was old enough to know what I liked, but young enough to feel like my future was some faraway thing I could idle towards at my own leisure. (Fast-forward to now: I wear the same shoes, I still take photographs of cow parsley, but everything is tinged with worry about my future, about money, about how 'time comes to us all'.) The smell of wild garlic, clustered in the woods that circle Bath, will always remind me of this feeling of tranquility and ease. When girls came of age years ago, they got access to their money, a debutante dress, and maybe a husband. When I came of age I got sun-speckled hills, midsummer weather, and wild garlic. A special time.

Also, the Bath trip took place a week before Springsteen played London, twice. Two nights that changed my horizon for good. Next week I see him play twice again.

I'd argue this latter connection is the more important one.

Dubrovnik, last August

It is hot, close, limp, the morning I arrive in Dubrovnik airport, confused by time differences after an overnight stop in Helsinki. A half-asleep car ride along the coastline to our airbnb apartment. Stumbling to the local Konzum in the hazy midday heat: bread and cheese and tomatoes: then sparko all afternoon. Our first night in the Old Town, a harbourside meal and walking down the Stradun, revellers and religious processions all around, for it's a Croatian national holiday. 

Sunday morning, walking back into the Old Town. The first drops fall as we approach the gate; by the time we're within the walls, the rain is torrential and we take shelter in a Franciscan monastery, embroiled in a group of jovial American tourists. The silent, glittery lightning that accompanied us on the way home last night has found its voice. Thunder, loud and crackly, and rain so hard it cascades down the stones of the steep side streets and pours off the edges of restaurant awnings. We scurry from monastery to gift shop: stand in a doorway watching a parade of ponchos trudge past, every part of them flattened down with water. 

A dry spell, and pizza, which defeats us. Inside a dark room off a side street is an incredible war photography exhibition documenting conflict in the Central African Republic and, more recently and more locally, the nineties Yugoslavian fall-out. The images remind me of the extraordinary power of photography, and its often uneasy beauty when the subject is so ugly.

A visit to the museum of modern art, housed in a beautiful old building by the sea with windows that stretch up two floors. A slow, lingering walk back to the apartment, where we eat peaches and chocolate. 

Monday morning, Croatian plum tea in bed, a hair wash. There was an enormous crack of thunder again last night, and rain so loud I thought it had burst through the windows. It is still raining so we catch the bus into town, visit a dire ethnography museum. In a cafe that looks more New York than Dubrovnik we sit on stools at the bar, drink really good, strong, black coffee, talk about Mad Men and fifties music. Dean Martin is playing. But it is busy and we leave for a Dominican monastery, laugh at the medieval depictions of baby faces. 

The last of the storm clouds rattles on down the coast and the sun is back, and the town's identity transformed. Lunch on the harbour by the fishing boats and then iced coffee on the stone veranda of the Rector's House. A peek inside the cathedral, and by now the sky is blue, emptied completely of clouds. 

We walk the walls of the Old Town, sea of orange roofs one way, sea of blue waves and foamy flecks the other. There are people jumping high off the rocks into the water. 

Later we buy a bag of crisps and watch the sun set on the harbour arm, then head to a vegetarian restaurant on a lantern lit street. The food is incredible. 

Tuesday now, and we buy food from a central Konzum and catch a boat to Lokrum Island, walk its perimeter talking about the Famous Five and smugglers, sit on pale blue towels with our picnic and our books. Flick ants away, doze, read. Later I wander in jelly shoes down to the rocks and the water where a few families swim. I sit looking out at the sea for a while: trace circles in the gentle waves with my big toe. 

Back to the mainland: sitting at the back of the boat watching its white tail arc off gracefully toward the horizon. Aperol spritz in a square, the sun glowing off the marbled buildings, turning them orange and yellow. Later, roaming an unexplored side of the city, cigarette tips glowing in the night.

The last morning: a paper bag full of pastries and a zigzag down many steps to the beach. The water is extraordinarily still and I swim lengths, float like a starfish, feel safe among the mottled green cliffs. Breakfast on the beach. To our left a family of five eat peaches before scrambling back into the water: to our right a boy skims stones with his grandmother. 

A final lunch at the vegetarian restaurant that was so good, then suddenly we are in a car again, heading towards the airport, sorting liquids into a clear bag, the first drops of rain starting to fall.

* * * * * * *

cameras: iphone 4 / olympus trip 35

a few places mentioned:
Pizzeria Domenica
War Photo Ltd
Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik
Nishta vegetarian/vegan restaurant
Bellevue Beach

Two hundred hours

In the last ten weeks I’ve spent two hundred hours either creased and crumpled on trains and buses, or blown to bits along Waterloo Bridge, or hunched at draughty bus stops trying to avoid the drunkard’s eye. I watch the city slide past me: late at night, the streets glistening with life; or during the quiet midday, suspended alongside brick and window on high line trains that pull serenely past the scurrying Thames, blocks of sunlight clasped in their empty carriages. I’ve inhaled the morning waft of suited males and the evening tang of crisps and gin. 

I love the regular faces: the bearded hipster on the bus looking out of place in this corner of suburbia, the three schoolgirls who always meet at the bus stop outside Tesco, the girl who clutches a different homemade cake every Thursday, the heavy breather watching Seinfeld on his ipad, the fine-boned Asian boy with a man bun and tortoiseshell glasses who sits, eyes closed, so still on such a busy train. The tanned man in tight jeans with a handbag. I sat next to him once in my tomboy clothes, and there was a strange moment when we simultaneously crossed legs at the knee, his movement far more graceful and feminine than mine'll ever be. 

Then there's the disorientating transition between leaving the house in the early morning black, feeling like you're the only person alive in the world, and thirty minutes later boarding one of the sweaty sardine tins herding hordes of suits into the city. Arriving to class late, damp and frazzled. 

I happened to be reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust on many of these journeys. And what she says about how modern transport messes up our idea of space, time, scale - our idea of what it is to be human - played itself out as a real life example every day I made that seventeen mile journey between home and city. It was hard to connect the suburbs with the city: the suburban girl with the city girl. Living in the middle of London last year, whenever I came home to the suburbs I felt overwhelmingly different, like I was pulling on somebody else's clothes. This year that feeling repeated itself daily. By the time I’d stepped off the train at Waterloo and breathed the grimy, busy air I was somebody else entirely, with different priorities and preoccupations. And in the evenings, with every inch I was tugged back towards home, I could feel myself shedding that identity. To commute for four hours a day is to be in a permanent state of transition, without actually getting anywhere - it is to be two different people at the same time.

I complain a lot about commuting but actually, the secret is I quite like it. Not the dandruffed shoulders of middle aged men in the morning, not the gladiator tactics of traversing Waterloo Station at rush hour, not the lady at the bus stop who went into great detail about her toe operation while I cast my eye desperately down the road, not the buses that smell of hot breath and squashed stale crisps. 

No, I love the travel, and the knowledge that for a certain amount of time I don't have to do anything, make any decisions, be anyone. I am neither here nor there. I love it when two trains converge to run alongside each other and for a few minutes the two bouncing interiors are not-quite reflections of each other, and my reflection is of somebody else.

___________________

'They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge whence they will be swung in long rattling trains, still dreaming, to some prim little villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.'

- Virginia Woolf