Onward!!

“Umm, I’ve got a book that’s on the essential reading list but it’s not available anywhere. I don’t think it’s been published yet.”

“OK let me check,” I say and search through for the title, finding it. True enough, no holdings as yet. But then there’s over 2 months of 2009 left, and the book is marked as being published this year.

I tell him this, instructing him to come back later.

“It’s a bit strange that they’d do that,” he complains in his drawl.

“It’s quite normal for professors to put forthcoming titles on reading lists. You have ages before the exams.”

“Yeah, but it’s essential reading. It’s the course book. I’m supposed to have read part of it in the first week.”

Sorry we can’t do anything about the space-time continuum, bub. The book simply doesn’t exist yet. And teaching for your course? A week away yet.

Sitting in my flatmate’s bedroom, typing away on short articles for her online mag, some of us leaning out of the window smoking, all of us sipping some red wine. The air outside is warm, unseasonably warm for the time of year. Thom Yorke’s solo album is playing, filling the gaps in our chatter. There are no sounds from the road outside the window, no traffic and no people.

The Irish girl who’s visiting is showing her captain’s hat she got in the charity shop underneath where she lives. It suits her quirky features.

I should probably sleep but it’s just too chilled to go to bed just yet.

Brighton is a world away from London. It’s hard to think that everything that happened over the weekend there occurred in the space of only 24 hours. I have no idea how newspapers do their “48 hours in X” features, as they never seem to sleep in them and I was shattered despite getting some shuteye between Saturday and Sunday. I was better for it, too, as some people in our loose group were looking decidedly worse for wear.

It was wonderful sitting on the beach, watching the sun go down and then basking in the glimmering lights from the Pier having some drinks and laughing a lot. It wasn’t too cold that night, though there was a cold undercurrent in the wind that picked up on occasion. Watching the dark sea glittering from the lights by the promenade after getting out of the pub was pretty cool.

It’s turned decidedly autumnal since. Right now it’s bucketing down and my normally light-grey hoodie was the colour of graphite by the time I made it home from work today. I think it’s time to start carrying, if not wearing, a coat.

I remember sitting in a high school computer class on 9/9/99. That’s exactly ten years ago. Then we were discussing whether operating systems would freak out because some sort of interrupt routine used a row of nines as its trigger or somesuch. I whizzed through the programming exercise and browsed internet forums, looking out through the horizontal blinds in the window.

I remember thinking about University, and whether I’d attend one that had a lush green campus like the American prospectuses always showed. I was sure I’d do something related to biology then. Weird, how differently things panned out. Even three years ago I thought I would be making a kind of return to that idea when I decided to do Environmental Policy. Turns out it had nothing to do with it. You could argue the way it was taught had little to do with any tangible “environment” at all.

There’s that sense of grey melancholy in the air again, so reminiscent of this time last year.  The day is getting  a little bit shorter, especially when it’s overcast or misty like it was over the weekend in Shrewsbury. London will no doubt hold on to heat and light a bit longer, but in more rural Shropshire it did feel like autumn was setting in, little by little. It reminds me of that bittersweet weekend in August in Finland when you knew summer was over and you had to be in school on Monday morning. For a long time, that meant leaving for me, slipping to another reality in another country. That made it more dramatic. But even though it did, and still does, feel wrenching, it is beautiful too.  There’s something appealing about the greyness of the season, especially strongly exhibited in this country, of wearing woolen jumpers and coats and things. I do love the summer but I want to embrace the oncoming fall. I feel I should gear up and just walk, experience it, smell it in the air like I can in the spring when winter’s back is finally broken.

I’m looking back to that expectant feeling of what I thought London would be like, and find myself being somewhat disappointed that it didn’t match up. But when I think to my retained glimpses of memory of what it was really like, I think of that October night we took a walk around the perimeter of the local park for the first time, the sky turning black above us and the street and big houses being lit up by the yellow streetlights. I think of her being worried and me too, a bit, but sure we’d hit something familiar soon and find the way home.

I think of standing on the high bridge holding train station and looking across the expanse of ugly, near-pointless old buildings that nonetheless served a purpose and that sheltered, such as they did, people trying their best at life.

Part of me is a bit sad at having left rough south London. Part of me wants to live in a small town somewhere, knowing the neighbours and having it all feel familiar. There’s parts of London that I feel at home with, but others make me feel like a definite stranger.