Return to the Mothership

Greetings, Earthlings.


I, for one, feel like I’ve been on Planet Xendor for the last month. I think the best way to go through things is sequentially, so, starting from the top:

I had my last day in London. I was on my own, bar lunch with a certain Go-getter, and I took a bit of a wander. I started at our house in Dartmouth Park, and I toodled down into the fabulous Kentish Town, stopped short of Camden and swung through Somers Town. It was a glorious day until I reached Russell Square and a pizza lunch with the Go-getter, where as the storm clouds gathered, I heard of his myriad impressive plans all stacking up on eachother with their deadlines and possibilities. Take that, pathetic fallacy. I told him of my plans, the agency set-up, the footloose and fancy-free feeling of having no more possessions in my life bar the roller bag and the duffel I was taking home from Gatwick.

I went on up to Islington, which is a great place to go when you’ve nowhere else to be. Full of life-affirming baked goods, expensive furniture, killer jewellery and antiques, it says ‘Waste time here – you know you want to.’ And I did.

It poured, but I took slow buses and thought about not very much and said goodbye. It felt like a great release.

And then I came home.

Irritating, the Maternal One refused to come to the airport, but I made it back home through throngs of Celine Dion fans. More or less immediately thereafter, I went back up to Dublin to meet the cousin. For some reason, I was vaguely dreading it – something to do with a combination of exhaustion and trepidation about entertaining a travelling newbie for a week.

My fears were unfounded and all was well. We toddled around Dublino, saw a couple of near and dear, did some sights, had some pints, went to the beach in the blazing sun, had cocktails, and that was a week. We talked about our shared family, nothing at all, Ireland and college life in Greenville, North Carolina. It was nice to get to know someone else in the family as if they were a real person, rather than a Christmas ornament. I spent my first and only stinky, hot summer in Washington with a different cousin once to the same effect, and I hope to work my way through all of them by the time I hit thirty.

When she left, I slept for sixteen hours. Then, I started to work.

I haven’t worked with such concentration and enjoyed my work or learned so much since I left college. This says to me that I’ve made the right move.

Not wanting to completely cut myself off in the seaside calm, I was up in Dublin for Writers Week, and got to see the wonderful Mr. Jones in conversation with John Boyne and Claire Kilroy, whose work I like very much. It was a slightly nervous set-up, hung on the tenuous connection of the South Seas – but it was a gorgeous introduction to the two baldy gents’ writing. A few days later, I had an infinitely less inspiring evening watching Hugo Hamilton ask poor David Grossman a slew of facile literary questions topped off with the breathtaking rhetorical on the Middle East, ‘I mean, how can you guys find it so hard? We showed you how to do it with Northern Ireland!’ Um, eight hundred years? So myself and the Editor headed for much-needed light-up pitchers of cheap beer and plates of very tasty sushi. Mine, the Eel Dragon roll, snaked across the plate under its crispy skin and looked at me with wasabi-paste eyes.

I’ve been going steadily on a project that came in three days before I launched the business, which is good, but I haven’t yet established any kind of schedule whereby I can do the task at hand while still setting up the bigger picture. I think that I should be able to do that once I’ve settled in our new house and am cookin’ with gas. It is, however, the uncomfortable, rigid, eyes-on-the-screen, slightly panicked kind of work that you do in your first days in a new job, which I guess I am.


To make my teeth unclench and reconnect with the outside world, I started taking huge walks and much shorter runs – and taking a lot of pictures. The river here is tidal, and goes so low that you can see the trouts’ fins as they roil just below the surface. We now have a pair of snowy egrets up from Africa, who seem to be having a tense relationship with the nesting herons. The ’round Ireland yacht race starts tomorrow, visible from the living room, and the lovely bronzed boaty types are attracting a good bit of, erm, harbour totty, I think Curly would call them.

I miss the Bearded One, but he’s been having much the same intense experience in a different context up in the city, so it’s good this way – but better together.

I feel like myself, and ‘glad to be home’ doesn’t even come close.