Seven o’clock and I’ve finished the sausage I bought in honour of W.’s visit. Salami and Cava and the latest magazines. How was it, I asked W. today on the phone, or did he ask me?, that our Scottish friends can drink so much, all day, all evening and all night, and though they were dreadfully lairy when they rolled in drunk, they seemed perfectly cogent the next morning, when we, if we had tried to match them – and we began drinking with them in the afternoon, but gave up, as always, too soon – would have been wiped out by hangovers?
W. was tender this weekend, remembering the weekend when I stayed with him the time before last, and he spent the whole day preparing for the dinner he would cook us. First of all, the recipe, cut out carefully from a magazine. Then a shopping list, then the trip to the supermarket with Sal, making sure we had everything. Then the walk home, and the long process of cooking. I admit it, I was too hungry – W. has always known I’m a compulsive eater, and I went out for pork scratchings and a fourpack of Stella. Wine and chicken could wait, but when they came, when the chicken was steaming in the middle of the table, I went into a great ecstasy. W. remembers this lovingly.
On another day, I told the story of how W. and I went drinking with X., the esteemed keynote speaker, and walled him in with plates of Cumberland sausages. He was talking sense, he was sincere and serious, he who was also so witty, and we walled him in as he spoke with plate after plate of sausage, mash and gravy, 2 plates for £5. That was in Reading, and we drank the early afternoon and then the evening away. The worst conference we’d ever been to, we said, and we were right. The worst ever! Later, we all got lost in the fog that descended over the campus. X. found his way to the dining room, but W. and I., who were not eating, played pool and then billiards and then darts and chatted with the African students stranded there over the summer.
We were in Oxford last weekend, Zizek amongst us, very amiable. Delighted to see Y., for whom I thought the word pellucid was apt, for he is so clear and fresh and speaks so givingly of himself. With the smokers! R.M. had forgotten her camera. How is it that whenever I attend I think, this is it, this is the last time? We all hate Oxford, of course. It is oppressiveness itself, of course, but we are there to defile it, we are the bone in the throat and wander out looking for lock-ins, scarcely necessary now the licensing hours have been extended.
What are we doing in Oxford! Of all people! On the Friday and Saturday, my stomach playing havoc, I go from cafe to bar to cafe, trying to stay calm. Up the Cowley Road, I find an internet cafe when it is too late. The next day, I take the path which runs opposite Magdalen College, remembering Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy and his Thyrsis and quoting the lines I remember to R.M., who walks beside me. She remembers her mobile phone can take pictures, and we photograph each other in the same locations as I was photographed with others when we came up, my dad and I, for Z’s birthday, and we drank tea in her room before going out for a walk.
We looked for the festal lights of Christchurch Hall in vain. We’d been drinking with the others at The Turf all day, the traditional debriefing pub, pint after pint of Honey Bunny – one gleaming pint after another, sitting first outside, and then around a table inside. It was happiness itself; the hours passed, and I thought, I’m not going home tonight. So I stayed again at St. Hilda’s, crumbs of Lavash bread all over the floor, on condition, said the porter, that I was out by eight A.M. I was out; I cycled out to broad street and sat on the bench where the previous day a tour guide and then one of her party spoke to R.M. and I, the latter telling us of the Chicago Loop and Kansas, where she now lived.
Oxford. I was glad we went out to Jericho, which I had seen on the folding map I had bought from the Tuck Shop. Glad we found the marvellous Greene King pub (what was it called?), with such a solicitous barmaid. Plates of Cumberland sausage – what else? -, pints of another golden beer. The afternoon passed happily, but then W. and I had to find our way back, because he was chairing one of the speakers, whose book we had admired, and were glad to see join us from such a great distance. An hours’ walk, and the others, our Scottish friends, stayed back in the pub. An hour! But we made it in time, and I took notes from the talk, though I was still half-drunk, and even stammered out a question.
That evening, relieved, the speaker from the distant overseas told me what he’d heard happened to J. L., fascinating scholar who resigned from Yale after writing his extraordinary Proximity in 1979, a book I’ve admired as out 20th century equivalent of C.M. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, so strange and rare and intoxicating are its formulations. L. resigned, and after teaching in the Midwest for a while, gave up on academia altogether, slipping away from his friends and his students, and took to writing pulp novels. For my part, I told our speaker, I’d heard L. had become a Jesuit priest.
The pub was crowded, and though R.M., fresh up from London, wanted to stay longer, we were too tired to stay past one A.M. To bed! And didn’t I tell R.M. that we should give up on double beds in preference to the narrow single bed on which we slept enwrapped? The next morning was Sunday, and we went out to Broad Street and the tour guide and the visitor from Kansas. And the next morning, I sat on the same bench, with coffee from cafe creme and a toasted bagel. But I was on my own then, and knew my little holiday was at an end. Happily, I had Sebald’s Vertigo to read on the five hour journey back to my city, my bike hung up from its wheel in the front carriage of the train.
Oxford! And soon enough we will die and those who remember us will die, and we will have all passed from the earth. The planet that turns into light will turn into darkness for us, though there will be others still for whom it will be morning. And what will it have mattered whether we had lived or died? Always that sense when walking through Oxford’s ancient streets: here you matter less than ever, here you and your friends are lighter than dust.
And hadn’t I spoke to the second blogger I’d met in a fortnight? Hadn’t we spoken of the scandals of the blogosphere? Hadn’t she said she demoted my blog out of Denken by mistake? Had I even noticed?, she asked. Later I asked myself: is it immortality I would want by writing? Then the answer: it is to write as one already dead that I want. To write as one dead: hadn’t I looked for Gene Wolfe’s Peace on the shelves of Blackwells, although I already have it, and indeed brought it home tonight in my rucksack? Hadn’t we spoken, the Scots and W. And I and Sal’s delegate in Oxford, and even Y., the most philosophical of our company, of Tarkovsky’s Mirror (which Y. hadn’t seen)?
How exquisite that solitude when you know your friends are close, and you will see them again in the evening! Exquisite to wonder streets along when you know you will see them again, friends and half-friends – for many are companions of the pub, no less friends for that, but friends whose friendship turns around the great third term of alcohol. Half-drunk with half-friends and then wander out onto the streets, simmering with thoughts that haven’t formed themselves yet. Thoughts, half-thoughts, wander past the colleges that are closed for Easter. Remember everything that happened here, and as though you were already at the end of your life, and past it. Remember it all from the other side of your death, as though you were the spirit awoken when the elm tree that grew on your grave had fallen in the night.
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