The plasterer working on our new kitchen is standing by the skip when the previous owner of the house walks up and drags out the old worktop. ‘This is mine,’ he says amicably, and takes it away.
By the time they reach the long avenue of limes, Leo has been talking about mindfulness for at least 30 minutes. His years of meditation practice allow him to be totally grounded and open to the world around him. Beatrice doesn’t know what she’s missing. Hoping to change the subject Beatrice says ‘Don’t you love the scent of the lime blossom?’ ‘What lime blossom?’ Leo replies.
We go out to buy floor tiles for the kitchen and return 7 hours later with a garden chair, two mannequin heads (one polystyrene, one wrought iron), a goldfish bowl, three pairs of bamboo socks and a wallet made in India from recycled leather.
At 3.30 a.m. we are woken by what sounds like a choir of angels. I get up, stare out at the deserted street, get back into bed. The music gets louder. I stagger from bedroom to study and find that my stereo has switched itself on and is playing I Fagiolini singing Thomas Tallis’ ‘Spem in alium’, a recording we do not have on any app, CD or vinyl.
In the morning I message the director of I Fagiolini with the story. His reply: ‘How very alarming. Still, good choice….’
A sunny Saturday afternoon. A few gardens away a neighbour is reprimanding someone. It’s not a child or a dog. It’s Siri.
‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people who moan all the time,’ she complains.
The sign on top of the cabinet displaying rhubarb and rosemary scones, chocolate brownies and apricot flapjacks says ‘Menus without calories are available’.
Four and a half years after my godfather died and we filled in mountains of forms to wind up his affairs, I receive a letter from J. P. Morgan stating that there are ‘further cash balances’ on his account. I send them the documents they ask for.
Two weeks later they return one document but not my bank statement, and say they are ‘unable to verify’ my bank details. I phone them and a polite man tells me he can find no record of the outstanding ‘cash balance’ or of my bank statement. I send them a second bank statement. A week later I receive a letter stating they are posting me a cheque. Two days later I receive a letter by Special Delivery thanking me for my documents and telling me I can register online, which proves impossible. Six weeks after their original letter I receive a letter explaining how to access their privacy notice. There is no sign of any cash.
The most popular question on Google about this investment company is ‘What exactly does J. P. Morgan do?’
The white tulips in a white jug on my kitchen table are gradually turning pink, a gentle tint spreading from the petal tips, like chromatography. They were brought by our friend whose husband died one day last summer, out of the blue. One minute she was messaging him from France about the children, the next his heart had stopped. He was 53.
Sometimes there is just too much loss. It’s not only, in my life, the deaths of the older generation, the sister who hasn’t spoken to me since my father died, the beloved nephew who wants nothing to do with me. It’s the crumbling infrastructure, the disappearance of shops and cafés we’ve used for decades, the dumbing down of all forms of culture. We go to see The Magic Flute in London and find it turned into something more like pantomime, with crude jokes, audience participation and no magic. Too many people have disappeared from my life, I miss the family home I used to dread visiting, my friend of 45 years has moved to the other end of the country.
Another friend has relocated to Vietnam, married a local woman and started keeping chickens. He sends long emails from his adopted country, where he doesn’t speak the language and is mystified by the rituals. His messages read like reports from an anthropologist. The importance of funerals, the use of the lunar calendar, the symbolism of the peach tree. There’s a lot about traffic, air quality and, of course, food. At one meal he asks his partner’s extended family what it is they love most about Hanoi. One says the seasons, another the accent, a third the street food. The youngest person present opts for ‘pho’ (noodle soup). ‘What would you say is the thing you love most about the city or place you live?’ my friend asks, not really wanting an answer.
Someone asked me recently why I stayed in Oxford. Cycling, the only practical way to get around the city, is terrifying, the tourists drive you crazy, house prices are absurd. There’s a nasty snobbery from the kind of people who pretend they don’t know who you are, even though they’ve met you five times, somehow combined with a lacklustre provincialism. But this is my home.
The colleges are way ahead of the country in approaching zero carbon, couriers use cargo bikes, we have a micro-hydro generator just around the corner. My Osney neighbours include a cellist, a man who restores historic buildings, two Guardian journalists, a lawyer who works with migrants, a script writer and a very deaf octogenarian who walks miles a day at astonishing speed.
Every Friday morning I walk down the river with my friend Anna, and around Christ Church Meadow. The early-morning rowing eights on the misty river, the cowslips and fritillaries in the long grass, the beech trees coming into leaf. There is yoga in the perfect little studio two minutes from my house, purple-sprouting broccoli from our allotment across the road, the walk through town to the cinema in which we own shares.
And there is music.
On a Monday afternoon in March, almost by chance, we find ourselves in New College Antechapel, listening to a world-class opera singer teach four already excellent young musicians. The opera diva is between performances at the NY Met, Beijing and Oslo. Tickets for the masterclass are free, it has barely been publicised, there are about 30 people in the audience. This is Oxford.
One of the young singers is visibly shaking as he starts to perform, another can’t stop herself breaking into laughter. All of them sing beautifully at the start of the class, and all are transformed by the work she does with them. The focus, whether it is on breathing, characterisation, dramatic tension or which notes to emphasise, is all about putting more feeling into the delivery. ‘Don’t throw in all the emotion at the start’, she tells the flamboyantly dressed counter tenor. ‘You have to build up to it.’ As a teacher she is affirming, tough, generous, perceptive, persistent. As a woman she is like an injection of life. ‘Once you’ve mastered technique,’ she says, ‘it’s all about what happens in your head. The permission to be great has to come from you.’
As the session progresses the sun moves round the Antechapel. She stops teaching, clasps her hands, looks up. ‘We’re so lucky to be here,’ she says. ‘Look at those windows.’ Above the hunched marble figure of Epstein’s Lazarus are Joshua Reynolds’ heroic, pale West Window Virtues, glowing with light.
‘The secret of happiness is for nothing to happen’, says my current hero, photographer Saul Leiter. I agree. My favourite days are those with no agenda. Empty hours when I can sit and think, notice what’s around me, become absorbed in pruning the lavender or making something from scraps of silk and a bit of felt. Such days are still, for me, a rarity. My time is no longer the complex jigsaw of working life, when I would literally run around the supermarket en route from work to gym to home, and set my own records for cycling between key places on my personal map of Oxford. Maybe my tolerance of time pressure has receded. I feel oppressed now by days with more than three things in the diary. I’ve never been someone who talks about ‘filling their time’.
I started to feel a bit panicky therefore, when a friend I haven’t seen for months messaged to say she and her husband would be in the area the following day, could they call in? That day was already ‘full’ with commitments, but I changed some timings, got a good night’s sleep and faced it as you would an endurance test.
My plans were not exactly arduous. An early morning walk with my neighbour Anna, skirting the stinky quagmire of flood water formerly known as the local park. Coffee with another neighbour in the café that roasts its own beans. Homemade soup for lunch in my kitchen. A not-too-terrifying cycle across town to visit an old friend and read about photography together. A circuitous and energetic ride home in the sunshine, avoiding the Friday traffic, dodging e-scooters, pedestrians, those cars that for some reason have to drive in the bike lane.
As I pedalled down Bridge Street to my house I felt happier than I had all week, energised, alive. The day was nothing like as pressured as I’d feared. I’d read three hilarious and thought-provoking essays about, you guessed it, Saul Leiter, with my friend Simon. And here, at the end of the afternoon, knocking on the door, were Julia and Andrey, one of the couples from Ukraine we befriended when they came here fleeing the war. Julia burst in like the sunshine, bringing flowers for International Women’s Day, a big smile, a new haircut. Two years on from their arrival in the UK they live in a sunny flat in a seaside town which offers little to do except go for long walks. Finding a job that is anything above menial is difficult in the UK, and Andrey spends most of his time working overseas, but their kids love being by the sea, go to football and dance after school, eat ice creams on the beach in summer. Andrey shows me their oldest child’s school report: straight As in every subject.
Revisiting Oxford is strange for them. ‘We were here for just 5 months when we arrived in the UK, Julia says. ‘I had no idea where I was, what I was doing. My body was here but my mind was in Ukraine.’ She packed to leave their Kiev flat in 20 minutes, as the windows shattered and the building shook.
I think of the hours we spent together at her kitchen table filling in forms, phoning the council, uploading documents. Trying to navigate the labyrinthine systems of the DWP, HMRC, Home Office, while the children made forays into the room in search of sweets, apples, the iPad password. It seems like a far-off time to both of us, but I still have all the WhatsApp messages, which tell a story by themselves. ‘Any news from council about school?’ ‘Thank you for helping in this exhausting process.’ ‘I don’t know what to do and where to call.’ ‘Received a message from JC. It says “you should have received an SMS from DWP about applying for NIN by now”.’ ‘Could you please help me make this difficult call?’ Looking back through the messages I’m appalled at what the UK put these people through – not just the confusion and unresponsiveness of central and local government, but the brutality and laziness of banks, letting agents, employers. And I’m surprised by my own consistent tone of calm reassurance, even though I was barely one step ahead of Julia, my only real advantage having English as a native language.
It is still almost light when Julia and Andrey leave. On a workday Friday I would not yet have been home. The tree across the street is showing a green haze of new leaves. It is time to draw the curtains, start to cook, open a bottle of wine. Julia and Andrey are heading back to their home on the south coast where nothing much happens – a sunset over the sea, a walk to visit their friends across the railway bridge, a fox in the garden. I don’t know if they would describe themselves as happy. But these days her texts are about the weather, World Book Day, how much the children are eating.
janebuekett 