It was such a gorgeous day yesterday that I took my lunch out and sat in the garden. It brought back memories of three years ago, summer 2005, a time pre-blogging, pre-cat-incident, pre-European travel, pre-parish councils, pre-creative writing course/group. Did I feel a kind of contentment then? More so, perhaps, than since, though I don’t have any recollection of being ‘happy’. I will see if I can dig out my diaries from then.
I had been out of work for two years, I had made quite a lot of progress on my novel, the most progress I ever made. But that was the year I didn’t write a single conference paper. I had a journal paper published, but I’d written that the year before, for the Times Higher essay competition, and when it didn’t get anywhere I sent it to a guy I know in Cambridge who is editor of a journal and likes my stuff, he accepted it without any changes, which was very gratifying.
It was the first time since our daughter was born (1989) that we didn’t have a family holiday, the first time in ten years that I didn’t go to a particular conference (usually held in the States or Canada except for 2003, when it was in London) and the year before I started going regularly to the one in Oxford; the first time since 1994 that I didn’t cross the Atlantic.
Mostly what I remember of that summer is days drifting by aimlessly, of walking round the garden in the mornings with the cat (we only had the one then), feeding the fish, fretting over what I should be doing and where my life was going. It seems like it could have been quite idyllic, but I won’t fall into the trap of idealising it, I remember clearly enough the feelings of emptiness and guilt. Although I wasn’t working in the sense that I am now (and hence also wasn’t getting paid), I was always conscious of all the things I should be doing, the work that needed doing on the house and the garden, the novel, the research that wasn’t getting done, always the feeling that I was wasting my time, that I wasn’t getting anywhere, that I’d got stuck, I needed something to shake me out of my complacency.
So, I don’t look back on those days with nostalgia for the kind of contentment I felt then. I was in a compilation show celebrating all the shows our group had done down the decades. There was a song in it, I think it was from ‘The Boyfriend’, a solo for a young woman, so I didn’t actually sing I but it stuck in my mind, called ‘I sit in the sun’. It was about how everyone is trying to pressure her into finding a husband, but all she wants to do is sit in the sun, and the last line of the chorus is:’ I might be in love by the end of the Season’. And I would sit in the sun with the same sense of aimlessness and lack of direction and think about all the things I should be doing and wasn’t and wonder if this was all there was or whether something was about to change.