and she worked that earth into your bones

Life still chaotic, but good. I have emily_shore visiting me, but she, being a sensible person who keeps sensible-person hours, is asleep. I went to fetch her from Lime Street today, and showed her around various bits of Liverpool, and saw them again myself for the first time. (It's a cliché, but it really is interesting, the way you see familiar places anew throught other people's eyes.) We wandered around Hope Street and the Albert Dock and such, but most notably, they have re-opened the bombed-out church to the public. It's the old church on the top of Bold Street, which is unremarkable until you walk past and notice the trees are growing on the inside; it was bombed in 1941, but neatly and perfectly, so the roof is gone and the walls are perfectly intact. Seen from inside, it's astonishing - overgrown and sunlit and eerie. The artists currently occupying it have dehumidified the crypt and poured the water into a stone font at the front in a strange baptismal parody. It's gorgeous and strange.

Let me see, what else? I got back from Edinburgh yesterday, and it, too, was gorgeous and strange. It's a funny place on my mental landscape; I hadn't been there since 1991, and remembered it in a high-coloured four-year-old sort of way, but there's another current to it - my mother, on hearing that I was taking the London to Edinburgh train, got somewhat concerned. "Be careful," she said, "it's a long way."

"Longer than here to San Francisco?" I said - but that's not it. My mother arrived in this country or the first time in January of 1985, and the first of it she saw was the landscape from the train to Edinburgh. For her, it's all tied up with culture shock and distance, not the distance up the country but the setting out across continents and oceans, the sort of journey I will never make, the sort of journey that belongs to another era. (Among the first lines of Angels In America:

"Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes — because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home."

Yes. Yes, that. It is the sort of journey that belongs to the past.)

So I understand, I think, her concern, and her amazement at change and the passage of time, that I was going up to Edinburgh just like that, just because I wanted to, with no epic undercurrents, that how what's normal changes. I was thinking about that today, showing emily_shore the part of the city where I was born, the pretty windowboxes on houses off Hope Street, which I remember through many years and a haze of murk. Speaking of which, Edinburgh seemed in strange flashes to be like home - like the north of England, it has pubs and cold sea air and shops that sell unidentified meat wrapped in pastry, it has stonework and elevation, it has lots of rain.

We didn't do a whole lot, while we were there. We walked around and avoided the worst of the Festival crush, we looked at bookshops, we climbed (some of) Arthur's Seat and looked down at the landscape rolling out to the water, we got rained on. I took a lot of pills. On Monday, we went to St Andrews to see hathy_col - it was her birthday, and I had promised lunch and to take her to the fair.

Well, there was a fair. The Lammas Fair turned out to be very very very loud and raucous phenomenon with lots of lurid rides, so we ran away and escaped with ice-cream down to the water, watching the gulls diving for fish. It was picturesque, and this time, no one threw raspberry sorbet at the indigenous Scots. Instead, in the spirit of gender subversion, I went back to the fair, stopped at a stall with a dartboard and won shimgray a pink elephant. It is a very, very pink elephant. He was only grateful I did not win him a VERY BIG pink elephant, which was a distinct possibility; I am apparently better at darts than I remember. Nevertheless. He is now the owner of a pink elephant called Hannibal.

Colleen, meanwhile, is the owner of a chirruping lizard and a cake shaped like Tom Baker, because stupidore is astonishing and made one out of chocolate brownies. I was impressed. We spent the rest of the afternoon watching daytime television - I have spent so long without one, I now watch it in the manner of one amazed by the magic tellybox - which was much more fun that it sounds, and we returned to Edinburgh with Hannibal in tow.

So, I am home right now, and I move back to Oxford on Sunday. And now, sensible-person sleeping patterns.