philosophy supernatural nude

I have been away from home for two weeks. As I had only lived in this house for two weeks and four days before that, I'm feeling a bit discombobulated. Hello, internet.

I spent my first week of holiday at Sabhal Mor Ostaig on Skye, on a short course in beginners' Gaelic. It was - I don't know. Perfect. Beautiful, transformative, all the other inadequate words. Interstitial, perhaps. I have no idea. It was - I went there, and I learned a lot, and the clear space inside my mind is quieter and larger for it. I am supposed to be writing about it under my real name elsewhere, but - haven't. Not yet. Perhaps soon.

I was on Skye for a week, Sunday to Friday, and on a clear, still, beautiful day midway through I went with a new friend to get her ticket for the ferry to the mainland. We'll sell it to you for now, Cal Mac said, but 'ware warning - there probably won't be a Friday sailing. On Thursday night I was at a ceilidh - there was an Orcadian strip-the-willow; they made me sing - and stumbled to bed in a ruffly dress and pink-wine-haze while the weather hit with an oceanic violence. I left the island entirely due to the kindness of strangers and ended up in Glasgow feeling like it was me who had been washed out to sea and returned with smoother edges. I had a booked train south on the Saturday on the west coast line, and it was one of those mornings where everything seems crisp and perfect. I had a table seat and wrote a few hundred words over a cup of coffee while the landscape flashed past.

At Oxenholme I failed to prevent a disaster ("Shall I just step on the train on a moment?" said someone, as I was clambering off. "Just to see you settled in!") and then happydork had texted to say there had been a slight navigation failure, so I sat on the platform for a while drinking more coffee and smiling at strangers, and then the next week after that was just the same kind of contented. I was in the Lake District because last summer I had a bright idea (how about I ask eleven of my closest friends to share a cottage with me in the Lake District for a week?) and wiser minds than mine had brought it to fruition. When I originally looked into it, I found a farmhouse we could rent that seemed big enough, and nice, and in a reasonably pretty part of the Lakes, and suggested it to my friends; it wasn't me who figured out that it was, in fact, the house in Swallows and Amazons, and is still in the ownership of the Altounyan family. I'm still not quite sure how that happened. And then when I actually saw it, it turned out to be an eighteenth-century farmhouse with ancient beams and slate floors, a claw-foot bathtub and a kitchen you could cartwheel in, and a view over the river tumbling through the valley. Over the week I helped cook, did some fetching and carrying, went on shortish walks around the surrounding lakes and fells, and wrote a fair bit at that giant kitchen table, accompanied by people with whom one can be quiet, and the smell of baking bread. I went on a steam train and played Poohsticks on a bridge over the River Leven, and met an owl. Writing is hard, currently; I had a couple of writing-related disappointments, but it's all right, I think. I am still trying.

Back in London, ( anxiety )

Friends! hello. I feel like I don't talk much about things as they go past, these days, and I ought to. My new year's resolution this year was to enjoy more about my charmed life as it happens to me, rather than always driving towards something new. So I am in the habit now of making lists of things that make me happy each day - and if that all sounds rather nineties-self-help-book, the one rule of the game is that it has to be something that did make me happy, and not something that ought to have done. So the lists are all things like "new flavour of Kellogg's breakfast biscuit" and "I got a desk at work today" and "my boss said my grounds of defence were beautiful" and "there was an extra egg in my soup" and "my new dress has a cute dipped hem" and "Jack and Phryne flirted in tonight's Miss Fisher" and "A. told me I was pretty".

(I don't actually think small things are enough for happiness. I think you need deep water for contentment. But I'm no good at surface ripples and that's what this is.)

So I was on holiday! Several days in New York - we got an Air BnB in Williamsburg, which was super hipster but kind of delightful with it; we bought a lot of books at the Strand, hung out with macadamanaity, went to bars, sat in parks, and really didn't very much of note. It was what I wanted. And after that we went to a wedding! Some of you met my cousin N. at my wedding; well, she's married now, after a four-day extravaganza in Indianapolis the week of the Indy 500. I'm not sure what I thought of it. It was very impressive and there were a lot of people, and she seemed very happy, and I suppose that's the part that matters, so. I liked her fiancé very much. He's a nice guy from the south, where wedding traditions are very different. One of my favourites of the southern traditions is the one where the groom gets up early the day before the wedding, gets his umbrella, stick and dhoti, and declares to all that he's going to Kashi (otherwise Varanasi) to be a holy man. Oh no! shout the bride's brothers, chasing him down the street holding pictures of their sister. Don't you dare. Come back and get married.

Okay fine, he says, after they have extolled her virtues to the skies. And everyone comes back and has a decent lunch and lives happily ever after. Unless you have no brothers and have to enlist my male cousins (and my partner) to play the role, and also that your fiancé is very charming - so the boys go to get him back from Kashi, and come back declaring they, too, have seen the light, and wish to renounce all material things and walk barefoot to Varanasi with nothing but what they're standing up in. (Luckily, a family friend has a seventeen-year-old son who was quite the most sensible person in the wedding party. He single-handedly persuaded them all to once again take up the shackles of this life.)

It was a lovely wedding, actually. Lots of ceremonies and a lot of outfits, more than my tolerance for femme, but it had many sweet grace notes in between all of those things. I liked all the hanging out with my cousins, late nights and jet-lagged early mornings. And the outfits are much more bearable in retrospect. Here is a picture of me on the steps of the Indiana Statehouse:

( it's quite pink )

We were due to return on the Sunday, 31 May, and accordingly decamped with an entourage to the airport. After the wedding, just getting to talk to people without rushing about and worrying about outfits and ceremonies was lovely, and I was really sorry, leaving behind my cousins and uncles and aunts and parents at the airport Starbucks. As we went through security, I turned to Shim and said, "That was fun, I wish we'd stayed another day."

Four hours' delay on the domestic. "Oh, well," said the gate agent, "you're going to miss all the transatlantic flights tonight, but we can put you in a hotel for tonight in Newark..."

"No," I said, very firmly, and we picked our bags off the carousel, went downstairs to arrivals, and met my dad doing the next of the day's runs to the airport. And it's funny how these things work, but that extra, halfway-there day, is going to stay with me as one of my favourite things that's happened to me. We went back to the house, where there were still enough guests for a moderately-sized party. We were around to see the bride and groom off on their honeymoon. We ate dosa and sambar in the cool light of the evening. In the morning we went via Dulles - where we were stuck for ten hours, four of which were spent in a plane on the tarmac with malfunctioning air conditioning - and in the end arrived home 28 hours later than planned, but you know, I don't mind? My boss answered my frantic not-coming-to-work email with, try and enjoy yourself, also I got stuck in Nigeria one time for five days, don't worry.

And I didn't. Being on the ground for that extra day was settling. I am trying to stay settled.

Notes on a week in Delhi and Mumbai:

-So this time I flew into Mumbai from London, to visit friends for a couple of days, and it's lovely. Unlike Delhi, it has reasonable weather all year round rather than two months out of twelve, and although it has its problems, it doesn't have Delhi's perennial issues with water. (Lately, in Delhi, you just want to cry watching water go down the drain; it's like throwing away gold dust.) Anyway, so I went to the beach and ate street pav bhaji and saw the Gateway of India (which you can't go in, any more; there was the beautiful open lit empty space inside, occupied only by a police dog having a snooze) and had tea at the Taj and generally was quite, quite useless. It was great. My mental health hasn't been the best, lately, but I think a dose of warmth and sun is never bad. Delhi, once I got there, is in the smoothing-off period, the pre-Diwali time where the shops and businesses are beginning to turn off the air conditioning. It lingered around a pleasant, dry thirty degrees, which was nice.

-Since I was last in India about eighteen months ago, my parents have sold their old house in Delhi, which was by New Delhi Railway Station, and given that it was my father's ancestral house and he did to a greater and lesser extent grow up in it, and also, it was where I spent the little time I did with my paternal grandfather, a deeply formidable gentleman who was kinder and gentler to me than he had ever been to anyone, given all of those things, god, I hated that house. When my father was young it was a nice house in a residential district, running on the rhythms of the railway station (one of the things I did like about it was the brief moment, halfway between wakefulness and sleep, every morning at five am: this is the night mail / crossing the border, in this case, the Kalka Mail), but now it's surrounded by developments, hotels and construction work, and to make things just that little bit worse, the water pressure in the area has long since fallen to basically nothing. We spent four months there the summer I was four, and it was forty-eight degrees in Delhi with no air conditioning or running water, and those days, you had to ring up Emirates to confirm your flights the day before travelling. (Did you know that? I've never met anyone who knew that. We were bumped to standby. I missed my first two months of school. I was put off my ancient and magnificent homeland for not-quite life.)

-(A related note, also: I occasionally see non-South-Asians refer to us as "desi", which is just, beyond not on, from my perspective. "Desh" means, homeland; "desi" means someone from that homeland. To presume to give that word, because it is a gift, is rank imperialism.)

-The new place, oddly enough, is very close to my mother's family. It's in CR Park, the Bengali colony which my maternal grandfather, my Dadu, was instrumental in creating in the seventies, and it's beautiful – it's a second-floor flat with two actual bedrooms (which, in south Delhi, is positively palatial) and trees in leaf brushing up against the windows. I adore it – partly for itself, because it's quiet and clean and comfortable, and as part of my family's continual quest towards non-Western modernity, it's outfitted with Indian-style bathrooms and kitchen, all cool, smooth granite and rattan and ridiculous drapes from Fabindia, and Ikea's finest in the kitchen drawers – and partly because, well. Last night I couldn't sleep, and it was maybe three or four in the morning and I got up, went to the kitchen and got myself an apple and rasmalai from the fridge, and cut the apple and put the rasmalai in the bowl, and sat for half an hour with my laptop, and ate them, then washed up the bowl, spoon and knife and put them in the rack to dry. I think maybe you have to be me to understand the significance of that. But I have my keys to the place. It's my home, too.

CR Park, too, is a good place to live. It was created as a gated community before the phrase acquired the connotations it has now – that is to say, the emphasis is on the second word. It's large and getting larger all the time – we are a short walk from the CR Park police station, CR Park Market No. 4 and the CR Park Kali Mandir Society – but all with that dusty-tree, homely feeling. Annoyingly, it's equidistant between two metro stations, Nehru Place and Kailash Colony, and thus not really walking distance from either, but just as I was complaining about that someone reminded me about the Phase III Metro work, which will build a third radial station closer than either of the others, so really, I'm very happy. I kind of want to take Shim there for a week one winter without telling any of my relatives I'm in town, and just hang out and explore.

-Speaking of which. I can't put my finger on it, and it's kind of frightening, but this kind of middle-class Delhi life has become a lot easier for me to navigate, just recently. I've been married five weeks and those five weeks have done more for my social capital than my previous decade of adult life. And it doesn't matter that Shim wasn't with me, or even that Shim isn't desi; somehow, something has changed. It's deeply insulting, of course, but that's maybe epiphenomenal? I picked up a book in the airport called Lady, you're not a man, which I liked mostly because it's basically a slim Indian feminist tract masquerading as a self-help book, and rule one is, never apologise for being a woman. This is the sort of self-help advice I can get behind. Anyway, so it is insulting, and maybe it is psychologically destructive to be a woman in a society that demands such apology (I applied to get the natural gas pipeline connected; the gas company wanted to know my husband's name before I could apply), but I don't know, I think the best way out is to carry on living the life I do. After all, India is an idea – a grand, ancient idea, for sure, but a thousand dialects and cultures, old states, new states, rural and urban and mixed, 1.1 billion people, one in six of all the people that there are, all pushed together like they fit, like it's possible for them to be one noisy nation, under no god. If there's no room for me in India, then what the hell's the point of it. (One of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, ever, was said by my second-year institutional politics tutor, herself a desi: "She is the argumentative Indian.")

(Rule number whatever in the book is addressed to single women, living in a society that believes they need to be married before they're complete: remember all the other women who support you, cheer you, admire you, are you.. It keeps telling you there's nothing wrong with you and you don't need help, it's the worst self-help book ever.)

( wedding stuff )

Anyway. It can't be helped. I am back now for seven weeks (wouldn't it be nice if I got a job in those seven weeks, gosh), peeling off the jet-lag, and listening to Jiya Re on repeat this morning, if anyone needs something cheerful to help them out of bed, and going on.

So, I went to Israel! And it was lovely. Last year, while I was doing my nth batch of law school finals, Shim went to Gdansk for a Wikipedia conference. (In his defence, he had said, I don't want to go on a trip when you're revising, will you be okay? And I said, don't be ridiculous darling, go to Gdansk and have a lovely time.)

By the time he got back, though, I was sufficiently flipped to declare then and there if he must needs go to a Wikipedia conference again, then I was damn well coming with him. And then they decided to hold it in Haifa in the north of Israel, and I was sold. Israel is one of those places I have always wanted to go to because of my longstanding quest to travel around looking for non-Western visions of modernity. Y'see, I have a theory that one of the major obstacles standing in the way of development in India is a lack of a clear sense of what modernity is, if not Western. I mean, how can we be Indian and grown-up and modern and developed and still be Indian, and not a kind of Anglo-American? I dunno. But I went to Hong Kong, and saw how they do it, and this was why I wanted to go to Israel.

And thus, we went. It took a taxi, a very long bus journey, five hours on a plane, an intercity train, an underground funicular and a bit of getting lost, and leaving the house at threee in the morning, but we got to Haifa, and I proceeded to fall in love with the whole country instantly and decide I wanted to stay there forever. In Haifa, we were staying on the top of Mount Carmel, in a hotel surrounded by trees and flowers and an army of what would be feral cats if they were not perpetually dazed by the sun, and it was a delight. It was just the right side of warm - thirty degrees; you need suncream and lots of water but it's not unbearable to go out in - and Wikimedia Israel believe in feeding people a lot. I ate a lot of salad and pita and hummus and was very happy.

I'm not going to write much about the conference - it was interesting and I'm glad I went to it, but is not my fandom - but it did finish on a beach party, which was totally marvellous. Shim and I wandered down the beach beforehand, and it was perfectly warm and brilliant in all senses of the word, you know, with an actual blue sky and bright blue water, and the sun set into the sea and there was dancing and an open bar and glowsticks and acrobats and paper garlands and it was just perfect.

( fannish people )

(I learned how to say "shalom" and about four other words while I was in Israel, and that was the limit of my language acquisition. That said, I said shalom to a waitress in Tel Aviv and she brought me a Hebrew menu, which I was charmed by; in Europe, in Swizerland and France, no one who speaks English addresses me in French or German or whatever, because obviously brown people don't speak those languages (I found this infuriating in France, because I am no native speaker but I can order a damn coffee). But in Israel, I was constantly read as Israeli. It was nice. Language is funny, anyhow; English isn't my native language, but it's the only one I'm native fluent in, and I speak enough Hindi and French to feel a resonant familiarity with Indo-European languages - it was very startling to be surrounded by a language I genuinely couldn't understand a word of.)

That evening, we returned to Haifa and I also met nogah and tieleen - hi, guys! - and had a lovely time wandering the boardwalk and peering out over the view of the city and harbour laid out below. It was lovely. I also spent some time making fun of the Mayor of Haifa, who was very excited that there was a conference going on in Haifa, and on the first night of the conference delivered a half-hour preroration on nothing in particular, clearly having had an encounter with the open bar. He also bears a startling resemblance to William Shatner. What a wonderful country.

( Jerusalem )

Afterwards we went back to Haifa and had a very nice dinner somewhere, and headed back to Tel Aviv in the morning, to a brilliant B 'n' B somewhere near the water. It's a rambling out-of-the-way place called Kehilat Aden, run by a lovely couple who are self-confessedly on a quest to run the best gay-run establishment in Tel Aviv, and as far as I'm concerned they've succeeded. Everything is ramshackle but sparkling clean, full of colours and flowers and guarded by a chocolate Lab puppy, who loves everyone with a deep and pure love. Shim and I spent that last evening having a drink with roga and then sleepily on a garden swing, surrounded by flowers and quiet night-time summer noises, using the free wireless, learning there were riots at home. We left the following day, got through security at Ben Gurion with a lot less trouble than expected - the authorities wanted to know why I had been to the UAE so many times, which startled me, because I've never been through immigration there - but we took off on time and arrived on time and survived Heathrow and the three-hour coach home.

It is nice to be back - the flat now looks almost habitable, which is good, as gavagai is coming to visit today - but I had a real glimpse into something different this week, and I didn't really want to come back.

I'm home. Oh, I'm home, I'm home, I'm home. In a weird, eerie twist, there is enough snow here for my parents to have been trapped in the hospital overnight, and to have spent four hours on the road to come and get me from the airport; and no snow at all in Ithaca or NYC! It's colder here than it's been in decades and feels rather a lot like Ithaca in that respect. It's more beautiful, though; mostly untouched, and storybook pretty.

I stayed up all night; I got a bus at six down to New York City, I had delicious brunch with macadamanaity, who cheered me up thoroughly; and then I got a bus out to JFK, and all that time a kindly god was smiling on me; Manchester was the only large British airport not closed for snow, and my plane landed half an hour early on a swept runway. I tracked the landscape through a clear sky during the descent and saw Anglesey, North Wales, Wirral, and Formby under a great coat of white. It really is eerie.

But... I am home safe. I made it. I really did. I made it to the exam, incompetence notwithstanding, and packed up everything in my apartment, and I made it. And I wrote 2300 words of yuletide on the plane! So now.... sleep.

Hello, I am alive. I arrived in Ithaca last night after a hellish twenty-six hours in transit, apparently it is impossible to get a coffee at La Guardia after ten o'clock at night WHO KNEW, but I have made it here and the sun is shining and I have my apartment keys and all is, for the moment, well. I don't have internet in my apartment yet - this is the public library! I joined the library, gosh I must be staying - so I may be out of touch for a little while. I also don't have a US phone number yet, but I hope to put that right quite soon.

Anyway. Am here, am alive, miss you all, very busy, orientation begins on Tuesday! Also, apparently I have an accent!

Administratively speaking, Fair Isle is a part of the Shetland Islands - in actual fact it's a bit closer to Orkney, although it's very far from both. Barring that, then, the southernmost point of Shetland is at Sumburgh Head, the bottom of Mainland, and it took me about half an hour to drive there from Lerwick yesterday. Just as the sea was bearing into sight, I slowed to a stop in front of a set of level crossing lights - I am a pro at level crossing lights! this is what happens when you grow up in a place with a railway line on one side and the Irish Sea on the other - and thought, huh, I thought there were no railways in Shetland.

Then an aircraft landed in front of me.

I really do approve of a place, for the record, where the road crosses the runway, and there is a man in a little car whose actual job is to drive down every hour or so and close the gates and get the lights going by hand. After the plane had landed safely he waved me through with a smile and then I got to have the unsettling experience of driving over the tarmac of an airport.

Sumburgh Head is pretty spectacular. It's way out at the tip of the island and has enormous carved-out gashes in its cliffs - there's one point where the road narrows to one track, with a sheer slope on one side and a seven-foot drop into the Atlantic on the other - and is supposed to be a prime spot for seeing whales and puffins. Alas, we saw neither; the whales are for the lucky few, and the puffins return to Shetland to breed "from April to October" - and lovely birds they may be but on-the-date punctual they are not.

We also did not see otters, to my mild disappointment; Shetland otters are interesting and reportedly numerous, having adapted to a marine lifestyle when surrounded by so much seawater. But we did get the chance to acquaint ourselves with some Shetland ponies, who trotted up to a fence and presented small furry noses for patting, and looked hopefully in my handbag for fudge, and also, quite unexpectedly, we met some seals.

( here are the seals )

They were very cheerful, hefting themselves across the rocks and basking as though there were not an entire town within a hundred metres of them. I suspect they are quite used to people, or at least to people clambering down rocks waving cameras in hope of getting a better look at them.

We caught the ferry back to Aberdeen last night, which feels like a million years ago, and returned to Edinburgh this morning. It was a lovely holiday. On the whole, we didn't do too much - we never made it far off Mainland, for one thing, and if we were to go again I think we ought to go to Unst and Yell, the northern islands (everything on Unst, delightfully, is "the most northerly [X] in Britain", and even Lerwick has Britain's most northerly barber, bookshop, court, and according to the Rough Guide to the Highlands and Islands, properly brewed lattes). The northernmost settlement in Britain is called Skaw, at the tip of Unst, and from there the northernmost point is a lighthouse called Muckle Flugga.

(This entire digression has been so I could use "Muckle Flugga" in a sentence. Unfortunately for all of us, it is not the northernmost point of Britain - that is a large, uninhabited and entirely unhospitable rock called Out Stack.)

But yes! Shetland is beautiful, and I do want to go back; and even in a few days there, I had disquieting thoughts about packing in the practice of law and living on the top of the world with my own fishing-boat. This is an entirely impractical dream, but I did note for the record that property prices in Lerwick are exceedingly low. As you can probably guess, I did a lot of reading about the Shetland Islands while I was there, but quite apart from the obvious beauty and charm of the place, I do find the whole idea of an isolated island community and how it's administered and governed quite fascinating. It's something to do with the notes of similarity and difference - for example, the red post-boxes in Lerwick are identical to the ones you find in Liverpool and Oxford, other than the fact the last scheduled collection is not 5.30pm, it's 11.30am "for the last scheduled delivery in the rest of the UK", which, I don't know, is to me an unexpectedly mundane manifestation of the isolation of the place - and it's something to do with small details of life that you take for granted when you don't live at the very top of the UK. On the way back, I was reading about a service offered by the ferry company - they will, at no cost, carry the bodies of babies stillborn in Aberdeen back to Shetland for burial.

Which, yes, is a particularly sad example, but maybe the poignancy of it stuck with me - the ferry company were talked into doing it by a woman from Shetland who, like all pregnant women with serious complications, was flown urgently from Shetland to mainland Scotland, and then of course her baby was buried there, 200 miles and a world away from home, as she put it. Which again interfaces with, I don't know, issues of identity and things; I was greatly struck by a little book I found in the aforementioned little goth shop, full of stories, songs, and poetry in Shetland dialect, which is provided to all primary schools in Shetland so, as the book puts it, children will feel comfortable and confident speaking it in schools. I was, I think, not unreasonably delighted by this, having been someone who found linguistic conformity both inevitable and highly stressful in primary school.

I was going to go on and talk about the interesting aspects of the law in a place like this, but probably if I did that I would be here forever.

In short: am back, it was good.

On the road! shimgray and I left Liverpool yesterday morning, swung through the city through the rain via bakery, and then started going north. This morning we left Edinburgh at the crack of dawn, and now we are on the train curving up the coast towards Aberdeen past rolling vistas of sheep, trees and sandstone, and the North Sea glowing under the sun. I have been to Scotland quite a few times over the last few years, but never in the sun. Everything shines. Everything is ridiculously picturesque. This from the country I visited last August and it rained so much the dye ran from my shoes. But, seriously, seriously: it is all drystone walls and clear blue water and tiny fishing boats rocking in tiny swells.

(The train has just slowed to a stop in Montrose and we can see the tail end of the Highlands with spars of snow standing out like bones. And there are real waves now, and rising spray, and flocks of Arctic terns doing loops and whirls.)

The last stops are some distance from Aberdeen, so we're picking up speed. This is the furthest north I've ever been in my life. Tomorrow morning I will be on a latitude with Bergen in Norway, parts of Greenland and Anchorage, Alaska. The way the landscape peels away, I feel like I'm flying.

So, I got here. The Incredible Fornicatores never stopped having sex, I didn't get to the exam before it started, I was delayed four hours out of Heathrow. But, I'm here. It's warm. Not hot, but actually comfortable outside; the fog is thick, and the airport is mostly closed, which is slowing the influx of relatives.

Well. I got my mehndi done. My hands are covered with beautiful red flowers. Tomorrow night I ought to have a birthday party, or at least go out somewhere and drink to celebrate not being old enough to drink.

But I got here! That's something, I suppose.

I am back from the Netherlands and very much don't want to be. I think that was the nicest holiday I've been on in years, and probably one of the most needed. One of my favourite poems is by Stephen Vincent Benét, "Nightmare at Noon", and has the lines, It was an old, peaceful city, Rotterdam / Clean, tidy, full of flowers / With the usual furnishings, such as cats and children.

We arrived in Rotterdam on Friday morning and I decided to extrapolate the sentiment to the whole of the Netherlands. The whole country is so small, so flat, so endlessly picturesque - there were rabbits bounding over the railway lines in front of commuter trains - so full of flashes of colour around corners, tiny, mundane wonders. We went by sea, and I was doubtful in the extreme about this - the last time I went anywhere by sea, everything was orange and ghastly, I distinctly recall, and I ended up wishing I'd just stayed at home - but we took the late train from London, reached Harwich in the dead of night, had a civilised drink by a porthole as the ship pulled out to sea, and slept peacefully on top of each other in a cabin with berths, towels and hot water by the bucket. When I woke up we were at the Hook of Holland and I've never travelled anywhere in such ludicrous comfort.

It's a very small place, with a very small railway station. The establishment at one end of the platform, where you would expect a ticket office to be, is a fishmonger's. There were ticket machines, which rejected first Shim's card, then mine. They didn't take banknotes. We were in a small town in the distinct middle of nowhere, being windswept as though it were the middle of December, and we didn't have thirty-one euro in change. I mean, who does? We went into the town, which was deserted, and had a bank with its only sign in English reading "No change". We walked back over to the tiny station, got on the tiny train, and waited to be thrown off or fined or told we must leave continental Europe for our sheer presumptuousness, when the ticket inspector appeared. He looked exactly like Lembit Opik, and said, "You must have a ticket. It is a seventy euro fine."

"We'll pay it," I said, feeling like I had proven myself unworthy of the Netherlands. "Really, we will."

"There is," he said very sternly, "a ticket office in Rotterdam. Go there."

And then he disappeared, whistling. The kindness of strangers turned out to be a theme - that, and speedy public transport, beautiful architecture and those cats and children. Rotterdam was fresh, full of busy, cheerful people, and they sold us tickets for the intercity train, which was a dream - again, you could doze off in one place and wake up in another, and then we were in Amsterdam, for which I fell, ludicrously and romantically, in the sort of way you are not supposed to fall for cities, which are really just bricks and mortar and canal-water, the moment I stepped off the train.

Things I loved about Amsterdam:

-The water. The way the city is moulded and shaped by the water, the way there are houses with small boats tied up to their front doors, and flowers growing at the edge, wild, and in perfectly cultivated pots, and how you can step up to perfect gnarled wrought iron bridges and watch the sunlight sparkle off the soft edges of it all. And then when it's all getting too poetic for words, a booze cruise drifts by, trailing beer cans and the dim smell of hemp. Shim and I waited all weekend for someone to fall out of a booze cruise into the canal underneath our balcony. This never happened. It was very disappointing.

-Balcony, yes! The apartment we were lucky enough to be staying in was film-set gorgeous; the top of an old warehouse building, almost a studio, but not quite, open-plan, enormous polished wood floors and the original, centuries-old beams holding the whole place together. Mirrors everywhere, sunlight streaming in every day from whole walls of windows, every step I took I felt like I was in an advertisement for something, possibly men's razors. It was quite noisy, being right in the centre of the city and surrounded by a lot of bars and coffeeshops, but I can usually sleep through people shouting when they're shouting in a language I don't speak.

(Although they seem to drunkenly shout in their native tongue, everyone in the Netherlands speaks English. This is a cliché, but it is embarrassing and it is true. My grasp of Dutch, after five days, extends to "alstublieft", which is how you say please and thank you nicely; as a contrast, one night we ate in a pretty Italian restaurant by Prinsengracht and the waiter spoke to the table next to us in Dutch, the one on the other side in German, and then came to us and began to precisely enunciate the specials in barely-accented English. For a moment he got sardines and anchovies mixed up. He apologised for his imperfect command of the language. I just... I cannot even. Anchovies.)

-The Café Het Gasthuys, which is possibly my favourite drinking establishment of all time. We discovered it on our first night in Amsterdam, and remembered it mostly because the waitress fell over twice. On subsequent visits, we discovered that a) all the waitresses were preternaturally beautiful (Shim notes, emphatically, that this is entirely my judgement, and he is not the sort of person who looks at waitresses in smoky bars, because he is old and respectable and I malign him); b) they are also very kind, and speak perfect English, and serve you gin with berries in it; and c) the café had the requisite cat. Its name was Kaspar, and it was amiable, black, and unruffled. It lived by the kitchen door. The place did very good food. The cat was roughly spherical.

By Monday, we realised we had been in the city four days and done nothing whatsoever. I mean... not nothing. We had slept in, and walked down sunlit alleys full of flowers, and watched the boats go past, and admired waitresses, and sneezed outside coffeeshops, and been momentarily horrified by the Red Light District (I believe it gets initial capitals because it's the oldest one) - the girls in the windows were disconcerting enough, but I was dazed by the girl who opened her window, swept the front with a handily placed broom, and then stepped back into her window and her livid backlight as though nothing were odd - and drank a lot of coffee, and discovered the Dutch equivalent of J. Sainbury, Albert Heijn, and spent happy half-hours procuring waffles, coffee and cheese.

But we hadn't done anything that tourists do, we'd been too busy being on holiday. So we went to the Anne Frank House, which I was last at when I was eight and it was being refurbished, and it was... sobering. Outside, the queue was miles long, there was a group of tourists with southern Californian accents saying things like, "So, like, who was this Anne Frank person?" and "Like, so, was this her house?", and I wondered if it was a bad idea - but inside was worth seeing. The museum aspect has been done well, subtly, and mostly it lets extracts from the diary explain themselves, with the bare minimum of explanatory notes. I always forget how young she was. Thirteen when she started writing, and fifteen when she died. The sunlight outside was necessary, afterwards.

(We also, through a mistake in navigation that was entirely not my fault, ended up walking by the harbour, and while we were there, paused to look at the Amsterdam, a reconstructed Dutch East Indiaman currently moored in the harbour. I've been reading a lot about the Age of Sail. It was worth seeing - tiny, and beautifully reconstructed, and we peered into the hold full of cinnamon and nutmeg, a gunroom I couldn't stand straight in, and perched on the top decks and looked up at the rigging and out of the water. More fun, I think, than museums, really. And that was it, for Serious Cultural Things In Amsterdam. I suppose pancakes are cultural - we found, also, the world's best pancake house, run out of the front room of the people who had the apartment next to ours. It was run by two guys, had only four tables, could only be accessed by ladder, had a roof covered in kettles, and served the best pancakes I have ever seen. They were enormous, covered in cream and cinnamon and apple and bacon (not all at once, but nearly) and it was with great disappointment that we discovered they were only open three days a week. (My theory is that the owner must be putting himself through chef school, the rest of the week. Mmmmm.))

And so there we go. The return was unfun, not because it didn't go smoothly, and not because there weren't the same easy fast trains and cosy wee berth out - but because it was a return. What a wonderful country. All the syrup waffles you could ever eat. A monument, in the city centre, with fresh flowers laid on it, for oppressed LGBT people throughout history. The sound of tram and bicycle bells waking you in the morning. Flowers, running water, children, cats. We got back to dim grey England and went back to London on a dim grey commuter train, and I have returned to the north, and all went entirely to plan, and oh, I do wish we hadn't left. The days were all perfect, full of nothing but varied and disparate joys, with my dear-and-much-maligned-beloved, all washed through by water and golden sun.

We said we'd go back; I hope we do.