bbc radio playing on a cloudy mid-morning scented with coffee

Considering I have about 10 days left in Edinburgh, I ought to be out and about seeing everything I want to see, yes? Well, sort of. I’m tired, I’ve been travelling for the last two weeks and I have way too many books for my shipping costs to be negligible so I’ve been neglecting Edinburgh in favour of sundry errands and mild illness. Mostly laziness, I must add. The weather’s temperamental nature (it’s been raining half-heartedly all morning) doesn’t make going out a particularly inviting option either.

So here I am, leaving yet another city. My first city-leaving was accompanied by floods of tears and an encroaching fear. I don’t think each consecutive leave-taking has been as dramatic, but the peculiar combination of breath-sapping sadness and crushing fear has not disappeared. I came to Edinburgh with stars in my eyes (forgive the cliché) and an odd sense of homecoming. Though I knew almost nothing about Scotland -I still haven’t watched Braveheart, even – it was still a part of that greater entity that has always been and probably always will be my intellectual home: the United Kingdom. I’m an unabashed Anglophile, as you should know if you’ve read my blog before, and I love everything about this incredible, insane and utterly lovable country.

As I’ve tried to say to so many people, being here has been like being inside a book. Not because of any particularly remarkable experiences, but simply because I recognise buildings and stories and people long-dead or never existent as though I have known them all my life. In almost 12 months, I’ve managed to accrue over 100 books, which ought to tell you something of my penchant for an inner, rather than an outer, life. I live, breathe and feel in words. I prefer my books to people – as I just said to my brother on Skype, there are few things I value higher than my books. Social awkwardness, scrambling for witticisms, self-consciousness and all those unpleasant adjuncts to human interaction disappear in literature.

That being said, Edinburgh has been the easiest city I’ve ever lived in. People are kind, they stop you in the street to have conversations; or sit beside you on a park bench to discuss life’s problems; they ask you if you’re lost and volunteer help; people smile at you in a companionable sort of resignation when it begins to rain and you know the clouds will recede soon enough to suddenly reveal a brilliant, rain-washed sunny day that you could not have known would appear at all.

Chennai, Bombay, Edinburgh… whither to next?

the joys of breeches, waistcoats, empire waists and corsets.

Ever since I discovered the existence of Jane Austen, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and Georgette Heyer, I’ve loved period drama. Of course, the annoyingly rational, nit-picky bit of me can’t help but notice every little niggling detail that film producers, screenwriters and directors faced with the task of dressing up old stories in new clothes get wrong, but for the most part, I find myself sated at the end of a few hours’ worth of “Indeed”, “You are too kind”, “dear Mr this” and “dearest Miss that”, uttered by beautiful people in beautiful clothes, acting out beautiful sentiments.

Exhilaration, elation, happiness, satisfaction, affirmation – these are the usual sentiments evoked in the typical viewer, a.k.a myself, after the viewing of a good period drama. The complications are ironed out, the good find happiness and love, the bad and wicked are condemned to uninteresting lives off camera and there is almost always a wedding, with the promise of a perfect lifetime afterward. No problematic ‘what ifs?’, no annoying lack of closure and above all, no depressing conclusions about the pointless, random, unfair nature of life.

The above really just applied to adaptations of Austen’s and Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels, and Jane Eyre. I’m not averse to the occasional mind-numbingly sad movie which makes you cry your eyes out, but I want a good reason to shed my tears. Even happy tears.

Since I’m growing ever more incoherent, and it’s nearly 2 am, I shall retire to bed on the high that watching Persuasion has given me.

oh, the louu.

All this talk of marriage and infidelity in medieval romance has convinced me that I’m addicted to the distance and worshipful adoration that courtly love characterised.

I always want men who are unreachable, in more ways than one (well, being dead is a good way to earn my undying – haha – devotion)

GAH.

I’d have been a good courtly lover. Pick me! Choose me! Love me! (But really, don’t!)

honey, i’m still free, take a chance on me

:)

One of those moments when something you did, or said, or saw in the past comes back to you suddenly, crystal-clear, and makes you smile, right there in the street. A self-deprecating, self-indulgent, inward-looking, happily bittersweet smile.

Hands in your pockets against the cold, someone stops you on the street, makes the music stop for a moment:

“Can I borrow a cigarette please?” “Yes, of course”

And you walk on.

Thoughts, like people, whirl around your brain. You’re walking roads with people who don’t exist, whose existence is in your memory, who have never seen the streets you’re on. Alternate versions of events march past, one after the other, in an orderly chaos of might-have-beens. You don’t dare close your eyes, for fear of what you might see.

The breeze blows away the evidence, but the question, unasked and unanswered, lingers in the air.

Faint, fading.

—

We do strange things in the night that the morning makes us question. But which was more real, night or morning?

juliet says, hey it’s romeo.

Dream-like, the past floated by.

Then it grew stronger; nebulous forms with ragged edges grew sharp, from blurry to oppressively opaque. Cold, from within and without, flooded the room.

Voices, as if from a far distance echo relentlessly, pleading, coaxing, importuning you to listen, to comprehend and so you do, attempting to fathom meanings that are false.

Sleep is eaten away. The hollowness you buried fills you up once more. You must escape, but you cannot: you are transfixed, despite yourself. You scream, you weep, you fall but still, you listen.

Memories turn treacherous. They hurl themselves against your defences, shattering, tearing, ripping you apart.

Your old, forgotten friends, self-pity, doubt and regret return to your side, forgiving your past neglect.

But now, your voice returns. “No!”, you scream, “Stop!”.

The phantoms pause in their onslaught. “Enough”, you say, firmly.

Slowly, the nightmare withers. Your memories curl up. You blink, and you find yourself alone once more.

Softly, enveloped in sleep, you dream.