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How are you all? Here's a question for you - where is home?
"Your home is within you, you carry your place in the world." This line from The Perfume Garden is going viral - some property company in the US started a meme advertising their services using it, and it's now popping up on threads all over the place. So is 'perfume is the key to your memories' - perfume sites and enthusiasts seem to have picked up on that one. It's intriguing that they resonate with people. Maybe I should forget writing novels and go into advertising ... After a flying visit to the UK, the truth of the first is bittersweet.
Walking across the bridge to the South Bank to see James Salter interviewed, I could see my old college, the Courtauld Institute, which is housed in Somerset House (left of the picture, above). I walked this route hundreds of times from our studio in Kennington. (To show how green I was when I arrived in London as a teenager, I thought I was going to see a surprisingly cheap studio in KenSington when I answered the ad in the Evening Standard).
Salter was wonderful - how great is it when your heroes live up to your hopes? Amusing, present, self-deprecating, distancing himself politely from the fresh interest in his work - and you sensed the drive, discontent and ambition that has kept him writing all these years. Esquire's assessment as 'the only 87 year old sex symbol' was also on the nail. I'll treasure the signed copy of 'All That Is' which sits on my desk with the pile of books from the UK. It will be a talisman to keep writing, and keep writing better work.
So, London was one home that I escaped to as soon as I could leave Devon. In the continuing Pinteresque weirdness that is living on a claustrophobic gated compound in the Middle East, friends here are now looking at a house in the remote Devon village I grew up in (other friends here have just bought in the village I rode in every day with my best friend). Happy for them ... life's sometimes too strange.
During last week's whistle-stop tour of the UK, I was also in Suffolk on the East Coast - another home. Here, I saw 'The Perfume Garden' in the wild for the first time - it was quite a moment seeing it on the shelves of Waitrose supermarket alongside Santa Montefiore's latest:
Suffolk was beautiful, wild, and rainy - magnolia and lilac in full, heady blossom in the garden. The lawn had grown knee deep as no one had been in the house for a few months, and the night I arrived it was a vivid, fresh green like a scene from a Kurosawa movie.
Maybe there's something restless about this time of the year, too? It's wonderful seeing our goddaughter finishing up exams, with a whole summer of firsts ahead - first love, first driving lessons. Glory days. I remember it all vividly - maybe you're the same, where does the time go? Daft Punk soundtracked the hundreds of miles I drove last week - it reminded me of that summer of exams 'back in the olden days' as my daughter says, listening to Chic and Sister Sledge (yes, you are officially old when Nile Rogers and Giorgio Moroder are on these new tracks as vintage legends). Remember that sense that life was just beginning ..?
So, a week of mixed emotions and memories - which is maybe why some US property company filching that line about 'home' resonated. We don't belong there now, and absolutely don't belong here. There is nothing like being surrounded on a day to day basis by what you are not to clarify what you are. I appreciated simple things last week - being able to walk hand in hand with your partner, to wear what you want, seeing happy dogs snuffling around in public spaces, pub lunches, the age and beauty of the country. However, as an expat you have to make the best of where you are, and 'plant your trees'. This is home for now. Maybe you do carry your 'home' within you - I believed it when I wrote it. All of these incredible places and people you have loved shape you. It doesn't make it any easier saying farewell.
It was touching, hearing the memories of my grandmother from friends and family (all the Celtic clans descended from miles around for the service, mighty voices belting out 'Love Divine' and 'Jerusalem'). The tributes and readings - John O'Donohue, especially, were touching. And I loved it that our remarkable Mamgu, the matriarch of the family, who barely came up to my waist towards the end, quietly left the same Joyce Grenfell poem to be found, and read at her memorial, just as my paternal grandmother had:
"If I should go before the rest of you,
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone,
Nor, when I am gone, speak in a Sunday voice,
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep, if you must, parting is hell,
But life goes on, so sing as well."
Have a great weekend. Happy writing - and singing x
But life goes on, so sing as well."
Have a great weekend. Happy writing - and singing x
