Angst ...geographic overload

17 June 2007
Father’s Day (UK)

My sixteen-year old daughter made her way back from a friend’s where she’d spent the night. It was just on 10 AM and the streets of Clifton were virtually deserted. Sunday morning. She was hiking her way back home – about half an hour walk – to make me a ‘fry up’ in honour of father’s day. At first she baulked when I suggested I preferred some of Chandos’ fabulous croissants – finest for a hundred miles around! When I talked her around, a chocolate croissant having aided the cause immeasurably, she was a ‘fry up’ apostate. I’m not sure it’s actually healthier, though, those croissants at Chandos, made upstairs every morning and still warm when they open (I’m waiting at the door for them to unlock), are unimaginably rich – they make you fantasize about fresh creamery butter and the purest organic white flour. So flaky!

Of course, I’m a model of restraint and set the example for my child by limiting myself to two plain and one almond (rich marzipan enclosed in buttery, flaky pastry, mottled with almond slivers). Fortunately she managed to get in there and appropriate about half of the almond.

We drove across country towards the sea at Poole. It was the first time I’d seen that enormous harbour. We ate a father’s day lunch of fried scampi and chips in the garden of a hotel above the beach at Studland. We could look out over the sea, blue in the sunshine. To the east and west we could see white cliffs. Those to the east marked the mouth of the bay.

The queue for the ferry across the throat that separated us from Poole proper was three boats long. Alex slept through the wait, I listened to a play on BBC 4 that involved a scheming woman bent on revenge for wrongs done her family (I admit that I tuned over to Classic FM for a bit and lost track of what was going on).

I’m not sure it’s actually Poole, but the area beyond the eastern terminus of the ferry is wealthy and charming. It reminds me of suburbs of Sydney, beautiful, waterfront or near-waterfront apartments, low rise and glass faced. Another, similar place is across the water from the centre of Perth, a string of low- and mid-rise buildings, spacious, heavily windowed.

You know, it’s strange how many times in life I’ve compared places to Oz – once the wife and I decided to write down our top five, favourite places to live and both of us, separately, listed Sydney and Perth. We’d lived in the former but had holiday-ed in the latter (a lot!).

I belong to that narrow class of humans who are virtually without a place that is truly home anymore. We lived on four continents in the first two years of our marriage. No matter what city I go to, I still play a mental game of ‘could I live here’. I pick out little grocery stores that seem clean and bright and restaurants that might make living in that place palatable. I assess schools and housing; I am particularly alive to the weather, not as a traveller inconvenienced by heat or rain, but as a potential resident, keen to know whether the nights will be sticky and a ‘barong tagalog’ required (and, hopefully, accepted as appropriate).

The last time I recall playing ‘could I live here’ was particularly poignant, I was in Dhaka. I’m now 55 and moving and adjusting to new places requires huge energy and bursting health. I believe that I still possess both but in measure less than when I was in my 30’s. I can adjust to Clifton, the chi-chi part of Bristol, but I question whether I have the strength to make another move to a place as challenging – health, food, weather, culture, language, religion – as Dhaka. Two decades before I would have welcomed an opportunity to live in a place like Bangladesh: I lived and thrived in India, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan …but my mental, if not my physical life in these places has always been a bit of B. Traven, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, John Masters, even Sir Richard Burton. I am still drawn to the romance but I’m not sure that I’ve still got stamina for the reality.

We’re contemplating purchase of a place in Taiwan where we’ll spend part of each year as we get older. I look forward to this, the island is far richer and more user friendly than it was the first time I visited it about thirty years ago. And that was a decade or so after I’d left India … where I thrived.

I don’t know, though, whether the story is a happy one or sad …. I can’t actually remember the name of the maids my Mom hired when we lived in Mexico back in the 1950s; they took care of me, they were ersatz Mothers and I can’t remember their names – there were two of them, they stayed with us for a couple of years (each) and I can’t remember their names. There have been so many names … so many places … so many names … so many places …