“…J’ai souvent eu l’occasion de répondre, à ceux qui me posaient des questions sur mon origine, que mon pays c’est d’abord et avant tout l’enfance, puis, en second lieu, ma langue.”
Daniel Ducharme

Birmingham, 3rd January 2009

Dear Everyone I’ve Ever Met,

On New Year’s Eve, I was back in Oxford.  Stepping off the train into the cold grey afternoon was like breathing a sigh of relief.  Everything was once again familiar.  The Business School’s copper ziggurat , the low forest of bicycles arrayed outside the station (none of which seem to have moved since I left), the signs on the front of the buses lead towards familiar places… Abingdon, Wheatley, Temple Cowley.

Avoiding the streaming traffic and noise of Frideswide Square, I slipped through the churchyard of St Thomas the Martyr, with its gravestones and 12th century priest’s door, and turned into my old street.  Nothing’s changed much in three months, of course.

That night we played old-time jazz in the village pub in Cassington, and saw in 2009 with a New Orleans-style rendition of Auld Lang Syne.   The pub had good ales on tap, the village was built of Cotswold stone.  The local accents burred westwards as the night went on. Strangely, it felt like I was home.

Although, at the same time, I am not “home” at all.  I’m a New Zealander.  The place where I put my feet is an obscure south-east corner of the Hauraki Gulf, with its particular configuration of water, tides, rocks and islands.  NZ writer Emma Hart, blogging this weekend at Public Address, talked about her own turanga waewae – the highway south of Christchurch that is the “back-bone of my childhood” :

…it’s how a landscape should be. That’s where I feel I stand strong, with the sun on my face, the sea on my right hand, and the mountains on my left.

Our emotions and memories are so often bound up in landscape: places where significant things happened, places linked to people we love, or places where we return to gain strength. But our memories of those places are twisted.

As we remould our memories, adding new layers of meaning, it seems we quickly reach a point at which our image of a place no longer resembles its reality. What we are left with is language: words that attempt to evoke the importance of certain times and places.

Last year in May, I returned to wander around my old school, a place where so much growing up took place.  Suddenly, it seemed the school was strangely small, that it couldn’t live up to the significance I’d given it through repeated exercise of memory.

There’s a sense now of being burdened by the clutter of places that make up a personal history. Like a refrigerator covered with so many postcards that you can’t tell its a fridge any more.  There’s pictures of dining tables in Basel, a view of Lake Taupo from my grandfather’s house, a snapshot of desert in Arizona, a place near Queenstown called Paradise, snow-covered ridges in the Vosges, cloisters in Oxford.

Is there a point at which our spiritual scrapbook gets too full? Is it possible to cherish all these places and yet still keep adding more pivot points to your life?  Can we stretch our roots too far?

In just over two weeks, I leave the UK to live in France.  Once again uprooted, pushing onwards into a new place.  It’s exciting. But at the same time, there is a little voice asking if it is time to settle down.  I’ve still got a whole bunch of old postcards to sort out.  At the same time, I’m still writing new ones.

Hope everything is going well in your parts of the world!

Lots of love from,
Richard xoxo

(Sorry, if this post comes across as self-regarding waffle, that’s because it probably is.)

Continued from Part 1…

Apart from the children, who were generally great fun, the main reason I headed to Basel was for the Herbstmäss- the autumn market which is one of the traditions of Basel. E-D is friends with the President of the Basel Church History society, (or something like that), and so he was able to get us into the opening ceremony of the Herbstmäss-,which takes place at the top of the belltower of the Martinkirche (St Martin’s Church) in the old town.

The bells of the Martinkirche are rung at midday on the first day of the Herbstmäss and at the end of the market at the end of the week. A local Basel citizen is chosen to be the bell-ringer, and as payment for his duty, he gets a pair of black gloves. BUT. But. He receives one after ringing the opening bells, and then the second one to complete the pair when he rings the bells at the end of the market. He also gets to wear a little horn-shaped trumpet around his neck for the duration of the market.

So there we were, climbing the rickety mediaeval staircase of the Martinkirche, and at the top we joined a group of guests crowded into the bell-ringer’s room at the top of the tower. (The bell-ringer used to live up here, and had the best view in the city. It’s still the best view in Basel and nobody is allowed up there normally.)

At five minutes to twelve, the bellringer was presented with one black glove. He then went over to the window and leant out, waving his glove and blowing his little trumpet to show the crowd below that he had received the first half of his salary. Then at 12:00 exactly (and remember that this IS Switzerland, so you can be sure that it was exactly the right time), the bellringer begins to ring his bells, for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, everyone in the tower looks out the window and waves at the people in the street below and looking at the view- it was a perfect day, and we could see the three mountain ranges that surround the valley of Basel and the Rhine: the Black Forest to the North-East in Germany, the Jura to the South in Switzerland and the Vosges to the North-West in Alsace.

This was the 531st time that the bells of the Martinkirche have been rung to mark the beginning of the Herbstmäss- which means that the first time it was done was in 1469- before Columbus arrived in America, before Basel was part of Switzerland, and even before Michael Jackson recorded Thriller. That, believe me, is a very long time ago.

The Herbstmäss involves lots of fairground rides in the little squares around the Old Town, and the town was full of neatly-dressed Swiss families (3-year olds in Fubu and Armani being pushed around in Audi baby buggies, that sort of thing) all earnestly munching on candyfloss (Zückerwatte/ barbe de papa) and making their way between the various attractions. There are sausage and chocolate stands everywhere, and the main market, where you can buy all sorts of things at Swiss prices. One stall just sold Advent Calendars, and they even had these really small ones, perfect for putting in envelopes (one of them is in this letter, if I remember to put it in).

Apart from exploring the Herbstmäss, I helped E-D buy materials to build a new garden fence. A Swiss DIY shop is something to be experienced, I tell you. Everything is just so NEAT and TIDY. The power drills look so shiny that you could perform brain surgery with them, the timber is neatly stacked out and there are special hydraulic-suspension trolleys on which to to carry your timber to the checkout with. At which point you must part with an amount of money which you could use as a deposit on a house in New Zealand.

However, I shouldn’t be too harsh on Switzerland- I really enjoyed the change from the dogpoo and baguettes and Peugeots that you find in my town. AND the drivers in Switzerland are polite and STOP for pedestrians. Everything works, there are no strikes (Switzerland has 1% unemplyment, and those are just the cuckoos for whom a clock has not yet been built), and the place is CLEAN. H dropped a piece of chocolate on the pavement, K picked it up straight away and H ate it without question. In France, a piece of chocolate that was dropped would probably fall into something else that is brown.

Not that I hate France at all, it’s just such an unreliable country, with funny public holidays that interrupt your travel plans and fonctionnaires who move as fast as glaciers and train companies where the drivers are constantly on strike to demand compensation for nocturnal frog attacks (or something like that). But it’s all good, really. Challenging sometimes, frustrating to the point that you want to stab administrators with a baguette, but really good. My town is so completely French and Alsatian at the same time, and even when I’m completely fed up with the place, the boulangeries suddenly sparkle in the morning sun or I find some beret-wearing old Alsatian men playing pétanque by the river or a poodle relieving itself on a postman’s bicycle and I realise how lucky I am to be here. I’m beginning to understand how the French have managed to con the whole world into thinking thay they are the absolute best at making wine, cooking and living with complete joie de vivre.

I’ve just about run out of things to say for the moment, so until I hear from you, keep safe and have fun whatever you’re doing!

Grosses Bises comme toujours

Isaac Hayes – Never Gonna Give You Up
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