The Shock of the Old

 

 

Dec 9^th 2014. My past life seems to be fading from my memory, like the light grey vapour I saw hanging over Christchurch meadows this morning. Perhaps the shock of the new, or rather the old, the astounding buttery yellow beauty of my new built environment in Oxford has wiped it clear.  Then again I do keep getting short flicks from my childhood and the more recent time in London, but they come from glancing briefly into the boxes and files of black and white photos I have just received from my mother’s home, a catalogue of sepia family faces many of them people I never knew, and of course going through my Christmas card list, sending off my new address to many old friends. Writing out my new phone number again and again, hoping the simple numbers will stick in the right order in my disordered head.

A lot of the time I feel like a student who has just left home for the first time, excited but mildly scared. Everyone I meet is unfamiliar and I am starting the first term where you have to madly join everything on offer. I just applied for a ticket to a lecture at the Natural History Museum which  I thought was about dinosaurs, but it turns out, from talking to the lady with the hyphenated name who is organising it, that it’s about the cases containing the great bones.

 She said, ‘there will be a discussion about the glass roof.’ Oh dear, and now I’ve talked to her I can’t not send her my cheque. I need to slow down and read the small print, stop losing receipts for things like the new loo seat which can't be fitted, and return bus tickets. I really miss my Oyster card. All this fiddling about for small change makes me feel like a pensioner.

What will emerge from all this mist, fog and confusion? Nothing from the past has been resolved but this new start has blotted out old anguish. I am strangely cut off from all that I was, or so it feels at the moment. I am freshly aware though, and it’s sometimes  like a sharp pain, that I am still looking into the dim, distance, across endless watery wastes, for the companion, the other half, I have so far always failed to find.