Diary – 3 January 2013

I am re-reading D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia. The opening line runs: ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move…’ He expands on the dilemma (I paraphrase): you are afflicted by wanderlust, you want to move, you don’t have any money, you’ve only recently moved but for some reason you want to move again. It is, for example, England in deep midwinter and it has been raining solidly for six weeks. Deracination is an occupational advantage of being a writer, which is otherwise a pretty absurd profession. Writers can live anywhere, or everywhere, or, at times, nowhere…

For a while I lived in an airless flat in Alphabet City, New York, when it was still a seedy neighbourhood, and the only people with mobile phones were drug dealers and pimps. When the roof fell down I ended up in a charming dive opposite the Brooklyn Museum, where broken English gurgled through the walls. I spent a year in Sentier, the old garment district of Paris. Each morning the workers dragged trolleys full of gaudy cloth along the cobbled streets, so the age-warped windows rattled, so the entire arrondissement rattled, so your teeth rattled in your head, so you retired for the night bone-jangled and weary, as if you’d run for miles. In St Petersburg I lived with an aphoristic babushka, who gave me a piece of advice I have tried to ignore: ‘Women are nothing. Absolutely nothing. You may as well give up now.’ Tallinn was smothered in Baltic fog, everything indistinct and monochrome. In wintry Oslo the nights were long and the days pallid, but from my flat it was a short tram-ride to the Nordmarka wilderness — vast tracts of silence. In Treptow Park, Berlin, I overdosed on W.G. Sebald, the flat was correspondingly drenched in ghostly miasma; I didn’t stay long.