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.