Goodbye, mossy green shade

I have returned to Denver. It is always nice to get back to my own house (yes, even this one) and my own life, such as it is. On my first day back I went for an early breakfast to the Watercourse restaurant, and walking home in the morning sunshine I found myself happy to be here and looking forward to the coming months. It's a shame that at the moment it's too hot to stir from my house between the hours of 10 and 6, though. It's forecast to reach 37 ˚C on Monday. Glasgow is to be 17. I'd settle for something in between, but if it has to be one or the other I like the one which leaves me comfortable in my clothes.

I'd intended writing entries for the last month as I went along, but there was too much to do: getting the new visa, all that sorting and packing, seeing relatives and friends. So, here is the lengthy retrospective version.

Ireland

I took the car ferry from Troon to Larne with my parents. It takes around two hours, or somewhat longer if one of the engines isn't working. It's the only ferry I've ever been on that doesn't have proper external decks for passengers. You have to sit inside, or go up to the tiny walled in sheep-pen of an observation deck and hook your chin over the rail.

We drove down to Dublin, stopping for lunch in Armagh. The trip to the border took in lots of small towns with an unsettling number of flags and displays of red, white and blue bunting, making it look like America on Independence Day - only in this case it is clearly aimed at an opposing team, and not just for the day. Who would have thought that something so colourful could be so depressing?

Armagh was rainy and grey.

Dublin was rainy too, but interesting, and it became suddenly beautiful on our last evening when the sun came out. While there we walked for miles, usually in circles. We saw the famous bits in the middle - The Liffey, Temple Bar, Grafton Street, O'Connel Street. We visited St Patrick's Cathedral, the National Gallery, Trinity College and the Book of Kells exhibition.

Of all things, what I like most was Dublin's crossing signals:

Their compact little short-armed people are much nicer than the standard red and green men of British cities. I noticed a new crossing of a similar model in the centre of Glasgow last week, though.

Back in the north and on the way to Belfast we drove for some way along the coast of County Down to visit two historic houses, Castle Ward and Mount Stewart. The area from midway up the Lecale Peninsula and up the Ards peninsula was beautiful, with tunnels of trees and fuchsia hedges and nice little towns which seemed to be getting by without partisan display (or perhaps I was just distracted from it by the fuchsia and the sunshine). We saw the inside and outside of Castle Ward, a house built in two styles for a husband and wife with conflicting tastes, and then we took the ferry over Strangford Lough and arrived at Mount Stewart in time to see the formal gardens. The only gardens I've liked as much are those at Versailles, which are full of strange passages and unexpected objects. The Mount Stewart gardens are smaller, but they are pleasingly idiosyncratic. The terrace in front of the house is surrounded by statues of odd animals.


We drove on into Belfast, the partisan display taking a nasty turn for the worse as we hit the edges of the city. I was filled with the desire to leave before we arrived, but I'm happy to say that it all looked much better after a walk around the university area, a good pizza, and a bottle of beer.

The following day I went to the American Consulate to get my visa, an experience so entirely unlike going to the embassy in London that I am reluctant to mention it in case it becomes so popular with U.K. applicants that I can't get an appointment there in future.

And here ends the Ireland trip.

I think I had better make the rest into a new entry. However, I have already uploaded my favourite Edinburgh photo. So, I will end with it, and with the comment that when I first arrived back in Edinburgh I felt oddly indifferent - just a nice place I used to live long ago - and then, travelling on a bus through Tollcross, I was suddenly hit by the returning force of all my love for this city which still feels like my chosen home.

Ireland, briefly.

I got back from a family trip to Ireland yesterday, but we are going off again to the somewhat less scenic Doncaster tomorrow, so for the moment all there is time for is to add a photo of me at Castle Ward, Northern Ireland, the day before yesterday.

Majo in Scotland.

I got here a week ago after an unintended diversion to Cleveland, and consequently my luggage got here two days later. Remarkably, two days of this last week have been beautiful and sunny. It looks like this outside:


I've spent the week sorting through all of the things I've left in my parents' house over a number of years of moving back and forth across the world. It seems I've gathered enough to open a small china shop, not to mention a toy and book shop.


Perhaps I will. After all, I can't see how it's all going to fit in my Denver apartment.

Departure.

I'm currently engaged in a gentle centrifuging around my apartment, a process by which it is to be hoped that eventually only the things I need for the next month will drain conveniently into my suitcase. Tomorrow I leave a place known for over 300 days of sunshine a year, and go to one with... well, I don't know the details, because it's hardly the kind of thing the Ayrshire tourist board would advertise, but it has to be about that many days of rain.

Having finally finished my course proposal, I can leave all work behind at least for the duration of the journey, and read something just for pleasure. I went to the Tattered Cover this evening to buy a book, and came out with three: a new collection of stories by Margaret Atwood, The Tent; a new novel by Sherman Alexie, Flight; and a novel I just stumbled across, featuring a come-to-life teddy bear being arrested for a series of bombings, Winkie by Clifford Chase. Now I have the problem of working out which to take on board, and also the logical absurdity of taking all of these books back to a place where I am going, in part, to pack up and send to myself all of the books I have that are there already.

One other book will travel with me: a slim Faber and Faber volume of poems by Louis MacNeice, selected by Michael Longley. I hardly ever read poetry, but sometimes slip this book into my bag when it seems it might be a good idea to have some reading material with me just in case. This afternoon I had it when on the bus, and was reminded again of why I like MacNeice's poems so much. They read like songs. They are so rhythmic that they can sing me through moments of boredom or distraction. Today I was caught by the last stanza of "Meeting Point" -

Time was away and she was here / And life no longer what it was, / The bell was silent in the air / And all the room one glow because / Time was away and she was here.

Waste time well.

I have just spent a whole precious week not producing a new course proposal and syllabus. It seems to me that if I am going to spend time not getting things done like this, then it would be more profitable to not get something somewhat more grandiose done. I could have been not writing a book for the whole of the last week, for instance.

Independence Day

Yet another American holiday crept up on me when I wasn't expecting it.

Yesterday, still sitting around in my pyjamas at midday, I heard three loud gunshots, and then a flyover by a military jet or two. Yes, the Fourth of July. Not a three gun salute, though - the shots went on sporadically... must be marking midday... no, way past twelve of them. Three quarters of an hour later I finally gave in and had to go out to find out whether a British re-invasion was being repelled, or whether English people were being shot in effigy. In front of the State Capitol building I found lots of flags, a big and very noisy gun, and a thin little crowd listening to a thin little military band playing music that sounded as if it would fit well at an English garden party. Some kind of Independence Day military ceremony.

The crowds and the people on the street are more interesting for me on days like this than the events, though I can only take them in short doses. What makes people get up in the morning and go out to take their flags for a walk? It seems like a football match, except that there is only one team.

In the evening I took a run to the City Park, where I knew the Colorado Symphony Orchestra was giving a free "All-American" concert. I arrived just in time to hear the last few bars of something very familiar and distinctly not American, and then a very short and very American finale which had people waving their flags and their babies in the air (which is perhaps why I really find such days so alienating - they are days for families and large groups of friends of the type you only have if you've managed to spend a decade or so in one place). So I ran home again, and went to bed good and early to make sure I could be woken up as many times as possible by my various neighbours. I understand that I missed a firework and lightning display.

To be honest, I think that fireworks are really quite boring - but don't tell anyone.

Summer

It is insufferably hot, and on no account should anyone go outside and get into a car which has sat in the sun for many hours and in which the air conditioning doesn't work.

Earlier today I saw a small black dog tied up under a tree. For a moment I felt sorry for it - and then realised that resting immobile under a tree was the only sensible way to spend the afternoon, and that it was me, dragging myself from place to place in the glaring sun, who was the more pitiable.

I long for tree-lined European avenues. Denver has trees everywhere, but few of them seem to provide much in the way of shade.