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I was seven steps from the ghosts on the other side of that door
Searching for something entirely different, I just ran across the transcribed file of the journal I kept for six days in the spring of 1999, when my high school sent its concert choir and jazz band to England and France for a week and a half. It's very strange for me to read now, even beyond the usual disconnect of no longer familiar language. I'd never kept a diary before and couldn't settle on a comfortable tone; the text is spattered with parentheses and dashes and ellipses, as though I couldn't simply let a statement stand; and even with all the hedging, I can still see some of the places where I was condensing or eliding out of frustration at the time it took me to get anything down on paper. An embarrassing number of parenthetical notes seem to be apologizing for the state of my handwriting. And that doesn't touch the really blackmail-worthy material—it's a credit to J. Michael Straczynski that I compared Versailles to Centauri Prime, but the sentence "Earlier we went to Montmartre, to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and a square where the artists hang out, like in 'An American in Paris'" should automatically disqualify a person from all intelligent discourse. (My brother and I were just looking at Toulouse-Lautrec this afternoon, too.) Still, I am not really sorry that the following was preserved:
I wish we had been able to stay in Canterbury longer. They were Roman ruins beneath some of the buildings, Roman roads beneath the modern streets. There was even a museum—underground, I believe, in a villa that had had the city built over it. Romans aside, I just liked the town. There were old buildings, interesting stores, churches faced with flint next to very modern concrete. (Canterbury was bombed very badly during WWII—made me think of "A Tale of Time City")—I just wanted to stay there.
It's good to know one is consistent in certain things.
I wish we had been able to stay in Canterbury longer. They were Roman ruins beneath some of the buildings, Roman roads beneath the modern streets. There was even a museum—underground, I believe, in a villa that had had the city built over it. Romans aside, I just liked the town. There were old buildings, interesting stores, churches faced with flint next to very modern concrete. (Canterbury was bombed very badly during WWII—made me think of "A Tale of Time City")—I just wanted to stay there.
It's good to know one is consistent in certain things.
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And that's a wonderful shot of Powell and Pressburger: almost a perspective in time.
Nine
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And Pressburger is the one making eye contact with the camera.
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I must go back to Canterbury: I've been there a total of one day, in 1980, which is kind of ridiculous. (On the other hand, Diana Wynne Jones told me in interview that she'd never been there at all, Time City or no.)
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Heh. I'm not sure I have any pictures of me from Canterbury: I had a camera, but I was bad at tourism. If any ever surface, I'll scan them for you.
(On the other hand, Diana Wynne Jones told me in interview that she'd never been there at all, Time City or no.)
(It's okay. I don't expect her to have visited the Related Worlds, either.)
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I'm glad that mine recorded anecdotes and quotations I might otherwise have forgotten about; I started the travel journal specifically for that purpose, and it worked. ("It's not only after dinner, it's tomorrow. Since I left my own pencil—and binder, worse—in my room a few minutes ago, I'm writing with Peter's mechanical pencil and listening to Steve and Jason debate whether one of them said 'Louvre' or 'loo,' as in 'I will spend all of my time today in the,' because today it's raining. I personally am going to go to the Louvre.") But then I spent several hours reading similar material from college and fell asleep over it, and I think that messed up my head.
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Truer words were never spoken.
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They feel now like reading the memories of someone else.
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Almost everything in my life older than three years belongs to someone who no longer exists.
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I could be wrong. It is just very difficult for me to see much continuity right now.
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And really, your old journal sounds no worse than any teenager's.
I like your description of Canterbury. Did ever you get to York, and the Jorvik... whatever it is? (Viking Centre? I want to say Vikingamuseet, but I know that can't be right--the fact that my mind is coming up with appalling pidgin Swedish is a sign I need to go to sleep, gan aon dhabht.)
I was there once, as a child, a good... twenty four years ago? I should go there again someday, to see it again. An I do, I will try to make Canterbury as well, for to see the Roman villa whereof you spoke.
I'm actually reminded of a dream I had, a bit less than a month shy of two years ago:
I was living somewhere, in a flat in a mediaeval building with the traces of Victorian and later renovations, in a city somewhere, a flat over a shop or perhaps a restaurant or an upscale pub. I had a child on the way. I have no clear picture of who my wife was or where she was, but she was apparently near to delivering.
I had to make an amulet for the child. I needed earth from the Roman racetrack beneath the building to make it. The Roman racetrack could be reached under the foundations, by lifting up a sort of low curtain, a bit less than knee-high, like the space beneath a sofa writ large, and underneath it the curving earth and gravel of the racetrack, left behind when the stands and the walls were fallen down and the stones taken away. I had the feeling it had been excavated, here, and that the archaeologists had left this curtained access, perhaps for uses such as mine. It was behind the back of the building; I was doing this furtively, but had no particular fear of discovery, it seemed.