Somewhere Towards The End

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It's just gone 3pm on Thursday 21 July 2022 and I'm on a coach waiting to board the Stena Line ferry home. I'm feeling quite panic-stricken at only having my telescopic keyring pen (an excellent gadget gifted by my dear friend Fran) with no refill or back-up. It'll be fine. There's pens at home, sure.  But what if it runs out now? Have I used it enough? 

How tedious it is having an anxious brain. It takes my mind off being the only masked person on this nearly full coach, I suppose. We didn't reach Port Ryan quickly enough to get out for a breath of Irish Sea air (I know we're not quite there yet, but practically). 

That wasn't why I started writing in my DYCP notebook. I've just read, today cover-to-cover, Diana Athill's late-life memoir Stet, or Somewhere Towards the End (2008). No, I'm not sure about the abbreviation. It's been an enthralling read. I have felt as if she's been telling me her life story and about all the people she ever knew from beside me all day. She died aged 101 in 2019.

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Am out on deck now. We've just released from docking. The wind is cold and frantic, but I'd rather fight against it than be around more people. I am truly hermitted these days and people aren't a joy for me, not en masse at least. It's very pleasant out here. I feel a peace when near the water. All the more so if there's heat or warmth. Forgot a scarf, but I'll muddle on. Will walk for a bit when I've run out of thoughts. Just me out here with the occasional smoker. 

I suspect that's why I took to Venice and fell so hard, the water. For all the tourists and the overpowering smells, that sparkling, swishing green-blue had me captivated. I did experience vertigo by the Canal Grande, though. I experienced it for the first time in my life, as far as I recall, during that trip. A significant episode happened in the tilted NSK State Pavilion installation and I have only ever felt shame for this. It did what it intended to do so effectively for me, which was to invoke the stress of being forcibly displaced - a displacement that I in my western white privilege of travelling for fun on an EU passport had no real right to feel so deeply and so fleetingly. The displacement I felt in my life at this time was real and painful, but wildly different from seeking asylum. 

It's getting busy now with families out for a stroll. Understandable. It can be challenging being couped up in a vehicle for long stretches, even when your travel is leisurely.

Athill talks about not really having travelled or learned languages. My travel hasn't really been for what many people from our part of the world would consider holidays. I only visited Venice because dear Jenn was there. I doubt I'll ever return, mainly because the industry that's keeping it afloat is also hastening its sinking.

Oh there are so many smokers. I'm not used to the sickly stench at all now.

Athill wrote of many topics in her memoir, largely about the people and experiences she collected throughout her life rather than a psychological 'I', and a passage on this towards the end struck home. Something I grapple with as I embark on an ambitious book project enabled by my ACE award is involving myself so much, being a central, pivotal character rather than the spectral absent presence whose 'I' becomes erased in much academic writing. In the last chapter she writes of being brought up in an environment in which 'I' was met with: 'YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PEBBLE ON THE BEACH'. Quite. Of that she says, 'I know several people, some of them dear to me, who still feel its truth so acutely that only with difficulty (if at all) can they forgive a book written in the first person about that person's life' (pp. 178-9). What strikes me after having read the book within a day is that much of it isn't about Athill, but much more about, as I say, the people she collected, and she emerges from time to time as another of those people. It is utterly striking, erudite and honest writing which I thoroughly recommend. I only read it because it is suggested further reading for the creative non-fiction writing course I'm beginning in late August. Well ahead of time it has given me a pile of books I'm enjoying diving into (got loads of pre-loved copies courtesy of Wob and local libraries). 

There I shall have to leave it for I'm getting blown to bits! 

 


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