house guests

5

Tiny revolutions in other people’s lives, I just can’t stop making them. When we got here and had eaten our first meal together I said to our hostess, No, I’ll wash up. Because as everybody knows, it’s not on for the person who cooks to wash up as well. I made sure to say it […]

Something I dig about the guy I’m travelling with. We are staying with my folks and Mum, fielding a houseful of hungry guests, sent us down to the supermarket with her credit card, and her pin number written on my wrist. We did the shopping and then looked at one another. I said, “Hey! We’ve […]

I feel tearful this morning and my chest is aching with grief. Luckily my housemate & host made us both laugh just now by describing, with infinite wryness, the ruthless player she is partnered with today (“I have to go all the way to Zurich & then it’s like the Olympics”) before leaving with her […]

A melancholy day. We visited the grave of my friend’s husband. The room where I am sleeping is filled with his things, fishing trophies he won and a fearsomely engraved pewter hard hat with his name on it and, from underneath as I gaze up at the glass shelf, a space where his mind once […]

It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed. A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like […]

When I walk between the quiet cottages and see people with their heads bowed, eating dinner… I can feel the wildness in my heart and I feel like a teenager, it feels like rage.

Afternoon cycle ride down to the shops. I say down, but I really mean up: this is Switzerland. We set off up the side of a steep quarry and my host, who is in her seventies, left me so far behind that I had some trouble once I reached the crest working out which side […]

My friend lives by a rapid, cold river in northern Switzerland; her little village is a lot more built-up than it was when I was last here. We walked by the river in silence and a kind of sadness for what has become of the landscape. You have to kind of relax your mind away […]