I’ve been reading Ali Smith’s luminary Spring over the past week, and it’s made me meditate a lot on all those things that come with the close of windows, friends going home for Christmas, and the end of another year.
Amidst long hours in the library, it’s made me go back to writing poetry and filled me with a renewed hopefulness for the new year and all the change Spring’s arrival beckons.
Settings have always been something that stuck with me (though completely out the window when it comes to navigating – hello, getting lost in Trent in third year…). I remember it whether it was a text I received at a specific moment on the pavement, or what played in that café on a Tuesday morning.
So, dragging up photos and my Spotify wrapped, and trying to veer from over-sentimentality, 2024:
Spring
Visiting Prague in April was optimal, the daylight stretching hours just to the right stretch of evening, the crowds palatable, and flowers well in bloom.
I wanted to visit Prague immediately after I finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being, though the only reference point I had was Petrin Hill, where Tomas has sent Tereza to end her anguish. Two weeks later, I came, left with pieces and buildings untouched, wondering what Kundera must’ve been going through.
I turned twenty in Prague, this mystical almost fairytale land of bridges and castles, with two friends, having planned the whole trip, thus wholly responsible for the hour detour to the flea market, and inadvertently booking us onto a Czech tour of the Klementinum complex at half nine.
On the cusp of Easter break, Prague’s timelessness offered a sense that not all has to change in the tide of self-discovery in your early twenties, the past few months having held tumults for me, and never-ending workload of April peeking through.
I caught the running bug in March, so I really loved waking up on Easter Sunday (although in Prague, the main event is Monday, as was felt in a very empty single-floor of Duplex) and just going for the hills, I felt like Julie jogging along the water in Oslo in The Worst Person in the World (2022).
Moments of solitude let me calibrate my setting independently, taking a wandering day trying Honey Cake in Hotel Paris and walking all the way to Zizkov to the rather foreboding tower with the babies I didn’t go up. Despite the language barrier, I managed to compliment the lady on aux at a quiet, dimly lit bar in the Old Town, and in exchange, got a YouTube list of next suggested songs I still haven’t put on.
It was nice to spend more time with friends I hadn’t travelled with before or seen much of recently as he lives in a different city, and to me, the pace was perfect – we could always have more, especially when hungover and sleepless on a cruise I’d hyped everyone up for post 6 a.m. return from the club.
Prague’s not a city I’d be quick to call quaint, but the alleys and cobbled streets will always be special to me, the sun streaming in through the cracks between old buildings, and its river and the swans giving endless space to rethink all your life decisions to Underdressed at the Symphony.
Summer
Following the liminal few weeks after essays are in and the days seem to go on forever, and as my friends and various other people in my life left Nottingham, I became somewhat restless for the change of pace July offered.
Interning in London was pretty novel to me, the pace, the taking the tube to work in the mornings, and having an empty flat to myself. I found myself listening to a lot of new music my degree didn’t seem to need – consistent eight something commutes, armed with a Pret subscription, on the Northern Line were peppered with Jungle and Tommy Richman.
I found myself reading more, Love in the Big Cityencapsulating all the daunting charm of Seoul and navigating the romantic waters of youth. There’s something so right about reading it when you’re new to a place – my friend was more objective about the book I’d fussed over, giving it a meagre three stars on Goodreads. Both books are in fact gone now, falling out of my housemate’s bag en route to her hometown, but I think the notion of losing objects is as important to appreciate as their acquisition.
I’m glad I pushed myself to explore, go on all these side quests, whether a walk to Sir John Soane’s Museum during my lunch hour or a trek from work in the rain at eight p.m. to Daunt where I’d give my unsolicited views on Just Kids to a couple who’d just picked it up.
I adapted pretty quickly to the routine and freedoms the city offered me, using the opportunity to invite a different friend over or meet someone new many nights of the week, embracing the fast-paced air of transience that I can only describe as very London.
I did, ultimately, find myself somewhat reliant on my friends following the first week or so of social quietness and independence, and with a sense of not being quite grounded – needing Maps to go anywhere, and eating out constantly. I took to my second Instagram to carefully curate all the bakeries and food spots I’d been trying, and document the areas I’d walked, from Newington Green to Deptford. It was while in the cinema that I couldn’t quite get the image of slicing mozzarella for pasta out of my head, and I felt better when I got home and finally cooked.
After a final weekend with a friend who’d come down, it felt like I’d done my time, for now, exhausted by the lightness of my month where everything was new, exciting, and, at times, surreal. I welcomed going home, and planting my feet back in family soil, with the impending trip to Japan offering a mental out during the usual tiffs and moments of stagnation.
Japan was everything I’d seen splashed over screens whilst also utterly just not. This was around the time I properly started to get into Charm, lingering over Clairo’s lyrical uncertainty between Kyoto’s maple-shrouded temples and romanticising my Lost in Translation (2003) moments.
Osaka came to me like a young woman at a party who is unafraid to tell you about her life as it is, friendly, but with edge, and yet rather untainted. It’ll always be the first ‘neon city’ I experienced in memory, something I’d only seen in film before. I’d never travelled with this girlfriend before, and there was a thrilling energy we shared for the onsens (okay, Shinsekai’s Spa World) that stayed open all hours of the night. We were wrapped up in the dizziness of the big city, and to escape the heat often lay in bed until the afternoon, then slowly wandering to the convenience store, and making a long walk to the castle something of an odyssey, pausing at every drugstore and smoothie machine in 7-11 we came across. There’s a song by The Shacks called Trip to Japan that to meencapsulates the new, child-like wonder we had for all these technological treats and Osaka’s lights, kind of remarkable because it was written apparently based merely on an imaginary journey to Japan.
The dislocation I experienced in Japan is so difficult to put a finger on, it’s disorientating, and yet, so alluring – I didn’t feel as shut out as Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s characters did, but then, what was I running away from? I encountered someone who said their borderline-psychoanalysis of me was kryptonite for a lost twenty-year-old – I wasn’t escaping a marriage new, or one stale with kids.
I felt a sense of life not being quite real, the ungritty cleanness of the streets juxtaposing England, and Singapore’s more compact urban sprawl – it was like walking through a mystical, removed place. Most Japanese people don’t follow Shinto, there was still an aura permeating the city that felt quite holy and disorientating, the city lights only metres from signs prohibiting smoking outside.
I met someone who described Kyoto as scarred white, so steeped in history, haunted, yet, so renewed, the Kamo river ever flowing, offering an image of rejuvenation and renewal. There was a kind of incongruity between the historical landmarks and natural beauty of Kyoto, and the nearly overdressed glitz of the karaoke bars for tourists at night. Luckily, I discovered Ponto Cho Alley and the others I can’t name, a quieter, more everyday Kyoto, and my favourite drink ever, Soybean Shōchū, a combination of sweet potato, barley, rice, buckwheat and sugar cane (yes, I was dubious).
Autumn
The return of the past, for a moment, before the initial novelty of seminars and lectures wear off, and that person you thought you could be close to again turns away. September’s a faint nostalgia for something unplaceable, the return of candles and dragging out of the heater, reaching back for folk and Blood on the Tracks again as you settle into a new house, always missing the old one.
The crisp air that feels alright against your too-thin coat that you should upgrade for winter, even a bit warm, inviting you back to the cafes, the stairs and stairs of the shiny library. Returning to Nottingham had that feeling of leaning into a reclining chair that won’t quite go all the way back anymore – third year, graduation on the horizon, a clear lack of plan.
I took comfort in the escape a week between Paris and London offered, my family up for the first time in my Nottingham life. I got obsessed with Marie Naffah’s Rust and Blue for the first time in July, so this offered a kind of rewrite of living in the song for me as my sister, dad, and I climbed the steps of the Louvre, me closely watching how the ‘paintings, they could move’. There’s just something disconcerting about a new city – however peeled you keep your eyes to everyone’s move, and the shadows on a wall, you just must know you’re never quite getting ‘it’, because you’re just passing through, that lack of belonging, inability to be still.
Seeing my family renewed my sense of belonging to something bigger than just my little world of people at university, and I’m glad I had that separation from Nottingham that I often find difficult to, even if just for an hour or two walking to brunch with my siblings, or getting a steady ninety minutes’ train window view.
Winter
The line’s become a bit muddled here because usually I’m sure it begins properly in December, but midway through November we were suddenly graced with snow seemingly out of nowhere, a dreamlike night on Lenton’s streets hurling snowballs at anyone passing the car on the opposite side of the street.
There is something so subdued, and soft, about December, as I double up my socks and pull out Mazzy Star from old playlists and yearn for warmth and silence to The Marias.
Seasons aren’t lines fixed in the sand though, are they? Or perhaps the tide and wind always shift. It’s winter and I’m crawling back inside with things that feel good, tucked in the metaphorical blanket that is typing in bed just above the duvet, mince pies, the catchy jangle pop of Alvvays, and looking up what’s screening at the BFI over Christmas.
Well, it’s been a year.