​I’m there to take part in neighbouring Melbourn’s celebration of Bloomsday. On the first day, eight short stories are read outside different houses in the village – Dorothy Parker's 'Arrangement in Black and White', Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’, Joyce’s ‘Eveline’. My turn coincides with a deluge. I read a P.G. Wodehouse story under a chestnut tree, shouting out the wonderful lines (“The kemerer’s ’idden in the keb”) against the din of the rain. The following day I take part in a panel of four working writers discussing who we are, what we do, how we do it and why. It’s a compulsion, we agree.

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We arrive in wet dark, a recent downpour just petering out, car parks and streets awash. We are met by a smiling young driver who patiently answers all my questions on the way to Hotel L’Opera, a quirky nineteenth century building on Parizh (Paris) which takes its name from the opera house (modelled on its Parisian counterpart) around the corner. From my attic room I can just see the top of the golden dome of the Sv Aleksandur Nevski Memorial Church and, on a clear day, the Vitosha mountain. A floor below, Carole’s tall windows look over a garden full of cats. For most of our time in this lovely city, the sun shines.
 

​We spend our days wandering: church interiors, markets and parks, cobbles and back streets, much more interesting than the pedestrianised shopping street bul. Vitosha. We plod the length of 6 Septemvri several times a day, frequently finding ourselves lost. We discover a fine vegetarian café with excellent humus and soups and a cocktail bar in a square on Angel Kanchev where we sit under an umbrella in an evening storm. On the same street, a family-run Italian restaurant provides two of the best meals ever. Carole plays a jewellery seller at backgammon for a ring and loses. We visit the tiny but charming botanic garden. We dodge trams, ride one stop on the metro. It takes us several attempts to find the Central Station.
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The poem On Falling by Joanna Klink dropped into my inbox at the end of last week. I read it as metaphor before discovering at the end that it is really about a tree! There's the beauty of poetry, I guess!

All photos taken in the Botanics on the morning of 13th April

​Up the track at the side of The Falcon past the dead larch and diagonally up the hillside. Late afternoon light. Curlew.

I’m thinking of Shakespeare I suppose because the second piece I read*, about the history of the camp and its destruction by the authorities, was based around a resident from Syria who had taken almost a year to reach Calais. As well as speaking fluent English, we learn he has ‘a degree in English literature and a Master’s, plus an uncle in London and a cousin in Wales…’ Such madness, such a wicked waste: if it were no one’s fault, it would be bad enough. But the thousands like Baraa Halabieh are not victims of some random act of god or nature. They ‘have fled countries where in recent years the French and British have dispatched troops or bombed from the air. Others have escaped from regimes armed by France and the UK…’ Halabieh speaks with the same quiet dignity as you do when you explain the hunger strike: ‘We are not criminals and we are not terrorists. We are just trying to find a safe place. We’re here because of the actions of European governments in our countries. We are the outcome of your actions.’ 
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The third Calais account is Glenys Newton’s ‘Have we lost our Elgin marbles?’ It hits home with her characteristic mix of searing anger, heartfelt compassion and humour. Like the other two writers, she finds laughter in the Jungle, and hospitality and, even in these terrible times, hope, whether in the Greek philosophy of Filotimo –  gratitude, generosity and humanity – or in ’Rise Of The Give A Shits’, all those who are ‘stepping up to fill the gaping holes left by our governments’. 
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Ben Ehrenreich's 'Diary'* appeared in the London Review of Books for 17 March 2016. I took the liberty of  sharing it on my timeline, where I hope you can read it in its entirety.

You can listen to Francisco Canaro's orchestra with Ernesto Fama singing 'Lo Pasao Paso' in a 1939 recording here. Meanwhile I'm thinking my rough translation should read 'what's past is past' - should it? Now I'm not  sure...

​And you can read more about the Calais Hunger Strike on their facebook page

 The day begins with a post from Mick, reporting on Day Six of his group’s visit to Buenos Aires and Day Three of their ‘training’: a tough regime which has left Mick’s shoulders ‘like raw meat’. One sentence really strikes a chord with me: ‘only my tango friends know that when you come on something like this you start again from the beginning.’ At once I’m back in Argentina, if only for a few minutes. I don’t remember experiencing sore shoulders but my memory produces its own lows – the days when my arm swelled to a balloon after a mosquito bite and I took to my bed convinced I had dengue fever, or the night I paid several hundred pesos for the services of a charming taxi dancer in Club Gricel and then lost my nerve so completely that I couldn’t dance at all – as well as plenty of highs, which blur now into a kind of composite glow, jacarandas in bloom, street life sounds from the balcony, dancing to a perfect Pugliese tanda in the early hours…

An exhibition The Museum of Innocence, a collaboration with author Orhan Pamuk to accompany novel and film, is at Somerset House until 3rd April.

Two boys sit side by side on a bench running alongside the wall of the large tent which houses the Ashram Kitchen. Both wear woollen hats, with scarves which they sometimes pull up over their mouths. This, and the way they swing their legs as they speak, makes them seem like youngsters, teenagers maybe, though from what they say and their grasp of the wider world, they must be grown men. They see their country at the centre, and at the mercy, of a struggle for control and power, not so much at the hands of the Taliban (they are tiny, a small small number of Afghan people, they say) but at the hands of neighbouring countries – Pakistan, India, China – and of the major powers. The USA sounds like ‘Lucia’ in their narrative, but there is nothing foolish or faulty in their analysis. One draws a map of the area on the checked cloth where he sits in an attempt to clarify the situation for his less informed audience. One says his city, the capital, Kabul, was bombed yesterday. ‘Yesterday,’ he emphasises. The other comes from a different city which is also constantly under fire from warring armies. And it’s been going on for 50 years – longer, they say. It’s terrible. They don’t volunteer their own stories, or speak of their families, or their own journeys to the camp, keeping their private nightmares to themselves. Despite what seem like dreadful and dangerous conditions to those listening, The Jungle for them is clearly a refuge, a place of shelter and safety.
 

​Muhammad is an older man, from Tehran. Apparently he has at most ten words of English – ‘good’, ‘eggs’, ‘tomatoes’, ‘tea’, ‘water’, and ‘no English’. He is living opposite the Ashhram Kitchen, in a timber-framed plastic-walled shelter with an earth floor, a chipboard door and chipboard benches which run along two sides of the main room. There is a small rusty metal cylinder in the centre, clearly used for a fire, but it is cold. The back of the shelter is open, with another half-length bench forming a narrow table and a view over the tops of tents and shelters to a line of trees. If you were to keep your eyes at tree level, you might be in England; or France, as indeed you are.
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He invites four volunteers, who happen to be outside waiting for a lift, in for tea. He does this without words (apart from ‘eggs’ and ‘tomatoes’). His invitation is made gracefully, and graciously, with his hands, but it is also insistent: there is no possibility of refusing. He tries to learn names, but gives up, laughing apologetically. He settles his visitors on the benches and disappears behind a partition wall, where he must have a stove. In ten or fifteen minutes he reappears with a frying pan of scrambled eggs. He empties an orange box of clean crockery and upturns it on the fire chimney to make a table, on which he puts the pan. A tiny folding stool makes a second table for a bag of sliced bread: use the bread as a spoon, he mimes. The eggs are mixed with tomato and onion and lots of salt, and are delicious. He brings a bottle of water and a cup. Later, there is tea, and then more tea, and photographs. His guests leave, to return to their homes. 

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​ Photoshoot is an attempt to capture the myriad impressions of a weekend volunteering in Calais, the way those impressions come at you without letting up and all in a jumble, all the highs and lows, often both at the same time. The three stories are moments that have stayed with me. You will have your own stories, of bananas and onions, packing and sorting, driving and distributing; of the ‘dirty girls’ who bought a washing machine and a tumble dryer and wash and dry clothes for people in the camp in Dunkirk; of the Airbnb booking which enabled a refugee family to have a night away with hot showers, a dining table, DVDs for the kids. You will have your own moments of frustration, anger, despair as well as laughter and – not a word we use often away from a religious context – joy. I remember that, on our way back, Dan said it takes a day or two for the emotional impact to hit. Meanwhile, perhaps like you, my first day back in Cambridge has felt a bit unreal; as if I’ve left part of myself behind. Or is it that I have so many vivid memories of the last couple of days, that ‘normal’ life pales a bit by comparison? I don’t want to romanticise the situation there – even if Dunkirk is ten times worse, there are still aspects of The Jungle which don’t bear thinking about. But I was inspired by tales of volunteers and residents joining together for the impossible task of moving all the newly constructed shelters away from the area targeted for the bulldozers in time to save them. I noticed how the newly flattened ‘100 metre buffer zone’ is clearly an attempt to contain and also to conceal the refugees. And back at home, I watched the youtube video of the French police assaults with tear gas and rubber bullets, before the bulldozers moved in. I’ve felt tearful and angry and elated by turns and it’s been hard to be patient with the trivial concerns which clutter up my time here. Somehow my day picking litter and the people I met feels like an intense and important experience and I’m left with a reminder of the kindness of strangers, as usual particularly the poorest. I can’t wait to go back.

​The run up to Christmas and I’m off again, heading north with that familiar sensation of being pulled two ways: am I approaching home, or leaving it behind? My taxi driver knows where I’m coming from. A Romanian living in Arbury, he’s happy there, but it’s not the same as Romania, he says, you know, the feeling. He holds his hand to his heart. He has no plans to travel there for Christmas though there’s still time to arrange something; or he could go somewhere else, Mexico maybe. 

​It’s an old preoccupation of mine, and one that’s been uppermost in my mind for a while as I’ve tried various ways to stay in my lovely Cambridge home (ah!) where I’ve been contentedly settled for more than four years. I’ve dipped my toe in the lodger pool with varying degrees of discomfort, and surprised myself by finding my last guest a pleasure to have around. The previous one brought enough luggage for an entire family; in fact, I was on first-name terms with several of his relatives by the time he left, and at moments was worried I might show up one evening to find they’d all moved in. Several times I’ve come close to giving up, trawling the Rightmove and Zoopla lists and trailing round the smart and overpriced and the downright grotty, which of course are overpriced too. I’ve even followed the advice of well-wishers and with a rather bad grace put my name down for sheltered accommodation – I can’t decide if the term ‘alms-houses’ included in their mission statement is more or less chilling – run by a local charity for Cambridge women over sixty, in straitened circumstances. If only my Cumbrian house were an earner rather than a drain on my already pretty empty purse!

​I don’t know why it took me so long to think of Gumtree, which has been perfectly serviceable when it comes to beds or bikes. In the space of a week I’ve fielded enquiries from would-be chicken farmers and horse dealers, gardeners and vegetable-growers, a couple with ‘one small dog, never any trouble’; and a full page of a disjointed life story, hovering somewhere between comedy and tragedy. What they all have in common is the search for a new home. The latest, arriving this morning, comes from a man who wants permission to lay a wooden floor. My most likely prospective tenants I dismissed out of hand on account of a name so improbable I thought it was a spoof. They are driving down from the Scottish Highlands tomorrow with their deposit. If all goes according to plan, they will have moved in before Christmas.

​By the time the train passes through Wigan, Cambridge’s clear skies and full sun have been replaced by dull grey cloud though no sign yet of the promised severe weather. I watch the streets recede, trying to catch some sense of my parents’ footsteps on the pavements of the town where they grew up and where I started life. For both of them, childhood was somewhere to escape from, their adult lives a sustained endeavour to create a better life for themselves and their children. Why not? The same impulse is explored in John Crowley’s recent film ‘Brooklyn’, adapted by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Toibín, which I saw for a second time on Monday morning. Which in itself felt like an indulgence until, just minutes in, I realised I was watching a master class in story-telling, each development delicately handled with just enough detail to engage the audience before moving on. The narrative opens with a long shot of the dark streets of Enniscorthy, where Toibín himself grew up. By the time Sunday mass is over, the stifling confines of life in the small town are palpable, the opportunity for Eilis to travel to New York for a new life, as Toibín did, a relief but also a wrench. Eilis’s journey allows us to experience the terrible dislocation of leaving home and the acute pain of homesickness. Still, it is a better life, as we are reminded in the moving sequence where Eilis volunteers at a church-run Christmas dinner. As the men file in, the priest explains: these are the men, all Irish, who built the tunnels and the bridges. But there’s nothing for them now. ‘So why don’t they go home?’ Eilis asks. Of course there’s nothing for them there either. For Eilis too, it’s a less than straightforward trade. Returning to Ireland after the sudden death of her sister, she is quickly drawn back towards the old life. But things have changed. And she has changed too, at home in both places and neither. It’s a remarkable film, too hastily dismissed by some as a sentimental love story. It reminds us how closely our identity is tied up with place. If you haven’t seen it, do. 

​Between Lancaster and Penrith (my early years in Carnforth inching nearer to my twenty adult years in north-east Cumbria just before relocating – horrible word! – to Cambridge) the cloud thickens in tune with my mood. Visibility shrinks. Rain flecks the windows. Swathes of standing water in the fields remind me that I’m nearing the parts of the county reeling from the effects of Storm Desmond. Earlier in the week on TV news, I see a man wiping away tears as he faces the ruin of his home by flood waters for the second time. A woman streets away wades through her downstairs rooms, refusing to leave: ‘It’s my home,’ she says. ‘This is not going to beat me.’ A message from my son’s father, living now in the Eden valley: ‘So sick of dark waters’. I remember his near-despair, echoing the distress felt by the county’s victims of foot-and-mouth in 2001, tempered only by the spirit and courage of the people amongst whom he’s made his home. I scan my bookshelves until I find Heart and Soul, the personal stories of the agonies shared then by the farming community, and reread Gord’s contribution. Then the terrible floods of 2005, more floods in 2010, and now these, one knock after another for a community already on its knees. Our son Jack, born-and-bred Cumbrian now living like his mum in Cambridge, describes the latest blow as ‘savage’. One explanation: the amount of rain – more than 30 centimetres, the equivalent of a month’s rain in a 24-hour period – was simply too much even for the new multi-million pound flood defences. There is more to it than this, though. Whilst we are beginning to take on board the devastating impact of deforestation in the Amazon, we are less keen to recognise similar forces at play here. George Monbiot suggests that government policies which keep Cumbria’s hills ‘treeless’ for grazing sheep and support river-dredging to protect farmland actively contribute to the problem.

​Almost in Penrith. I pause to collect my luggage, a backpack so enormous it’s barely manageable and an even heavier bag of food, thinking of houses where groceries and clothes are swimming in filthy water, and of other journeys made in haste, driven by necessity or fear, taking nothing, or losing all you have taken on the way. In Emily Dugan’s Finding Home I read about Clive from Harare. He arrived in the UK in 2008 without passport or visa, having paid almost everything he could raise to traffickers for his voyage: South Africa first, then 14 days or so in the hold of a cargo ship to Calais, and finally in the back of a truck amongst boxes and pallets to Dover, and on to London. His application for asylum is rejected. He spends much of his time homeless. Three attempts to return to Zimbabwe fail. Now, he is still waiting, Dugan says, ‘hoping an opportunity to create a real home –in either country – will present itself’. I’m reminded of Clive and those like him whom I met in Calais as the train pulls into Carlisle. There as here, no sign of the desperate scenes so familiar from the media, without which you wouldn’t know anything was amiss. 

​I have half an hour to wait for the connection to Brampton. The station is shrill with starlings, lined up in their hundreds – thousands, perhaps – along the metal beams below the roof, jostling and screaming as they find a place to perch. Do they return to the same spot night after night, or fight for a new roost each evening? And what of those other migrants, cuckoos and geese and raptors, who travel thousands of miles twice a year, without luggage? By the time my heavy bag and I arrive in Hallbankgate, it’s pitch dark and pouring and somehow I have the wrong key so have to break in. For the week that I’m there the weather stays mean – gales and driving snow on the second afternoon, and everything frozen the following morning – and a leaky washing machine has created my own private flood, leaving half the kitchen floor a pulpy mess. Perhaps not surprising that my Highlanders decide they’re not so keen after all. I begin by tackling the most pressing of the jobs, and before I know it I’ve embarked on a full-scale repainting. No time to walk so no photos to speak of; a few friends squeezed into the spaces between coats; the week almost over. I despair of finding a tenant. Then, on the last day, a couple whose Carlisle house has been flooded seem relieved to find a temporary home for themselves and their Wheaten Terrier Molly. I’m hugely relieved too. I join the crowd in the bar of The Belted for carols round the pool table. The massive TV in the corner stays on, images of Cameron alternating with shots of flooded streets as we sing. Next to me, Jackie bellows out the descant. A small girl in a pink party frock, white ankle socks, white peep-toe sandals, dances. Sara and Erin play the flute; Sexy Ed the vicar on the fiddle; Stella sings a solo, the first verse of Silent Night, in German, as she does every year. It’s not smart, and it’s not Cambridge. But a part of me belongs here also: for the time being at least, I have the double security of two homes, in a world where so many have none.