Reliving

The frost is covering Harborne in the morning. Our neighbour Lyn, one down Victoria Road towards the roundabouts at War Lane and Fellows Lane, has a skeleton of an old greenhouse, dead plants coming up through the metal and covered in crystals. The sun both comes up and goes down behind the house because it's just gone winter. You can get up at seven or seven-thirty and still not be sure if it's morning. Like when we were in Scotland, and you couldn't tell if it was actually morning or if the sun had just come up at three-thirty. Two sides of the same thing.

With Christmas passed, I am spending the week getting things done around the house. Laundry that had piled up and moving some furniture. This house is too small for the five of us, but there is no energy or impetus to move. I decided instead to just change the master and second bedroom, giving the kids more space. Yoko and I are now confined to the second room, on the second bed, but it doesn't matter.  This is the self-imposed paternal martyrdom that my parents used to practice and I used to resent. From the second bed, one can see out the back window into the garden as the sun is coming up and then going down.

When we came to this house three years ago from the heat of Malaysia, it was damp and cold, covered all over with mould. Yoko still insists there is mould everywhere, but I can't see or smell it as much: I pulled out the rotting boards in the washing cupboard and then painted over all the stains underneath the sink and resealed it. I feel a kind of warmth emanating from it at night, calling me back after I've been out drinking with a friend and I fall down Victoria Road, drunk and tired.

There was never this stasis in Malaysia or even in our first stay in the UK — in my mind, I was always backed into some kind of a corner. Now, it feels like nothing will change ever again. I will get fat and old. I will think about whether or not we should buy the house or a house or some house. Can we buy it or not. I finally have the money I need, but I don't feel like I have the money I need. It's always simpler to say, I don't have the money, than I don't want to, or I can't, or I'm afraid. We didn't go home for Christmas because our passports are with the Home Office. There. Finished.

I shouldn't feel old, but I do. I looked across the street when I was at the cashpoint yesterday, and I saw my reflection too clearly in a shop. My ears are larger. They look larger. I put on the sort of jumper that my dad would wear and feel increasingly concerned about this title I'm taking on next year, that I wanted for so long: Reader. I am going to read now. In this Soseki book Yoko bought me for Christmas, a character says, 'The only thing that will satisfy you from now on is the library.' I worry that this is my future, some monasticism, with all the trappings of settling. What now, I wonder, as I set out for the high street, wanting to smoke a cigarette. What about another twenty years arguing with your wife about the dentist. What about it.

If a year of personal success feels like this, I wonder what a year of failure would be like. This year had failure too, I guess, I just haven't had time to think about it. I was on the train, or I wandered off, like at the beach in Scotland. The kids played and Yoko followed them, and I, having done whatever imaginary duty I needed to do, followed the stream back up into the hill, wondering where it came from.

The secret chord

The alarm clock has been waking me up at 3:30 for the last month: baseball games, the election, trips to London, Glasgow, Bristol. Today, because it was so early, I took a taxi to the city centre. The car came early, around 4 and it was cold outside, minus two, the driver said. The streets were empty and dark and I thought about Letchu, our Malaysian taxi driver, and Genehsa on the dashboard of that car. It's been three years now. He had us to his house once, for dinner and the girls played in the park across the street.

The trains are on time or late, but it hasn't mattered actually. In London, I've sat on the 8th floor of the Institute of Education, going line-by-line through a funding bid, and taking time out here and there to go to Pret to get coffee or down past Totttenham Court Road to a pizza restuarant, where I get a slice and then stand on the road, eating it and watching the city go past. That project is done now, I think: there are five or six people left to check it and see what can be done to make sure the costs are maximised for the university. 

The visa application for 2017 has hung over my head for years, but two Monday's again, the Certficate of Sponorship came through and then on Wednesday, the day that my PhD student passed her upgrade viva, I sat in the finance office with the credit card and watched nervously as two payments went through £3000 and £3320. Five people, main applicant and four dependents. I put everything in an envelope and went to send it off. I ran into the other American on campus, Trump had won, yes, I hugged her, but this, holding the envelope, this is good news. This is the best news. Forget Trump for a moment.

I was hoping for a rush of satisfaction that never came, like after my PhD when I jut sat at home and drank whiskey for a night, angry rather than relieved. It's my fault for not putting too much importance on these things, to view my future only as various obstacles to overcome. You can't just keep flirting to pass the time, to put of the inevitable.

Nothing buys happiness though and we got the letters to go do our fingerprints and biometerics at the Post Office. I was angry with the man at the window for treating me poorly and then with the girls for dawdling, and then with myself for choosing such a difficult path. It was done and we went out into the German Market up on New Street. There was nothing left to do but wait. The money saved is just a number and there is still all the usually concerns to worry about. My salary still doesn't really cover our living expenses, isn't it, I say, and it's true and not true because I work so much on other things and there is always money coming in. It's an excuse really. I go to bed without anything to say.

Time is ticking away

When I was an Evangelical, for most of my life until I was about 21, I was convinced the world was going to end imminently. I worried daily — it hummed in my subconscious like you imagine the drones in Afghanistan, just waiting to take you out. I would walk outside and project Jesus coming from the sky suddenly, and it being over like that. In everything, in the literature, the sermons, the audiobooks we listening to: a constant drumbeat of time running out; DC Talk rapped, 'Time is ticking away/ tick, tick, ticking away'. I worried that I would come up short when this happened, that I wouldn't actually have been a Christian. As I grew up, this was less of a concern, but instead I worried that Jesus would appear before I had a chance to have sex, this black hole of unknown pleasure that no one talked about. I remember seeing a naked picture of Pamela Anderson in a CD recycle shop and being burdened for months. Whom do I tell, what do I say.

The silence of the early morning brings up these thoughts. I stood twice in the cold at the bus stop this week, waiting to be taken away to work somewhere, feeling impotent and tired and fat. I wanted to smoke, like I had the week before on the back stoop of Yoko's friend's house, a guy whose kids she teaches Japanese and who is lovely. He's a psychotherapist and an immigrant like me, but older. We were smoking and listening to the M5 in the darkness and talking about how you get older and forget about everything — forget about the curiosity about doing acid, for example. It would be silly at 44, isn't it. We took long drags — the cigarettes were from Sri Lanka and we talked about vices and death and how we need to accept death. Indeed, no one wants to accept it anymore. The conversation kept falling into silence, the sound of the motorway. None of it makes sense, isn't it: how you buy a house and wonder how it was that you bought a house. You are still a kid with a backpack in some foreign country, just trying to get through the year.

I saw DC Talk in New Mexico, at the NMSU basketball arena, when I was 12 or 13, I don't remember. I saw them twice, once with my parents and sister on the Free at Last Tour, my parents insisting on sitting throughout the concert while my sister and I stood nervously. Then again, when they were touring Jesus Freak, their crossover album with the video directed by someone who had directed a Nine Inch Nails video. That time, I was with the youth group and awkward in a different way, but we jumped up and down while they played. We were close to the stage, and I remember that my calves hurt badly the next day.

I don't remember who I was worried I might not ever get a chance to have sex with, who I had a crush on then  — perhaps it was still Sarah Bush, who was several months older than me and studied Spanish with my brother at the homeschool co-op. I was in a class below them, having been born in 1982 rather than 1981 and was with my sister and some other kids I don't remember. Our teacher was a Mexican woman named Liz who would make us copy Spanish sentences into our notebooks, a mixture of a grammar-translation and audio-lingual method I can recognise now as a kind of expert in these things. There was rout memory of irregular verbs, but we never said much of anything, just repeated her for hours on end. I don't remember it now even when it might be useful like when running into our Spanish neighbour and thinking about saying good morning.

There was a mother at this homeschool co-op, a vivacious woman with two boys. She was intimidating and sexual in a way that at thirteen you can't put into words. She would hug you and speak to you directly and loudly. She was convinced suddenly one day that untucked shirts were a sign of disrespect, so we had to tuck our shirts in before we went in. I remember this so clearly, standing on the stairs of a Baptist church which was old and had a 'Fallout' Sign above it, looking back at the car as my mom watched me tuck my Looney Toons shirt into my cut-off jean shorts. The world is ending soon enough — with some luck, before it all falls apart, I will pass Sarah Bush in the corridor and perhaps she will say hello.

The things you remember when your calves hurt — I have been going to the gym again after taking the summer off and trying to be healthy but not crazy, which seems to be a kind of balance I can't manage. I can reject the existence of god, sure, but I'm still 13 and convinced that it will all come to an end. I still want to take communion. I'm 34 now, I think, looking at myself sweating in the gym mirrors and feeling 34. The world didn't end, did it. I sit back in a booth at a pub, drunk and tired, all the conversation spinning around me. The world didn't end, did it.

Travelling

There are Irish travellers on Selly Oak Park now — I saw them over the weekend when I took the kids to the park to play. I saw the caravans first and wasn't sure what to make of it and then it suddenly made sense. I took an Instagram photo like a tourist and the kids asked if they were camping, and I said, yes, sort of. We walked back up to the play area and the kids played on the zip line, and a white Ford Ranger with a twenty-something kid at the wheel rolled up on the grass past me. We leered at each other and I don't remember what I said, but he shouted, 'Why don't you mind your own business?' I said, This is my business, and he laughed and said something like, 'What are you going to do, four eyes?'

He started to pull out towards the main road, but he turned the car back to me, pointed it and reved the engine. I sent the kids running to the jungle gym, but then he did a donut on the grass, spinning around and around, before peeling off. The girls went back to playing and I called the police. A man was there on the playground, without any kids, in a track suit and I wondered if he was one of them too. People say you can just tell, that you just know, but I don't. The American is useless at the pub quiz, there are so many things he doesn't know.  Like the vicar at my church mentioning to me a philosopher I think I am supposed to recognise and have read. I don't. I haven't. I'm sorry.

The police operator sounded tired and bored and I suddenly had the sense we needed to run, to get away. I told the kids we had to go and they complained, but I got angry and hustled them off to the car: we'll go back up to the park by the house, where it's safer.

The Irish Travellers on Selly Oak Park are like a flash of colour in an otherwise grey autumn that's felt unseasonably warm. I watched YouTube videos of them boxing and some documentary about their history, while quizzing colleagues about them. What other things didn't I know.

My life is less interesting otherwise — we trudge up the hill on Sundays for the church service and Mei is singing in the choir, with the white collar and gown. I go when I feel like I can put my unbelief aside, but there are days that I can't and I retreat away to my work because there is always work to do. The pay slips come and now, the edge is off, like the whole plan might have worked. Now to time travel and go back to me some time in the past, the me that was riddled with anxiety and say it will be okay, yeah? You'll make it through. You're being melodramatic.

The girls have started to organise themselves. This was the promise of having three children in 2010, that September when we decided. I feel like it was something I heard while sitting on the edge of a bed. Yoko now tells me that Naomi has organised the Halloween candy they got so Mia won't eat it in the morning, which she had done even though she had promised she wouldn't. It was my fault: their father laden with an evil spirit about him, I took them out trick-or-treating. The last two Halloweens it's been foggy and brisk, and the girls were full of a kind of energy beyond them. They ran and laughed and Naomi said it was like a paradise for children. This, of course, is what makes it worthwhile. Whatever it is. People ask you how you are and you say the kids are happy. What else matters, anyway.

Domocile

The autumn's come as it does, and I can't seem to find my footing. I keep wanting to write, but not having anything to say and falling further and further behind to the point that I have to write about not writing to begin writing. This makes sense to me as a pattern, but it makes for bad writing.

Everything is fine though — the days fill up and empty themselves, the girls getting bigger and those so full now of things and people. How long we can stay in the 100 year old terrace house, I don't know. We will trip over each other until that day sometime in the future when the word comes or doesn't come that we can stay permanently. Still, I feel like I'm sleepwalking — I can't tell what's real.

The leaves are coming down and you can smell it. I get up in the morning and run to work, to the gym, the sun coming up. I teach and then in my office, I open the door with the cold air coming in. I bought a chair that I sit in now, that I can fall asleep in, the sun just coming in for the last times, directly, on my feet. I get up and run again, kiss the girls, all the fleeting moments of childhood.

End of September

This month slipped away. I wrote and wrote and wrote, but wrote nothing here.

The End of the World

Britain ends somewhere in the Scottish highlands, not far from the cottage in Kinlochbervie where we spent the week. The end of the island on northwest side is Cape Wrath, which is the real end, and we waited to take a ferry there on Tuesday until I realised that we needed to take a bus on the other side and it would cost more than I thought, something like sixty pounds altogether. So we instead went back to the beach in Durness, the rain just starting to fall again.

If you know anything about the Scottish Highlands, you know it is famous for small biting insects called midges and for the rain. Both of these things can be particularly bad in August, but in May, when I made the plans for the trip and booked the cottage, I didn't think about that. Instead it was a kind of attempt to recapture my own childhood, taking the car north to Ely, Minnesota, to Wolf Lake where my grandmother had a cabin, or rather a mobile home parked on a berm looking out at the water. I wrote and wrote and wrote about memories of Wolf Lake and Ely when I was in college, about ghosts of dead relatives and the people that disappeared in the woods. 

When I wrote in college, I didn't think much of my parents,  but they are there in the writing as I look back at it now. I wrote:

The house my mother grew up in has been painted. A deck has been added to the front stoop, the sidewalk where my uncles pressed handprints, torn out. Now, as I stand in the snow ten years after I was last inside of the house, I need to look away to remember everything. I look away to remember how the cement stoop, painted red, peeled in July heat or how, when I was six, I woke up from a nap one afternoon to hear my brother and father coming back from fishing. The things that make up memory, like this place (the cabin my grandmother had at Wolf Lake, the paddle-boat, the dock), decayed, fell over, turned upside down, were left behind in the snow. The space between them is closer now and I talk outloud about how they used to be as though, if I stop talking, I will forget.

Kinlochbervie may be in the north, but it has little in common with Ely — there are only four hundred people in Kinlochbervie and a Spar and petrol pump attached to a Post Office. It is quiet in a way that there is rarely ever in the south. You stand and you can hear nothing manufactured, no planes or cars or hums of machinery. On the first day, we trudged an hour and half through the heather and rocks to Sandwood Bay which you can't reach by car. The girls and Yoko pressed on while I worried the whole way about one of them collapsing and being caught out in the middle of nowhere with nothing. I was worrying too much, wasn't I. We crested the hill and there it was, a mile of pristine beach and only the people who had persevered through the heat to see it. The girls ran the last half mile, pulling clothes off before they finally fell into the water.

My parents are minor players in my childhood memories of the lake — this makes sense now as I watched the girls run in and out of the water and on the sand. Where is dad anyway, where has he wandered off to — it's a thought that sits just beyond consciousness. He's hiding maybe.

The midges came out like a cloud when we left Sandwood Bay at five. The girls pressed on, Naomi especially, and I thought about my worrying on the way out: here, this is what I was worried about. I pulled a blanket over my head and we all kept going until Mia was sobbing, a mile away from the car. I put her on my back, underneath the blanket and she went limp like she had passed out. I carried her a while and then had her walk 100 steps while I rested. Up and down, up and down, until we were back to the car and laughing and joking about it all. What was there to worry about.

We used to fish in Minnesota, and we would sit out in the paddle boat on the water, casting again and again. I don't remember catching fish. I remember there was a suana that we would sit in naked. I remember that when I was 14, one summer my sister and I went to see Grandma alone and she let me drive the minivan up and down the access road to the cabin. I was growing and filled with an awkward kinetic energy, but that is all I remember, just the energy.

On the ride home in the car, the girls fell asleep at different times: we drove back in silence, out of the south of Scotland and towards Carlisle. Why isn't there ever anything to say. I thought and I thought, remembering some trace of my father, but then not sure if I had the memory or was projecting him into a place I knew he would have been. There, a fleeting thought of us, eating lunch on the rocks, as we took canoes into the Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Canada. There he is, sitting and smiling. I'm sure I can remember it.

What to expect when you're expecting

Whenever I travel, I save my train tickets in a rubber band like baseball cards. This year, I've been back and forth to London every month, to Euston and then parking myself in Senate House or Starbucks or some other place as I wait for some meeting I've booked. Sometimes I've taken the 4AM Megabus to save money, to squeeze all that I can out of the £300 I asked for at the beginning of the year. All these trips haven't amounted to much yet, even though last week or the week before, I thought that they might. I had one last trip this school year, for an interview that went well. I rode the train home that night not sure of what narrative I needed to tell myself. There are so many different narratives you can tell.

The narrative, it turns out, is the same one I've been telling myself for the last two and a half years, of working at a small university and affecting change in a meaningful way, one that I've gotten very used to saying as I hand out the teardrop shaped business cards I've been given. When I drove Mei up to Newman last Wednesday, to print a picture for her friend that was going away, we stopped at the statute of the university's namesake John Henry Newman in the centre of the quad and I brushed off some cobwebs from the back. I thought of Newman the man, who only wanted to radiate Christ's light to the world, and felt guilty about my own lack of interest in serving others, before taking Mei's hand again and heading back to the car.

Instead of a new narrative, I replayed an old one, coming back to Cagliari, in Sardinia, for an academic conference on authenticity and style. I had been here in 2014 at the beginning of my time at Newman, for a conference on metaphor and I remembered, the way that you remember by being somewhere a second time, a night I had met two beautiful German PhD students who knew my work and were perched on the steps of Chiesa San Michele smoking cigarettes and drinking. I got a beer at a shop that had beads hanging in the door frame — everything was golden and faded, and we sat there looking out over it.

This time, I've felt older — sweaty and fat trudging up and down the hills, thinking about my failure again to secure a better job and all the questions I should have answered in the interview with more focus on teaching English rather than all these other things I've been writing about. And how does sexuality fit into your work on religion? The truth is I'm not sure that it does — I just assume that in twenty years I'll look back on my life and it will make sense. It's all narrative, isn't it? The panel looks at you, but no one writes anything down: this is a sign that you haven't said the right thing.

I told someone about the interview and they said, I'm sure you did wonderfully, but I immediately thought, how would you know though. What if I didn't. 

My book was on sale at the conference for twenty euros, but no one was buying it, and in the end I asked the publisher to let me have it to give to one of the plenary speakers, someone whom I had wanted to give it to for a while. I got the book and as I sat in a session and thumbed through it, I worried that she had left the conference already. This is okay, I thought, not that bad, before finding a spelling error and a poorly written sentence and stuffing it in my bag. When the session ended, I went in search of Elena, the speaker, and had a sense that she would be sitting outside, under a tree in the shade, which she was. I went down with it and gave it to her, You might find this useful, I said, and went back to another session. 

I went running on Saturday morning with a Japanese colleague, although we didn't speak any Japanese and he was a much faster runner than me. I felt like an ox next to him, and said at one point, you should set the pace, it's been too long since I've run. It was early and the Sardinian baby boomers, the ones you can imagine have been told then need to take tablets and get some exercise, were out jogging and walking on the sea front. We took a narrow path on the road, towards the river and the centre of the island. Suddenly, and without warning, I tripped and fell on my hands and knees, immediately shocked and embarrassed. I fell down, I said, and got up wanting to keep running, to pretend it didn't happen, but we walked a short way. I was fine — an ox is resilient, but I felt like a child the way you do when you fall. I scrapped my knees; I'm okay.

It's August first now, and my flight back leaves in three hours. I have to put on my warmer clothes, and get ready for another year of the train and Megabus. The girls are waiting for me: the girls who forgive me and find meaning without need of a narrative yet. I will shut and lock the door while Yoko reads them a Japanese storybook and they all fall asleep, their father lingering and hunched over his laptop in the living room trying to fix another sentence before giving up and falling asleep too. Let the imagination take over the narrative for a bit, let it dream in the cool Birmingham night, the sun just below the horizon and coming again before you know it.

Nothing but time

The US Embassy in London is full of Americans — this goes without saying. I go every two years now with one of my daughters, to have a passport renewed and be reminded, despite all the feelings of familiarity in this country, that we are not in fact British. The Americans in the US Embassy are abrasive in their American politeness. They call you, 'Sir', but in a condescending way. Once, in Japan, when I went to get married, I got scolded for taking an oath while chewing gum. Spit your gum out, Sir. I didn't even realise I was taking an oath.

This time, I was with Mia: Mia who is incredibly grown up provided her mother isn't around. I imagine she will be the one who smokes cigarettes when she gets older, if there are still cigarettes when she is older. She had her baby with her, baby Sky, but I had to watch Sky while she ran off to play in the play area.

London is big if you are a little person, and in all my comings and goings, I've forgotten how your eyes swell when you see any of these things for the first time. Euston Station, and Grosvenor Square. The rush of air in the underground when a train is coming. Sitting on a packed train, your legs dangling off of the seat and your father sat next to you, holding your hand. The crowded pavement and the men sleeping on the stoops of buildings.

We had a muffin together and after the American woman behind the glass shouted instructions at me (Anything you can do to help me, Sir), we went to the toy shop on Regent Street. Floor by floor, we looked at everything together. And then we went to Liberty to look for something for Mummy and then to the M&M store and then pizza for lunch. Mia wanted to look at a fountain, with the horses and then wanted to go back and I said, Yes, look as long as you want, I have nothing but time.

Leaving

This year has been consumed with leaving, or the thought of leaving. When Yoko and I went to sleep on Thursday night, the iPad screen glowing in the dark had said things were going to be okay, but I woke with a start at three and checked again. It was not okay anymore and like instant karma, the pound bottomed out. The truth is, you are never better alone, are you.

When we came to England in 2008, we were following my dream, the one I had chased through Virginia Woolf novels in college to the House of Parliament in 2002, when I sat and watched a debate, the green benches from the television suddenly in front of me. I sat behind a pillar in St Martian's in the Fields, a ten pound ticket to see Mozart's Requiem by candlelight. I went home that next day, a whole idea of the country germinating in me, like the first time I saw Oasis on a Walmart TV screen in Wisconsin.

Then we were here, me and my daughter and my pregnant wife. We stayed in a little cottage in Woolstone, in Milton Keynes, and the woman who owned it with her husband, George, let me keep boxes in their garage and told me about how it had been in the past, before there was Milton Keynes and it was just fields. George had been in the house for his whole life: I asked him how he had dealt with all the things that had changed and he smiled and shrugged.

I've outlived Jesus now. I woke up and felt exactly the same — fat from eating and eating again. I can't stop eating. I went out running in the morning, before everyone got up, before Yoko started hitting the snooze on the alarm. It feels like it just goes on and on.

Outliving Christ

When I came back from Malaysia, it was cold and I was smoking cigarillos. The taste hangs on to the memory: I bought Hamlets when I was last in London, so I could stand on the corner and look angry. I smoked them too quickly and assumed they would kill me, but they didn't. I'm on the edge now of outliving Christ — I'm terrified. I won't be in my late-early thirties anymore, but my early mid-thirties or maybe just my mid-thirties. You slip into the second-person. Your hair starts to fall out. You go to sleep before the children do. I reach for Mei as she runs up for bed. Hug your father, I love you.

Promise Hill

The hotel I stayed at in Fitzrovia didn’t have a toilet in the room: I’m not sure how I had missed this when I booked it. It was £49 and the woman who checked me in was European — I say European because it doesn’t matter now where in Europe you are from if you are in this country, we're all in the same boat. My room was on the top floor, the British third floor, and when I opened the door, I thought this will do: what do I have to complain about.

I changed quickly, so I could get a run in. It was the second day of the British summer, which lasts for two or three days at a time before tapering off in August. I waited at the light and then set out into the park, towards the zoo. There was a fat man running in front of me, and I thought that I felt fat too, but in a way that I’ve come to accept since seeing Julie for the last month. We can both agree you’re not fat, she says, and the part of me that agrees with that agrees with her. I ran up the outside of the park, past a fit couple running together and then out the back up what is called Primrose Hill. I know London well enough, but I had never heard of Primrose Hill, which I read as Promise Hill. There, in the middle of the city, a hill looking out over everything.

I ran up it and smelt weed: someone on one of the blankets, the young white and beautiful people, and then past Chinese exchange students with new iPhones, and finally to the top looking out. Yes, London, I thought, and ran back to the hotel.

Dismantling anger leaves you with a void: if you aren’t constantly and selfishly blaming your partner for everything bad that is happening to you, it’s your own fault, or worse, nobody’s fault. My inheritance came from my Grandfather and suddenly I was sobbing like he hadn’t been dead for months now. Why would money be the trigger. I reach for the tissues, and stop to think. That’s it, isn’t it. Stopping to think about it all.

The void, of course. Everything is just looking into the void in one way or another. I sat down to write on Monday morning this week thinking that exact thing. Here are some blank pages. I apologise constantly. I take the kids to school, up the road, in the rain this week. Mia cries holding her umbrella and I yell at Naomi for being insensitive. The new bakery opens. We go to the library and I read Mia a story. It’s okay, of course. You apologise and move on — nothing’s really wasted though.   

Habits

At least the sun is shining now. The kids, in the morning with their lunches and bags, walking up Victoria Road. It is non-uniform day, which means you can wear what you want, including your uniform, the girls say. I worked out first and then put on my shirt and jeans before taking them to school because I noticed I was the only dad taking the kids to school in workout clothes. And then today, I notice everyone else is now wearing running shorts. Hug and kiss, I say to Naomi and Mei and Mia before they run off. Hug and kiss. A proper kiss. 

When I get off the bus and am walking towards the station, two men are staggering and drunk and one of them has a bottle of beer. I keep my head down, as you do, because I am in a suit and headed the opposite way. One of them says, ‘Mate, do you know where the pub is?’ And I look up and say, ‘Which pub?’ And he says, ‘The one across the road.’ I don’t know, I say, there are pubs on Broad Street. And I keep going, ignoring him saying after me, ‘You American mate?’ like I didn’t hear.

I sleep nervously when I need to get up early. I woke up at 3:04 and checked the time. I’ll lie here until the alarm, I think. And then at 3:30, I get up at the first sound, before the alarm can wake Yoko who has finally come to bed sometime in the night. I make eggs and put on a suit and go out to wait for the bus, although I can order a taxi, I think, I'm not paying for it anyway.

Because it is almost summer now, the sun comes up so early and there are touches of the light on the edge of the horizon at the bus stop. The War Lane Road roundabouts are quiet and everything is closed. I stand there for a moment, in the quietness, and look at the big van across the way that says, 'Man and Van'. 

How many of my problems are just built on bad habits, bad habitual actions. This week I realised I had grown up eating constantly; I was always eating. An Italian woman, a parent of one of kids' friends who I am talking to at a birthday party at Boing Zone says this to me, triggers a series of thoughts: The problem with the British is that they are always eating. They will eat on the street. In their cars. In Italy, we eat three times a day, unless you are a child then you will eat a snack maybe in the afternoon because you can't control yourself. As she says this, a mother comes by offering us cake that the children have passed over, Asda cake, a Galaxy chocolate cake, and I take a piece while the Italian woman of course refuses. I think, yes, this is the problem. I am a child. 

In a committee meeting the other day, when I am referred to unironically as the 'subject expert', I feel again like a child in an ill-fitting suit because I ate a cookie that morning — I felt unhappy and stressed and ate a cookie, like a child. I know they are all thinking, look at this fat child, what is he doing here, even while they say, this is the expert, let's hear from him. 

I know I appear like a bureaucrat now, but I used to be someone who wanted to be a writer. And then I realised that writing is not a vocation, it is an identity. It can be a vocation, sure, but who wants to get paid to write. I want no strings attached. My father asked me when I graduated from university [I say university though I mean college because as an American masquerading as a British bureaucrat, you need to know the lingo], he asked me, What did you learn? and I said, I learned how to write a sentence. 

Later, I recounted the story to my father, and he said, 'You said, I learned how to write a good sentence, or I learned how to write a sentence well. You qualified it.' And I had to agree, because I didn't remember saying it anyway, but I thought, actually, that's not a very good sentence if I put a qualifier into it. It should have been, 'I learned how to write a sentence' and I should've trusted the reader to fill in the rest. 

I finished my expert committee role and thought that even though I had money to ride the tube, I should walk up from South Bank to Soho. I had, as I said, eaten a cookie, and then later a scone, and then later a cheese sandwich and some crisps. I was a fat man again with my bag, weaving through the traffic. I remember this same feeling in Malaysia, the feeling of being stared at even when people aren't necessarily staring. You get it in your head and you start talking to yourself in the voices of all the young men on motorbikes: Look at that fat white man, who is simultaneously a child and rich bureaucrat with a nice home. Earlier, I saw him eating ice cream at the seven eleven.

I walked up towards Westminster, past all the Asians and Italians with selfie-sticks on the bridge in front of Big Ben. And then up towards Trafalgar Square, past all the war monuments, the men on horses and the Americans taking pictures, and I was feeling hot and fat and angry at the world for loving war so much. Really though, I was angry with myself, the cookies, and tight fitting shirt that ripped at the elbow when I went to pick up something. I know I'm not blending in, I too would take a picture of the men on the horses and the clock and everything else if I wasn't so self-conscious. I may appear on the outside like a good bureaucrat, but wait until I open my mouth. 

It's a habit to eat when you are happy or when you are sad or when you are angry or when you stressed or when you are bored or when you are afraid. Here, this cookie will solve your problems, Stevie, you child. Jesus will come back soon enough. At least I realise it now, I say to myself, the fat reflection of me in the mirror. I say, You look fat to me, but I know you are not fat. It's okay: any habit can be broken. You just have to break it. 

Under the tree

London had touches of spring last week. The Megabus was late, but it didn't matter in the end. I woke up as I seem to always wake up when the driver swings past Marble Arch, and I look up and try to remember how this was ultimate success when I was 19. This was the dream; this is living one of the dreams. I got off, got on a bike and rode up towards UCL, towards Senate House library, through Hyde Park in the sun. Hyde Park, where I came when I first came to England, when I first had whatever insatiable sense that there was something here, something in this park that wasn't wherever I was. I parked the bike, I got coffee, I went to my meetings. At 8:30 that night, I stood in Euston Station looking up at the boards and fell asleep on the train going home.