All Ashore

"I am never merry when I hear sweet music."

- Shakespeare

"Let it go. Can’t hold it back anymore.”

- Frozen
“I’m not feeling too good myself.”

- Joe Cocker

It was in my second week of covering U.S. media that I started coming down with something.

Throughout my childhood I never thought my life would look like the set up for a bad joke in a lesser Richard Curtis film. But here I am, a New Zealander living in London writing for a New York publication alongside American girls fighting about who gets to cover the latest series of ‘The Bachelor.’

Allow me to elaborate.

They say the older you become, the longer your memory is.

My memory’s always been dire. Porous, you might even say. My mum and I used to joke about it when I was young. ‘Forget you head,’ she’d say, comparing the long gaps between my carriages of thought to the nearest pasta-straining device.

In fact, I never thought any of this would work out quite the way it has. I’m not sure how I got here.
My mother has the longest memory … well, in living memory. She’s almost preternaturally almaniacal. Recently, we had a minor spat over a dress that she swore I had bought, but which I had absolutely no memory of ever wearing. Guess who found the dress, and turned out to be correct. 
She would say her long memory was both a blessing and a curse. She could remember things she would rather forget. One of the warmest feelings known to me was being tucked up ready for bed, uttering the words ‘tell me a story’, and as if I’d put a penny in the slot, out would spill some tale of an overnight trip to visit her aunt in Dunedin by train. I never felt quite as secure as in those days. She always had the gift of the garrulous.
I am becoming more and more like her. Each day that goes by, I see fresh qualities cropping up – hitherto unforeseen desires to scrub the bathroom spotless, in absence of our cleaner, for instance.  
For the past few months, I’ve experienced a new emotion – waves of homesickness that come on without warning, akin to the queasiness one might feel on a trek out on the ocean waves. Is this the sensation my parents first felt when travelling from New Zealand, to the long-promised shores of Blighty by boat, way back when?

In those days, for a bob apiece you could take a six-month voyage out to Southampton and begin the sort of English life every good Colonial dreamed of. My parents travelled the U.K. by motorbike, my mother working as a PA for Elton John’s publicist, and supporting my father every step of the way in his budding career in publishing (later graphic designer.)

I remember the anecdotes from the road. There was the stowaway on the ship who skimmed the shoreline of England, tantalisingly, only to be made to turn all the way back around the Cape again when he was discovered. And one of mum’s favourite tales, which recalled my father seeking out a broche she had taken a shine to and going back to buy it for her. She never forgot that day.

A stately pleasure for upwardly-looking middlingly-mobile middle class New Zealanders especially in those great days of exploration was the slow-moving, nothing ever quite happens, faded grandeur of the Granada/ BBC drama. I didn’t escape the fixation – shows like ‘House of Eliot’ and ‘Brideshead Revisited’ were staples. It was a very English childhood.

My dad apparently used to tell my mother that when he saw England for the first time, it felt like he’d been there before. Déjà vu circumnavigated by Imperialism and The Madness of Queen Vic. These were the days when, in New Zealand, you’d still stand in the cinema for a round of ‘God Save the Queen’ before the movie started to roll.    

But the first time I saw England, I was unmoved. We arrived on 9/11. I was a teenager at the time, eager to get back to my active life at home. 
Home. That ever-moving feast. They warned me things would change. 
Now, a memory will spring up and strike. A game of Trivial Pursuit and a walk on the beach on New Year’s Eve have assumed the cut and colour of the most dazzling diamond. The sadness I feel today has nothing to do with the basest notes of love, envy, hate - but a sadness cultivated by the rigors of years, the past that has ebbed at the edges of the happiness of those I love, and the terrible toll of time and tide.

And yes, George Floyd, too.

Last week, I started a new job. A week later, I accidentally broke one of the biggest cycle-leading stories of the year when I was second on deck, after Twitter, to report on video posted to Facebook of a black Minneapolis man’s death. Being five hours ahead, I guess I got in front of the news. 

Behind the social media static, a real man had died. George Floyd. Survived by two daughters. Murdered in America.

And all I could see were viewer figures.

I had tried to cover it up. But that dread that comes at the sharp end of nostalgia. What men in the war would have come home to. Long cut adrift. A parting of ways from an association with life. What if, like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, something within me, long sickening, had quietly passed on?

My boss called me up personally to congratulate me – what a coup in my first week. They were excited, he said. I had the capacity to be one of their top ten journalists. You’re doing great, they told me. And the numbers are good.

I haven’t sung in over a week. Too much going on in the news for singing. Some music resonates with disappointment cast down the line. In 2010, I sang a beautiful quartet from Benjamin Britten’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’. The lovers reunite after their misadventures, chastened and wiser. “Why then, we are awake. 
"Let us recount our dreams.”

When New Zealand Opera came singing at our family home in Seatoun (I won the competition for mother’s day this year after entering my mum) they performed Bellini’s Vi Ravviso. It’s a beautiful bass aria from Bellini’s La Sonnambula.

“I recall pleasant places

where, happy and peaceful

I passed from early youth!

Dear places, I found you again,

But those days

I can't find anymore."