TIME AND SPACE

We’ve just got back from holiday. It’s funny how life changes: I used to write a lot about holidays; these days, there just doesn’t seem to be time.

Well that’s not exactly true. It’s more about a combination of time and space, and somehow, on our vacations, Sammy and I run out of space, and therefore time, to do anything quite like that. Perhaps I’ll try in October when we next go away by ourselves, but for now, it’s good to know that I was able to use that time and that space to breathe, to relax and just be somewhere different for a few days - rather than thinking about how to write about it.

We were on Jersey, staying with family. That in itself might make writing about it difficult; oh, not because there was any drama (there really wasn’t) but more that space (we’re back to space again) was occupied with other pursuits.

Pursuits like: driving around country lanes! Jersey is pretty much all fields and lanes. It’s an island of countryside, of low walls and leafy trees. Stone barns and corners of houses leap around corners and the sea seems just a couple of hairpin bends away, wherever you are. Like a grey flat cloud, it appears, then it’s blue with white waves, or deep green around Cornish-looking rocks, or crashing wildly over the concrete sea walls. I loved that.

We saw lighthouses and castles, villages and cliffs, clouds and sunsets, churches, flowers, and museums.

Of course, in wartime, Jersey was occupied. In 1940, the British government took the strategic decision to leave the Channel Islands undefended, and sure enough, the Germans came. It seemed strange to think of Nazis in kübelwagons speeding around those same country roads, or perhaps just on bicycles as the sun blinked happily through the September trees. The island just seemed too peaceful to have been involved at all.

I visited the Jersey War Tunnels - a museum that told that story in the underground network of tunnels the Germans built as a hospital. It was cold, dark, damp; the very last place Sammy wanted to go, and (I reflected) a peculiar choice for the wounded. Anyway, it was really interesting.

Being an island of about 9 miles long and 5 miles wide, there was plenty of ocean to view. In the west, we went to St Ouen’s with its dramatic Atlantic waves. The North (we went to Bonne Nuit) was more like Cornwall than Cornwall, and even in the East on a greyish day, the water chopped its way to Normandy. The South was windiest of all, and on the wettest of our days we struggled against the ferocious rain. I made a comment about how those days reminded me most of family holidays.

We had a good time. We had good space. The big skies and the slower world did me a great deal of good, and I think the Lady too - though both of us had anxieties to work through. Anxieties not lessened by one of us beating the other at card games, or floundering at Articulate!

And now, in the blinking of an eye, we’re back. And suddenly, so is good old work and that mode I have to switch in to. It’s hard not to feel constrained, not to feel hurried or pushed along by it. In me there is a push outwards for more hours, bigger sky, better breathing. Out there, the world reacts and pushes back, but that’s okay. Holidays remind us what matters, what’s possible, what’s deep and wide and slow and wonderful.

And that’s pretty good to hold on to.