navidad

It’s the evening of the day between Christmas and Boxing Day and I’m exhausted from delicious food and remarkably nice family times. The remnants of Mexico I brought home to give as presents went down pretty well, as did a video card I made involving Guadalajara Christmas decorations cut with sledging in Birmingham (where we once lived and went to visit best friends there, later walking with our (twentysomething) ‘children’ past the house we once lived in. Revisiting old haunts leads to waves of nostalgia, lots of sighing and very few thoughts of any real substance. Mostly it boils down to ‘how weird we once lived here and now we don’t’.

Growing older, the sense of home gets more and more dispersed. I’m at home in any of the cities where I can remember where the bus routes go, at home with a sample of friends from many different eras and places, I’m at home now on Twitter if I’m honest, that place feeling more like a real community of interest than some bizarre and spurious cyberworld.

:::::::> At the Guadalajara Book Fair I did an interview for the Book Fair’s YouTube TV channel. I thought being relentlessly upbeat about the future of literature while cheerfully predicting the demise of pretty much all the existing infrastructure of the publishing world might provoke a response here. “But will the bookfair survive?” asked the Interviewer.

“Well, probably not but, hey – all things must pass.” I didn’t put it quite like that, but realise I now feel at home taking those kinds of positions, but can understand completely why others find them terrifying.

There was a Christmas tree and nativity scene in the foyer of the Hilton, bright sunshine and palm trees outside. The British tend to forget it’s pretty hot in Bethlehem in December, but this still seems wrong. Out of place.

One of my favourite images is the Steinberg view of the world from 5^th Avenue. My place is a building, some people, some objects, some music, writers and artists -  an assemblage of identity, more like a homepage than a property.  Put together my choice of itunes, my friends on facebook and perhaps that’s my place, now accessible anywhere, no need to stick with one piece of earth.

Of course that’s just for us mobile ones with the cash to waft through free global wifi zones or hang loose with a dongle.

And there I was in another kind of place: the bookfair, familiar and always strange, everywhere the same, with stands, cafes, huddles, grouchy security people, ferocious networkers cramming in meetings.. this could be London or Frankfurt,  and books in languages I can’t read.  So all I can see are the trappings of the art – is this a great poet? Does he look and act like one? That’s all you have togo on.

At Christmas I find notes on the laptop written in Mexico and read “I now have one more hour in Guadalajara, in this perfect heat, at this place of books, in a mood of calm.

“A good spot to consider where my place is. I think it’s here, with laptop and notebook and coffee, the potential for scrounging a cigarette from a polite stranger if needs be, for some interesting and attractive passer-by to smile and enter into conversation, and meanwhile just enough relaxation, just enough pressure to write to let the juices flow.”

But to be honest, they didn’t flow very far.

Nor tonight. I’m knackered. Good night. Festive doodahs.