On Richmond Hill

Day 106  Intermezzo - a final romantic inerlude

General status update

Anxiety level/insane euphoria (+/- 1-10,000): A week from now, it’ll be Dexy Time again!! Yay!! Oh, and there’ll be the final dose of  chemo as well, obvs.

Nausea demon: he’s been doing a little shopping to prepare for his monastic retreat; I think he’s going to find it hellish cold this weekend in those open-toed sandals.

Despair Demon: He’s deeply depressed because the Chemo Muse has been ignoring him, and I find myself trying to cheer him up. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

Chemo Muse: She’s had me hard at it today – see below. She keeps talking about completing narrative arcs in the limited time we’ve got left..

Chemo Brian: just chilling on the sofa with his little woolly rat friend, Chemo Rat Brian.

State of mind: nostalgic

Hair: it’s seen better days, frankly, but our current focus is simply on attachedness, and it’s still scoring 10 out 10 on that front.

Previously on Chemo Nights: After meeting via a mutual friend on Twitter during a discussion about procrastination, R and I bonded deeply over our mutual love of the London Review of Books and  have conducted a prolonged epistolary and telephonic romance, whilst living 2,000 miles apart. After 8 months I have finally agreed to fly back to London from my home in the Aegean to meet R, but am convinced that this is all going to end in tears when our virtual romance is exposed to the cruel light of day. Now read on….

The view from Richmond Hill over the River Thames, winding its way through a sylvan landscape essentially unchanged since it was laid out in the 18^th century, is one of the most beautiful in London. The town of Richmond was founded in the early 16th Century, after Henry VII built Richmond Palace, and during the 18th Century, an Arcadia was re-created along the Thames below Richmond Hill. Royal and aristocratic palaces were constructed, with gardens and parks, and linked by a series of avenues, set within a framework of meadow and woodland.

It is the only view in England to be protected by an Act of Parliament:

The Richmond, Ham and Petersham Open Spaces Act was passed in 1902, after a campaign by local people against development in the area, to protect the land on and below Richmond Hill and thus preserve the fine foreground views to the west and south. Immortalised in paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds and J.M.W. Turner, it was described by Sir Walter Scott as "an unrivalled landscape". The Terrace Walk, laid out near the top of the hill in the 18th century, gives a panoramic view over south-west London, taking in the river Thames, royal parks and palaces.

All very fine and all very touristy, I can hear you thinking, but what’s that got to do with the price of fish?

Be patient, dear Reader, I’m coming to that….

The Terrace Walk on the top of Richmond Hill is one of my favourite places in the world to walk, or just to sit and look at the stupendous view; there are dozens of comfortable wooden benches there, each one bearing a small plaque with the name of someone else who used to love to sit on Richmond Hill and look at the view, and in whose memory the bench was donated. When I die, I’d like to be remembered with a bench on Richmond Hill, too (n.b. I’m not being morbid - I have an excellent prognosis, remember).

I know this place so well because my parents own a flat in one of the roads of Victorian and Edwardian houses that cover the more gently sloping ground on the back of Richmond Hill, and I stayed there frequently on visits back to the UK during the five years I was living in Turkey. It’s only a five minute walk from the flat up to the Terrace Walk, and I would spend some time there every day without fail; it’s a place I became addicted to.

So when it came to choosing somewhere for R and I to meet in real life for the very first time (after an on-line virtual courtship lasting for 8 months, with no opportunity to meet as we were living 2,000 miles apart), the Terrace at the top of Richmond Hill seemed the perfect venue: if the whole thing turned out to be a complete disaster, and we found ourselves without a word to say to one another, we could always just look at the view…

I arrived back in the UK for the first time in 3 years in the early hours of the morning on Sunday, March 27^th, 2011; I spent much of that day wandering around Richmond in a daze, in deep culture shock after spending such a long period of time living in a converted camel barn in Ayvalik, a very small Ottoman Greek town, on the north Aegean coast of Turkey, 170km from the nearest big city.

No cobbled streets, no head-scarved neighbours sitting gossiping endlessly on their doorsteps, no deliveries of logs by horse and cart, no mutant chickens escaping yet again from my neighbour’s garden; no competing muezzins calling the faithful to prayer from the minarets that sit so oddly on the old Greek Orthodox churches converted into mosques; no exterior sofas for hot summer evenings, no goats, or packs of wild dogs; no ruined houses occupied by tribes of feral cats, no pide sellers hawking their wares at the top of their voices; no village ladies in baggy pantaloons sitting on street corners selling wild greens, or sour plums, or pomegranates, or buckets of ripe figs…

Much had changed since I last set foot in London, not least that Marks and Spencer were now selling something called ‘wasabi peas’, a truly splendid invention. Even the discovery of the amazing hot-yet-sweet taste sensation of the wasabi pea, though, could not distract me from a rising tide of panic about the following day’s meeting with R, which I was becoming more and more convinced would be a disaster of truly epic proportions.

I was too old for this, much too old for this and, more importantly, some years older than R. He professed not to be the slightest bit bothered by this, but it still bugged the hell out of me. And I wasn’t nearly thin enough and my hair looked awful and I didn’t have anything to wear. He would probably take one look at me and run screaming down the hill towards the river, and the last I would see of him would be a tiny figure in the far distance loping across Petersham Meadows, zigzagging from side to side to avoid the grazing cows….

Several purchases of new items of clothing later, I at least had an outfit, but still walked back up the hill to the flat enveloped in a deepening cloud of grim despair.

What had I been thinking, travelling 2,000 miles back to London to meet a strange man off the internet? OK, he was a Professor of Bioethics, and we had friends in common, and we had spent the last 8 months exchanging hundreds of emails and spending hours conversing on Skype, but he was still a Strange Man. My mother always told me not to talk to strange men, and I should have listened to her advice. I’d been perfectly happy on my own, I had a great life in Ayvalik, I had a LIBRARY, in a CAMEL BARN, for God’s sake, the library I’d always wanted, and a dog, and 3 cats, and lots of friends, wasn’t that enough?  Why come all this way and risk humiliation and rejection and a broken heart – hadn’t I already suffered enough for one lifetime?

There was going to be a long evening to get through alone, as R and I had arranged to meet at 10 o’clock on Monday morning - giving me Sunday to recover and regroup after the 15 hour journey from Ayvalik - and given the frame of mind I was in, there was only possible way to approach it: with a raid on MamaFo’s exceptionally well-stocked drinks cabinet.

One of my mother’s hobbies - before she retired to her eyrie in the Tramuntana Mountains of Mallorca to devote herself to Mediterranean gardening and the cultivation of the highest quality home-grown skunk - was collecting particularly fine bottles of eau de vie, brandy, aquavit and the like on her travels, and in the flat there were several large cupboards packed with a world class collection of such beverages, including my own favourite, Calvados.

In hindsight, dining solely on Calvados and wasabi peas was probably not a terrific idea, but I was much too agitated to contemplate eating anything more, or drinking any less.  The spasmodic texting to R of my growing existential despair may have been a bit of a strategic error, also. R did his best to cheer me up, from a distance, but I wasn’t in a mood to be cheered.

C: This is so hard, today has been very difficult for me. This is so not going to work. I don't think we should do this.

R: I’m sorry you’re feeling bad. I thought you wanted today to get your head together, and evidently you have, but not in the way I hoped.

C :  I’m too old and too fat for all this, and I have been drinking Calvados, and now I have a RED NOSE.

R:  For the record, I don’t believe you are fat or old or have a red nose.

C:  My nose always goes red, reindeer-like: cold or alcohol, never fails.

R:  Also for the record, I am balding, and round-shouldered, and have a slight stoop. I just want to meet you, to tell you how much I feel about you, and then you can tell me to f*** off.

C:  I am only upset because I am very, very nervous. When we meet, things will clarify. We are both a bundle of nerves right now.

R:  I want to be kind to you, to make you happy – even if we never meet again, to give you good memories.

C: You are going to be so disappointed – the Tatlim with the Luminous Nose.

R: I am meeting the woman who has stitched my heart back together, and made me happy for the first time in years....

C : I have made major inroads into the wasabi peas, not to mention the Calvados.

R: ...which makes you Venus Herself.

C : You do say the loveliest things…

And so to bed. It should have been a sleepless, anxiety-wrack’d night, but I’d drunk far too much Calvados for that.

This is the view looking up Richmond Hill, from the water meadows by the river, towards the Terrace Walk - you can see Jerry Hall's house on the second left at the top, although Mick's long gone now, obvs..

It seems hard to imagine now, having just lived through the coldest and snowiest March in living memory, but March and April 2011 were exceptionally warm and sunny; the next morning was quite blindingly beautiful and as I walked, very slowly, up Richmond Hill towards the Terrace and my awaiting doom (R having texted me to say he had already arrived ), the sun was blazing in a clear blue sky, birds were singing, the trees were covered in showers of blossom –everything, in short, was wildly, inappropriately cheerful.

I was carrying a satsuma – or, as they call them in Turkey, mandalins, or as R and I call them, mandolins – something which had become a bit of a theme between us (you had to be there, really), had a bit of a hangover, and was now focused with grim determination on just getting this dreadful, ill-omened event over with and then getting on with the rest of my life, possibly in a discalced Carmelite convent in Ayacucho, Peru, if they’d have me. There would be llamas, and colourful ethnic knitwear, and distant, pleasing, mountain prospects whichever way you looked…

Looking from the end of the terrace I can see, some fifty yards distant, a man sitting on one of the benches, reading. He is sitting opposite the telescopes and the viewing platform, which is where we agreed to meet, so that must be R.

Oh my God, it’s HIM. But still at a safe distance. The ball of nervousness in my stomach expands and there are a thousand butterflies in there, fighting madly to get out.  

I start walking, even more slowly now, towards him. It’s 10 a.m. and there’s no one else much around, except a tramp, an old-fashioned, proper tramp, bushy of beard and wild of hair, clad in layers of slightly shredded garments, stretched out full length on his side on one of the benches, propped up on one elbow, and smoking a roll-up with an insouciant air. As I pass him I wonder if he has been hired by Richmond Council to add picturesqueness to the scene as the official Tramp of Richmond Hill, like the hermits 18^th century aristocrats used to employ to people their grottoes and follies.

I’m still 25 yards away when R looks up and sees me, and then he puts down his book and gets up from the bench, unfolding himself into a very tall person indeed, well over six foot, a tall, thin man with greying auburn hair and a strong handsome face on which there is suddenly the biggest smile I have ever seen. I find myself beaming back, and when we are five yards apart we both say ‘Hello, tatlim’ and then he takes me in his arms and holds me close in what is possibly the longest hug the world, and certainly the tramp, has ever seen.

And now he is real and there, after all this time, and I can feel his mouth against my hair and the smell of his skin and it is R,  just R , exactly the way he ought to be, to smell, to feel.

‘Here you are’ he says ‘here you are at last – I’ve been waiting so long’, and he’s not talking about the twenty minutes he’s been sitting on Richmond Hill.

‘There you are’ I say ‘there you are. You’re real. You’re here.’

And then he kissed me.

We never did get to look at the view.

Postscript: That meeting on Richmond Hill was two years ago today. We spent much of the next 3 weeks together, and then I came back to London again for another 6 weeks during July and August. R and I both knew pretty much right from the start that we wanted to make a life together, however difficult that might be to arrange, and I flew back to London for the third time on October 4^th, 2011, with 2 suitcases (‘on a wing and a prayer’ as BigSisFo put it, rolling her eyes in disbelief at my folly). I wasn’t planning to move in with R straight away, but he dragged me out of Richmond and into his flat in Hammersmith within 24 hours of arrival, and we’ve now been living together for 18 months. It’s been very difficult in many ways, some of which I can’t talk about here; it hasn’t just been the cancer we’ve had to deal with. All of that notwithstanding, it’s been the happiest two years of my life.

And now we share just the one subscription to the London Review of Books, and we keep them in an old wooden toolbox I brought back with me from Ayvalik…

Two peas in a pod

Day 62

Intermezzo: another romantic interlude

General status update: 

Hair: it’s been forgotten, really, in this week’s general mêlée. Still mostly attached. 

All the Chemo Demons are united as never before, BEGGING me to stop making that awful noise, and to evict the Coughing Demon from the sofa, of which he took possession much in the manner of Hitler invading Poland  (exiling a bewildered Chemo Brian to R’s battered leather armchair ) and where he now lounges menacingly, occasionally picking up poor little Chemo Rat Brian and swinging him around by the tail. The Nausea Demon keeps muttering ‘NOTHING I’ve ever done to you is as anywhere near as bad as this’ and ‘Seriously, that is One Mean Dude’, and the Chemo Muse has gone all motherly, bringing me soothing mugs of honey and lemon. 

Fatigue/weakness: very tired and over-exerted bronchial region – legs not being used much, just at the minute. 

Sleep, lack of: Lorazepam indicated tonight, so that the coughing won’t keep me awake. 

Anxiety level (1-10): FEC 4 next week? Yeah, whatever – it’ll make a change from coughing, fever, IV antibiotics and grief. 

State of mind: it’d be funny if I died of a coughing-induced asthma attack instead of cancer, wouldn’t it?

It has been a week of intense wretchedness, both physical and mental; the Chemo Muse, new highlights gleaming as she tosses her snaky locks to give us all the full effect, suggests that today it might be better to write a blog post that is not concerned with cancer, chemo or death, which is perfectly fine by me. 

‘Right’ she says briskly, ‘let’s get back to this - quite frankly, bizarre - epistolary cyber-romance of yours, back in 2010. We all know you and R first ‘met’ during a discussion on procrastination on Twitter, I see from your Gmail in-box that the two of you exchanged many hundreds of emails in the autumn of 2010, and you’ve described how you spent your lunch-times together, 2000 miles apart, engaged in literary discussions arising from the London Review of Books – by text.  

She rolls her eyes in a way that indicates the courting rituals engaged in by the love-child of Medusa and Chemosh, God of the Moabites, might well be rather more abbreviated, direct and, quite possibly, painful. 

‘So’ she continues ‘at what point did it finally occur to you and R that it might perhaps be a good idea to cease communicating only by written means, and actually start speaking to one another – you know, like normal people do? 

I laugh, because the first time I heard R’s voice, it wasn’t directly: he sent me a link to the podcast of the inaugural lecture he gave on being appointed to his Professorship of Bioethics, on the subject of Ethics and Politics in 21st Century Healthcare. In it he discussed the influence of political philosophy on health policies, asking whether ideology reflects what is really happening in GPs’ surgeries and hospital wards, and then examined current political thinking with its emphasis on patient “choice and empowerment”, encouraging people to take greater responsibility for their own health and welfare. 

Or so I’m told.  

I have to confess that I’ve just copied and pasted that summary from the web, because although I listened to the lecture several times, none of the content sank in; each time I became completely distracted by hearing R’s voice, which had said so much to me over the previous few months, but which only now could I finally hear.  

 Shortly afterwards I saw R for the first time, in a YouTube video in which he was being interviewed by what appeared to be a Hobbit, about matters bioethical; truly, ours was a strange romance… 

We moved on to speaking on the telephone, we exchanged photos, we talked on Skype, although without the visuals, as neither of us had webcams, and eventually we started to discuss meeting in person, although I was still convinced that this would be the point at which our deepening relationship would fall apart. I’d read too many stories of virtual relationships collapsing on meeting in person, with the painful recognition that online chemistry had not translated into real life. R, on the other hand, was blithely unconcerned, convinced that our meeting was a mere formality, and happily talking about how we could build a future together.

I thought he was bonkers.

Still, I recognised that now we had become so close, virtually, we had to take the next step, even though it would probably turn out to be a complete disaster. I agreed to fly back to London and meet him, in the last week of March. I could stay at my parents' flat in Richmond, in south-west London, since they spend most of the year in Mallorca.

I booked the plane ticket on Easy Jet and, with only a few weeks to go before meeting for the first time the man who had become such an important part of my life, started to feel very, very anxious. My closest friend in Ayvalik, D, an intrepid Irishwoman, listened to my worries patiently over many lokanta lunches, and took the ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ approach: if it didn’t work out, if there was no chemistry, then it was no big deal - I could just come back to my life in Ayvalik and get on with cataloguing the books in the Camel Barn Library, no harm done. 

It’s all very well for her to say that, I thought, darkly: she isn’t the one who’s going to have face the excruciating embarrassment of flying 2,000 miles to meet someone, and for that meeting to be such a complete fiasco that it will cause sleepless nights of remembered humiliation for years to come. 

However many times I enumerated to D my list of reasons why this relationship could never work in the long term, anyway, given the various obstacles in our way, she would just shrug and say ’Well, you’ll never know unless you try, will you?’ Eventually, I showed her the video of R on YouTube; she immediately commented on his good looks and then, after listening to him talking for a couple of minutes, started to laugh. 

‘What?’ I said, puzzled, seeing nothing inherently comic in R explaining the basic principles of bioethics. ‘What are you laughing at?’ 

‘Listening to him… and listening to you – you’re both just so… like each other. You really don’t have to worry about how it’s going to work out, Caroline – you and R were made for each other. You’re like two peas in a pod.’

Eating lunch together, 2000 miles apart…

Day 55  Intermezzo - another romantic interlude

 General status update:

Hair: Still there. Most of it.

Nausea demon: Quiescent. Almost.

Chemo Muse: Cracking the whip, and making no allowance for fatigue and feebleness. We have an important PROJECT! The PROJECT must be kept going! No, you CANNOT lie down!

Chemo Brian: Still stuck on the donkey – he’s been forced to do a reknit. He blames the pattern, I’m more inclined to think decades of mind-altering drugs might just have made the ‘Knit Your Own Nativity’ a challenge too far.

Sleep, lack of: n/a. Weird dreams, but if I ever starting describing them, you have my permission to shoot me immediately. 

Fatigue/weakness: persisting. It seems to be getting worse with each cycle. The second week is the worst.

Anxiety level (1-10): We’re actually going out tonight,  like normal people, for a final birthday celebration dinner with an old friend. Hope I will have the stamina for it.

State of mind: Happily nostalgic – see below.

Everywhere in Turkey, where I used to live, there are very simple and cheap restaurants called lokantas - for which there is no equivalent in the UK.  In a lokanta you will eat food which is essentially Turkish home cooking, choosing from a selection of prepared dishes on display. There is usually no menu: you just take a look and try whatever appeals. There is typically a choice of soups – soup being as central to Turkish culture as yogurt, with some lokantas called ‘çorba salonu’, which means ‘soup lounge’ – a range of vegetable dishes, and one or two meat dishes, plus pilav made from either rice or bulgur wheat. In Turkey working people go to lokantas to eat at lunch time, rather than buying a sandwich – Turkish culture still revolves around proper food. 

The standard of lokantas can be variable, but in my adopted home town of Ayvalik, on the north Aegean coast, they are generally very, very good. The Aegean coast is Turkey’s main olive-growing region, and is famous for Zeytinyağlı Yemek – food cooked in olive oil. The fragrant golden olive oil from around Ayvalik is legendary, and in previous centuries was sent to Istanbul to be used in the kitchens of the Ottoman Sultans. Ayvalik is also renowned for the quality of its fruit and vegetables, yogurt, cheese and honey, all sold by local producers every week in its market, which is the largest open-air market in the north Aegean.

 Many varieties of chili for sale in the market at Ayvalik

 My own favourite lokanta is located down a narrow cobbled alley in the back streets of Ayvalik, off the street where the town tin-smiths are located. It’s family-run, spotlessly clean, and has a number of tables outside in the shade of a great big grapevine:

 

  

All the food is made from scratch every day, they only open at lunchtime, and they close when the food has run out. They make excellent soups - fish, Ezogelin (spicy lentil), mecimek (plain lentil, served with lemon) –  and very good mantı (tiny dumplings served topped with yogurt and garlic, dried red pepper and melted butter), but the thing I love the most is their vegetable dishes, which include the year round staples of nohut (chickpeas) and kuru fasulye (white beans), simply cooked with olive oil, tomatoes and a little chopped pepper, and a variety of seasonal dishes, according to what is available in the market: barbunya (fresh pink and white-marbled borlotti beans), enginar (artichokes, cooked with baby broad beans and dill) and many more.

The cost of the food is so remarkably low (a meal for two or three pounds) and the food so delicious, and healthy, that during my years in Ayvalik I would eat lunch there virtually every day, either with friends or alone, but with something to read.  

You can get English newspapers in Ayvalik, brought over on the ferry every day from Lesbos, the Greek island which lies just off-shore, but they are extremely expensive; as a print junkie abroad, I yearned hopelessly for English newspapers and magazines, but accepted that their loss was one of the prices you pay for living somewhere so sunny and beautiful. Yes, you can read them online, but it’s just not the same; when I was going to the lokanta alone, I would take a book.

When R gave me an overseas subscription to the London Review of Books, however, in October 2010, all this changed: thereafter I always had a copy of the LRB, full of long, fascinating articles, to read at my leisure whilst eating my favourite lunch, which was simply a dish of nohut (chickpeas), with a little rice pilav on the side, and some dried red pepper to spice it up a little.

 

My favourite lunch - chickpeas, pilav, and a sprinkling of hot red pepper

 

The LRB is so full of interesting things, which I would immediately want to discuss with R, that from my table under the grapevine at the lokanta I would text him, 2000 miles away in London, to talk about whatever idea it was that had caught my eye and my imagination.

We were in slightly different time zones, but I usually ate lunch late, and R often ate his early, so somehow we often ended up lunching together, him eating a sandwich at his desk in his office in London, and me eating chickpeas at a sun-speckled table under a grapevine at my lokanta in the Aegean, all the while furiously texting one other to discuss literary matters arising from the London Review of Books: J.G.Farrell, his novels and his strange death by drowning, Philip Larkin's Letters, John Lanchester on the future of newspapers in the digital age, Saul Bellow, Jenny Diski, James Ellroy, Alan Bennett. The LRB is a broad church, and we were its devoted parishioners. 

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, we were weaving each other into the warp and weft of our everyday lives, via all the electronic means available to us - email, chat and Skype - but with 2,000 miles still separating us. Eventually we would have to address the issue of meeting in person, but that was some way off: the autumn months of 2010 we spent happily, living our different lives on different continents but, as often as we could, eating lunch together in our own little world - 2000 miles apart.