Gimlé

I’ve just returned from meeting up with my sister and my mother in Lancaster. All three of us were returning for the first time in eighteen years to a place where me and my sister spent important parts of our childhood and where my mother did both her undergraduate and her masters degree.

My dad had returned there a few years ago so he could warn my mother about the changes that had taken place there over the years.

Me? I couldn’t remember a thing about the place, my memory has long since specialised in information and stories, to the detriment of my memory for experiences and events.

And my sister, whose memory works in the completely opposite way, was too young at the time to have any memories about it.

The best part was meeting my sister and my mother. Haven’t seen them since Christmas, which is a very long period of time considering how family-oriented most Icelanders are. A large proportion of my social life back home in Iceland was with family. Sunday roasts. Afternoon coffees. Renting video with my uncle and my dad. Meeting up with the step-siblings. Always something, somewhere.

It hasn’t been too bad since my sister moved to Wales last autumn (a bit of a contrast to Florence, Italy where she had been living for the preceding to years). So it’s relatively cheap to call or visit her.

Meeting up with family, that part of the trip was fun. Train cancellations and delays were not (my Mother was supposed to have arrived in Lancaster at around 16:00 but instead only arrived at around 21:00).

Lancaster had a strange vibe. It was like feeling the emotion of the memory without actually recalling the memory itself.

There was something familiar about my old school there, in an eerie sort of way.

The road and house we used to live in… Haunting.

Something squirming and scratching around in the back of your brain, failing to evoke images but succeeding in generating the relevant emotions.

Like the feeling of hearing your favourite tune, but without actually hearing, remembering or recalling in any way the tune itself, the emotions only generated by glancing at the title in the storefront of a store for used vinyll records.

Weird does not really begin to describe it.

So it was fun. We took a lot of picture. Alas, us being poor we don’t have digital cameras. And with my camera buggered at the moment I will have to wait for my mother’s and my sister’s scans of their pictures before I put anything up.

Only of interest to family of course, but I have only one weblog so this sort of family stuff will have to come with the package.

Nice to be back in your own place, even if it is only a small, rented bedsit. Am about three or four weeks behind on my e-mail but intend to make one brave attempt to answer them tonight and tomorrow.

Also read Tom Holt’s Here Comes the Sun on the train back. Reccommended to me by Tom Abba. Good fun.

More later when I’m less knackered and it’s not Sunday.

Baldur. Clifton, Bristol.