At what age is it OK to start having retirement fantasies? Maybe it's just post-post holiday triste, but I've been thinking about Berwick-upon-Tweed a lot since we stopped there back in July. Imagining myself there on the coast, sitting in the town's cafes, eating cake (lemon drizzle preferably), reading my way through my Victorian and Edwardian ghost story collections. [1] Now and again jumping on the train to Edinburgh or Newcastle, two of my favourite cities, to take in a bit of culture.
It's just a pipe dream. Financial considerations – I have no money and I doubt my pension would stretch to lemon drizzle cake, frankly – do rather preclude it. And the fact that no one else in the Jamieson family has any interest in Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Still, I'm enjoying the idea, playing it around in my head. Seeing myself on the headland as the waves batter the shore, like a mysterious, intriguing character from a postwar British crime novel. Maybe I could even have a cane. I've always rather fancied a cane.
Thinking about it, I realise Berwick-upon-Tweed, for all its undoubted charms, marks something of a downgrade in my idle relocation fancies. Growing up in Northern Ireland I read Spider-Man, watched Rhoda [2] and dreamed of living in New York. I've been there once in my life, in 1999, and spent most of the time being homesick. (Quite something as I was living in Denny at the time. But there you go. That's family for you.)
I spent the 1980s hating London and the nineties imagining what it might be like to live there. (In my head I'd settled for somewhere in the Bloomsbury area. Handy for the British Museum and Gosh Comics, though the latter has since moved to Soho).
I've also toyed with moving to Liverpool and Manchester or, rather, toyed with the idea of toying with moving to Liverpool and Manchester (not at the same time obviously). In my more exotic moments I've even imagined myself living in Stockholm or Venice. Having my own private gondola. Being invited around for a meal by Francesco da Mosto. [3] Scoffing at the tourists swarming all over the Piazzo San Marco.
But now my imagination has relocated to Caffe Nero in Marygate. It's as if my imagination is finally conforming to my lived experience. I have only ever lived in small towns. Iserlohn, Tidworth. Portstewart. Coleraine. Stirling. Durham. Denny. Falkirk. Now my idle fantasies are small town-shaped – or Berwick-upon-Tweed-shaped in particular – too. I'm not sure if that's a step forwards or a step back.
[1] Starting with MR James obviously. But I do have a lot of time for Edith Nesbit too. She didn't just write children's books. Read Man-Size in Marble. I dare you.
[2] Am I the only person who remembers Valerie Harper? Proper New Yoik accent. You don't get those in Friends. Marge Simpson is in every episode too. Well, Julie Kavner.
[3] Whatever happened to Francesco? He used to be on the telly all the time with his silver locks and his Italian accent, swanning around, living la dolce vita.
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