Skinny Windows

I don't appreciate the English countryside enough. That's one of the lessons I took with me when I came back from Japan - along with 'cold canned coffee tastes like cigarette butts and, like an Epipen, is only to be used when you might die otherwise'. Many, many times, when I told people I was English in Japan, they would begin to gush about how beautiful England was, how much they wished to go there, how quaint the villages, how green the hills. (And that was just the Americans.) People showed me tourist brochures they carried around with them like a good luck totem. And I just took it for granted a lot of the time.

My patch.

I was not at all outdoorsy growing up - why are things crawling on me? why is there a leaf in my face? why mud? - so appreciating the countryside is something that I've only learned to do in the last few years. And even now, I often don't like to venture out for long hikes unless it's properly warm, so the English countryside is out of the question for at least three quarters of the year. Still, I've recently become aware of how little I've explored the countryside, in my own native Sussex and also further afield. I've never been to the Lake District, the Peak District, Cornwall or the New Forest. I know that on this small island there's a surprising variety of palettes - move from region to region and watch the changes in shade and softness of stone, darkness of tree, stubbornness of chimney, curve of street, moodiness of cloud. And so much of it I have yet to see.

A couple of weeks ago I tried to rectify my ignorance by spending a weekend in Norfolk. The first thing I noticed: all the buildings have skinny windows. Second thing I noticed: the ground is low, and chewy underfoot.

Like this.

After a warm, cosy evening in a pub, I spent a grey Sunday morning treading across marsh, along the squishy fringe of the East Anglia coast. The edges of Norfolk are quite alien. I sometimes wonder if they could have filmed Tarkovsky's Stalker there. It is not hard to imagine the ground simply dragging your foot in and taking you out to sea. Down south, land and sea are two separate things. In Norfolk, I have learned, there is a lot of grey area. None of this bothers the dogs. I have also learned that every single person in Norfolk seems to have a dog.

I'm not sure if I liked the place or not. There is a kind of brackish, earthy beauty to it I suppose. Very brown. Perhaps I would have liked it better if I hadn't wandered onto an A-road with no pavement and been forced to take a detour through a cabbage patch that probably belonged to a farmer with a shotgun.

A few miles down the road, I whiled away the afternoon in a seaside village called Cromer, which was much more familiar territory to me. (If you grow up in a town with a pier, going to any other town with a pier just feels like going to the Bizarro World version of your town.)

 Cromer's beaches are sandy, which is a change for a Sussex girl. I must admit being a little jealous, though I'm tempted to cover it up with scornful comments about how sand is for wusses and real beaches are made of pebble. There are also pristine cobblestone streets, leading up to a massive church. Like, a really massive church.

This picture does not show you how massive this church is.

Couple of hours around Cromer, fish and chips, a train back to Norwich, and a National Express home. Not a huge adventure I'll admit, but a new way to spend a weekend.

Would I come back to Norfolk? I think so. There's a few more place on my bucket list first. But I'm happy to have taken some shy, sandy first steps to discovering more of my own country.

25 Things I Learned By The Age of 25

Technically, I won't be 25 for another twelve hours, but officially it's been my birthday for an hour and forty minutes. I don't feel much wiser yet, although I do have a strange urge to yell at the damn kids mucking about in my garden (despite the fact that I don't have a garden and there are no kids). I feel like I haven't learned much thus far in life. But in case anyone wants to know my pearls of wisdom, here are 25 things I've learned before turning 25:

1) Avoiding thinking about a problem doesn't make it go away.
2) Don't buy clothes that are slightly ill-fitting, or slightly broken, or slightly weird, on the grounds that "oh, but it's *almost* perfect!" You will never wear them. Ever.
3) Make your bed every day. It will make you feel approximately 20% more like a successful person.
4) Be aware and honest about your weaknesses.
5) Remember that being aware and honest about your weaknesses isn't the same thing as working on them.
6) Discovery brand guacamole is terrible.
7) Don't turn down opportunities just out of fear they won't pan out as well as you hope.
8) It's okay to not look perfect every day.
9) If you heat leftover pizza in a frying pan, it gives the crust a freshness and crunch. Microwaves are rarely the best option for reheating.
10) It's not the end of the world if you're not good at something right away. Not being good at something and persisting anyway is called discipline. You need more of it.
11) Walking is nice, and healthy, and cheap. Walk everywhere.
12) Putting effort into organising yourself well is the best way to achieve your goals.
13) You will not achieve all your goals. That's okay, some of your goals are stupid. You are not going to design the world's first personal mini-submarine.
14) Write as much as possible, even if you're not planning on showing it to anyone.
15) People are too busy worrying about how they look to other people to think too much about how you look to them.
16) Showing a little bit of extra appreciation to someone, or paying them a compliment, can really make their day.
17) Always carry mints.
18) If you know you're going to regret something, but think about doing it anyway, maybe don't do that thing. I am surprised this something it took several years to learn but apparently it did.
19) Trying new things will (mostly) not kill you.
20) Learn languages, and then maintain them. You will lose them faster than you think.
21) Water parks are actually fun and not that terrifying.
22) The best day to do something is the day you decide to do it. I actually got this one from a Japanese t-shirt.
23) You can get a lot of useful life advice from Japanese t-shirts.
24) A few people are awful. A few people are the nicest, most genuine, wonderful people. Most people are all right.
25) You are actually all right.

Where are my glasses?

I cannot begin to explain how such a small thing is triggering the unraveling of my mind.

I have not seen my glasses for two weeks. They are not in my kitchen. They are not in the bathroom. They are not in the bed. They are not under the bed. They are not on the shelf. They are not under the sofa cushions. They are not at my desk at work. They are not at any other desks at work. They are not at my parents' house or the place where I volunteer. They are not at my boyfriend's house. They are not at the doctor's office. They are not in my mother's car. They have come unstuck in time and space.

They have to be somewhere and yet, somehow, they just aren't.

When I taught English as a foreign language I learned that one of the hardest things to get right as a non-native speaker are prepositions - why "in the morning" but "at night"? Why "on the train" not "in the train"? - but right now I feel like I'm done with prepositions as a general life concept. Once you look on top of a pillowcase and under a pillowcase, and then with only a slight hesitation look in the pillowcase, and then begin to wonder if it would be possible for your glasses to somehow be wrapped around the pillowcase in some four-dimensional manner that you simply can't see, you realise that our perception of physical objects and the relations they have to each other are basically a very complicated way to convince our brains that there is order in the universe and we're not just all hurtling on a big rock towards hell and chaos. In a weird way this might be the most frustrating thing to have happened to me all year, because it should be so simple and yet it isn't. They should be right next to me, or on the counter, or on my bedside table, but they refuse to be there, preferring to taunt me from invisible universes. They appear in my dreams, just out of my reach and inexplicably the size of the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I am the Tantalus of the studio flat.

Please tell me if you find my glasses.