Category: Dreamt
The Dreamt room holds the foreign places I have never been to — cities and far landscapes built from films, photographs, documentaries and other people’s memories rather than from any visit of my own. It is a standing record of armchair travel and Fernweh: the abroad longed for from a desk and drawn in charcoal, because I have never been abroad and have no photograph of my own to show. These are the places I keep meaning to go to, and somehow never do. Start with Zürich, Venice or New York.
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Madrid
A capital set down in the dead centre of nothing, on a high dry plateau far from any sea — Madrid is the one I have furnished out of other people’s light.
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Milan
Milan is the one Italian city nobody hands you for free — no postcard arrives unasked. I have had to go looking for it, and still have not gone.
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Barcelona
Barcelona reached me as a cathedral that refuses to be finished — a city I keep building because the men who began it never managed to.
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Athens
I have known the light of Athens for years and the city not at all — a whole place built, in my head, out of one stubborn rumour about how the evening falls on stone.
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Banff
Banff is a small town let into the mountains on sufferance, a turquoise lake under snow-capped peaks, a place that keeps the wilderness right up to its doors.
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Maldives
The Maldives is the place I keep as a thin bright ring of sand on a great deal of blue water — a country built almost entirely of the sea around it.
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Port of Spain
Port of Spain is the loudest city I have never heard — an island capital that took every people the sea washed up and turned the mixture into music.
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Gold Coast
The Gold Coast is a name before it is a place — a wall of glass towers set down at the edge of fifty kilometres of golden surf beach.
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Siem Reap
Siem Reap holds the largest temple ever built — raised to the gods I grew up with in Bengal, and standing in a country I have never once reached.
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Bridgetown
Bridgetown is the small bright capital of an island I have never seen — turquoise water, painted wooden houses, and a sea that keeps no cold in it at all.
