The Offing

The weather was the key to unlocking these conversations with strangers, the English being a nation obsessed with it being too hot or too cold, or too wet, or just not wet enough. Rare it is to hear an Englishman to remark upon the perfection of the meteorological conditions or the greenest of his grass, when he knows it is a greener county over. Weather talk is but a veiled code or a currency to exchange, a transaction as a means to moving things along to something more considered once reciprocal trust has been won. This I learned along the way, as circumstance and the practicalities of surviving forced me to open my mouth more often than I was used to at home, where most of my interactions with adults simply involved obeying their orders via a series of bovine grunts and anatine honks. An initial sense of loneliness first loosened my tongue, though I soon learned that solitude in the wild was not to be feared; in fact, I experienced frequent and quite unexpected moments of exhilaration at the overwhelming sense of purposelessness that I now had. I could go anywhere, do anything. Be anyone.

‘You don’t say much, and I like that. There is poetry in silence but most don’t stop to hear it. They just talk, talk, talk, but say nothing because they are afraid of hearing their own heartbeat. Afraid of their own mortality.’

‘. . . Romance needn’t mean love hearts and red roses, you know. Romance is feelings and romance is freedom. Romance is adventure and nature and wanderlust. It is the sound of the sea and the rain on your tarpaulin and a buzzard hovering across the meadow and waking in the morning to wonder what the day will bring and then going to find out. That is romance.’