…I wanted stay in the flat in the Art Nouveau building with its courtyard and rickety lift, stroll to the café for breakfast every morning, and then along the river to the tram stop and ride somewhere, maybe across the bridge and up the hill to Buda Castle, and look down on the city. Walk down through the gardens of Gellért Hill, maybe go to the baths (I never did that) or walk back into Pest across the Elisabeth Bridge, rummage through the flea market and find a café to sip coffee Viennoise or hot chocolate, maybe even a glass of sweet white wine with my cake…

After I started that sentence yesterday, I kept thinking of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s  ‘A Free Man in Paris’:

‘…If I had my way, I’d walk out that door and
wander down the Champs Elysée,
going from café to cabaret…’

From ‘A Free Man in Paris’ by Joni Mitchell

Then I had to play the song, and after rummaging through the box of cassettes in the study, I found it in the sideboard drawer, right under the music centre, first place I should have looked.

Ah well. I never went to any cabarets, but I did sit in a lot of cafes.

Three weeks after leaving Budapest, I walked up the complex of white ramps to the roof of the Opera House overlooking Oslo harbour, thinking again about the future, and ‘home’, about the need to make a living, and the responsibilities of selling and buying houses – and about the weight of the past, the ‘stuff’ still waiting for me in the old house, which would need to be sorted out and disposed of and/or moved to… some indeterminate future place. In another three weeks I would be back in England, and then what? I was going back to live with my daughter, and I knew there was £20k waiting for me in the bank from the balance of what I’d had from Ex-Hubby before I left England, that should keep me for a while, until the house was sold, and/or I could find (against all past experience) a job, and in the meantime I could write, and one day maybe start to make a living from that? But buying a house would mean committing to one place, and the thought of all the stuff from the attic and elsewhere banged around in my head, a burden dragged around behind me like Mother Courage’s cart.  What about going back to Budapest and living and writing there, then what would happen to the stuff, I couldn’t take it with me, so where would it go? If the house sale went through in the next twelve months, say, it would all have to be resolved

Once again, there were existential choices to be made, and the whole point of running away was to escape them and come back with new ideas and fresh opportunities, a new path to follow, but inside nothing had changed, and I felt no closer to finding my future.

My routine was disrupted yesterday: I was awake half the night then fell back to sleep when I should’ve been thinking about getting up, and slept through till eight, lay in bed till half past then got up and went to the shop, and when I got back I decided it was too late to write.

This morning, I’ve been looking at my desktop photos again. One came up that I didn’t recognise, it was of graffiti that read: ‘time you ENJOY wasting was not wasted’. I was trying to work out where it came from, I saw the date was 18 June, and thought maybe it was Copenhagen, then realised it was far too early for that because I was in Berlin on the summer solstice (when it poured with rain and I spent the whole day in the museums), so it must have been before then – I think it might have been Prague, though I haven’t checked yet. But if so it was probably the John Lennon graffiti wall, which surprised me because I remember looking for that the following year, when I was living there. I guess I must have passed it the first time without knowing anything about it. My memories of those few days I when I passed through Prague are a bit hazy, overwhelmed by later memories.

I will jump back into the Madwoman/Attic story now because I’ve described the beginning and the end without saying much about the times in between. Let’s start with Budapest, where I stayed for two weeks in a studio apartment a ten minute walk from the Pest bank of the Danube. That’s when I had the idea of going back, living there for a while, writing and maybe giving English conversation classes. Looking in the window of an estate agent’s near the flat, I worked out that I could buy somewhere similar (or a little bigger) for about £40k. Because, at the back of my mind was this awareness that at some point, the old house would be sold, and I would have my share of the proceeds, which would allow me to buy my own place, a proper home for myself, with no worries about where the rent was going to come from. It was a ‘some day, one day…’ fantasy, but it was also a reality, that one day I would be in that position – in fact, according to the divorce settlement, it should be happening very soon, within a matter of months. But the flip-side of that was that it would mean an end to my wanderings, and I wasn’t ready for that just yet – in fact, would I ever be? Ready for it? I couldn’t imagine that, how it would work, where I would be by then – I didn’t want to think about it.

I wanted to stay in the flat in the Art Nouveau building with its courtyard and rickety lift, stroll to the café for breakfast every morning, and then along the river…