pompeii

We were given an assignment in my grade nine science class, to write a scientific report on a natural disaster. In my usual fashion, I chose the most unusual topic I could think of, assuming that once the teacher had read twenty-four assignments about the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, my exhilarating report on a 79AD volcanic eruption would be a welcome kindness to his poor, tired eyes. I'm sure I was an annoying child. 

When it was my turn to discuss my draft with the teacher, I pranced (I'm sure I spent much of high school prancing) to his desk and plopped myself down in the hot seat. I was content in the knowledge that, as usual, I had created a masterpiece. The teacher pulled up his knee socks to meet his shorts and grimaced at me. He told me it was a case for total rewrite. He said I hadn't written a scientific report. He said I'd written a horror story. He was right, of course. I suppose fancied myself a horror writer after winning some prize for a wild yarn about a rogue cuckoo. God, I must have been an annoying child. 

But oh, I wish I had a copy of the Pompeii draft to show you, because I seem to recall it began something like, It was a sunny August day on in the idyllic coastal city of Pompeii, Italy, and the merry townsfolk were going about their business, chatting gaily, unaware that an horrific disaster was about to strike their peaceful, contented, honest lives, or some such nonsense. 

Anyway, don't worry. I figured out that a scientific report shouldn't have that many adjectives (it wasn't 'til years later I realised nothing should have that many adjectives). I won the prize for science. Then I proceeded to forget each carefully researched detail of the disaster, along with everything else I learnt in high school. 

Years later I find myself walking around the place I had (gruesomely, vividly, advective-ly) described. My grubby Docs kick up dust. The streets are scattered with skinny dogs and  tourists. I'm sure I'm imagining it, or maybe it's the heat and the salt carried from the ocean, or the dust, but the air feels heavy, like it's mingled with ash. This was a buried city. The awareness of that hangs over me. The whole day I feel like I'm in a tomb that's been opened to the sun. 

I'm acutely aware of the looming presence of Vesuvius. The volcano appears at the end of streets and over the top of buildings. It's a character in the story, the power that buried this city. It has survived long since. It has its own life. It's thrilling to think that it might choose today as the next day. And to wonder if, with all our volcanology and such, we'd make it out in time. I like to think we wouldn't. It doesn't suit Vesuvius to be understood.

The intense sunlight in the city is striped with shadows cast by stone and marble columns. We wander through the temples of Isis and Apollo with a boy we met on the train, and one who joined us at the stand outside that sold leaflets and trinkets. We collect solo travellers like playing cards. One of them seemed to be incredibly well informed about the complex. And about everything else ever, actually. He politely corrects our pronunciation of 'Ceasar' in his gentle Austrian accent. 



We sweat our way through the mummified town. The building that has survived perhaps the most perfectly is the city brothel. The bottom level is lined with small cells, each with its own stone bed. The walls above the doorways are adorned with faded stone images of pleasure. It is (I'm pleased to say) the only brothel I've entered, so I have little comparable material. But it's not particularly romantic. The solid furniture doesn't look very forgiving. It looks like it'd hurt.



Near sunset we walk through a crumbling amphitheatre that rivals the Colosseum. It's huge and still solid. There's only a handful of other people. It's peaceful. And it's different to ruins, really. The whole city is more like an impression, a ghost town. The civilisation was captured at its peak like a freeze-frame, and because of that it doesn't feel so far away. 

bath : off-season travel

But I hate to hear you talking... as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days. 

Jane Austen, Persuasian

The coach Ella and I catch to Bath has nine people on it. We take the rear emergency exit seats and stretch out. We've just moved into our new place. I have £50 to my name, and a headache I've forgotten to acknowledge for months. As the city gives way to the country I feel like I'm breathing again. London, the great messy crush of people and architecture, will go on without us. It won't notice we're gone. The sluggish weight of big cities builds slowly on me. I don't realise it's there until I'm released from it by some open air and a few good cows.

Bath is wet (as the name suggests, ha). Thin English rain veils the neat rows of terraced Georgian houses that run up and down the hills. It's the kind of rain you can walk about in and only end up a little bit damp when you reach your destination. Ours is Roscoff Deli, a little place in the centre of town with winding staircases, mismatched chairs, and gluten free sandwiches. They're generous with their cheeses. We sit in the café and watch the rain on the window, through the lunch rush and into the afternoon. Then we make our way through streets with sweet names like Quiet Street and Cheap Street and Parsonage Lane to our hotel. It just feels like a World Heritage Site. It feels like I should have a bonnet.

The realisation that my backpack is out of place comes over me slowly like the rain. I carried this thing over the European continent for months in the summer, one of many. In the grey Bath winter, I don't see another pack. It's the off-season. The whole city has a local, daily life feel. 

It's sad that I have to call it a city. City means smog and rush and that feeling of being completely alone in a crowd of people. Bath has none of that. Even in the centre, where Waitrose and Boots chain stores occupy the hollowed-out insides of magnificent Georgian buildings, there is that feeling of community that seems native to the country. I'm not sure why geography and population density dictate whether it's socially acceptable to smile at strangers. I am sure you can do it in Bath.

I booked this trip as a Christmas present for Ella. She's a bit of a Jane Austen nerd, and Bath has the museum and the pretty history. I didn't think of the place itself as somewhere to go, really. More fool me. The museum was cute, and I will never, ever grow out of dressing up as a boy (though my chubby thirteen year-old Jack Sparrow was probably the highlight of my cross-gender career). We wrote with quills and gazed on pictures labelled with particularly hesitant engravings. But the Jane Austen museum isn't the reason I'd go back.

The Roman Baths sink into the earth in the centre of town. The water that rises into them seems too blue-green, slightly alien. Its brightness against the masses of pale stone is beautiful. I take my time walking around the perimeter of the Great Bath. The water moves gently and steam rises off the surface like a hot breath. It's quiet. There are maybe six or seven other people here. Through large stone doorways are other cavernous old bathing rooms, dark and silent and warm from the springs. The smell of hot minerals seems to have penetrated the rock. 

The audio guide is probably the simplest and best I've encountered since leaving home. Also, it's free, and has some fun extra commentaries from Bill Bryson. The people behind the fiasco of the audio guides at the Louvre should come here and get schooled. 

It's at the baths that I realise I've struck something. The place is pretty much empty. Compared to the crush at the Vatican and the lines for the Archaeological Museum in Athens, it feels positively deserted. A cheeky Google reveals that the Bath baths receive over one million visitors a year. Averaged, that's nearly three thousand for every day it's open. But in the three hours we were there I'd say we were accompanied by only a hundred others. Maths has never been my forte, but I figure that leaves a lot of spare heads to clock in during the summer and school break. It is also worth mentioning that, although cold, the day was clear blue and still. Not at all unpleasant.

Basically, I've just been sold on the perks of off-season travel. If you're heading to the beach, weather is key. If you're up for a Vegas holiday you intend not to remember, it'd be a shame to find everything deserted. But the epiphany of visiting museums that are quiet, and seeing something ancient and beautiful without the top of someone's head and a few elbows obscuring your vision? Worth the extra scarf. And Gravel Walk (read Persuasion) was ours alone. 

There is scaffolding (as per usual for me) across the façade of the empty Georgian Pump Room. We stick our noses inside the famous meeting place and discuss briefly what it might have been like to dance and play at cards with Mr Darcy and dear Bingley beneath the high ceilings. Okay, so I have my Austen nerd moments too. 

Bath also boasts some great religious architecture, stalls and stores and antiques, and Pulteney Bridge, one of only four in the world to have shops the full length on each side. The city is littered with sweet cafés with options of the gluten free vegetarian variety (like Bill's, which I've discovered is a chain but still love). It's as though some sympathetic hand scattered them there just for me. Our last day sees my last £8 (for real: totally empty bank account) spent on falafel sandwiches and banana bread at Green Rocket. Didn't even regret it.

I don't know whether it's just in contrast to the overwhelming feeling of lostness I get in London's huge sprawl, but after two days, Bath felt like somewhere I could get to know. I will go back.

zombies (or: why am I afraid of the dark?)

...the dread of something after death, 
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn 
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others we know not of... 

                               (Hamlet, III. i. 78-82)

I have a problem. I can't walk down the stairs. It's not a physical problem. My legs work fine. They work great. I just can't make them take that single flight from the front door of my flat to the front door of the building. I can't do it. 

There are zombies in the hallway. 

Don't laugh. I'm afraid of the zombies in the hallway. Okay, laugh a little. I deserve it. 

Walking into my flat from outside goes like this: 

Open the big red front door. Fumble for the timed light switch. Hope the timed light works, which it sometimes doesn't. Walk down a narrow hallway for approximately six meters. Fumble for the second timed switch that will light the first floor landing. Walk straight ahead up seven stairs. Turn one-eighty degrees and walk up seven more stairs. Open the right hand door. You have arrived at your destination. 

Walking out of my flat goes like this: 

Take a deep breath. Listen closely for suspicious thumps, rustles, or growls from behind the door. Slowly open the door a crack, for better audio. Listen again. Hear absolutely nothing. Throw open the door fast enough to knock out anyone (anything) lurking behind it. Slap wildly at the wall until you hit the timed light switch. Hope the timed light works, which it sometimes doesn't. (At this point, if the light switch doesn't work, retreat immediately and cancel your plans.) Once the light is on, do a quick visual scan of the three square metres of space you can actually see. Try not to listen to your own accelerated heartbeat. Instead, listen for noises from the bottom of the stairs. Try to make your knees work. Try to make yourself shut the flat door and thereby cut off your only escape route. Don't think about the way the darkness from the hallway presses itself well into the half-way landing, where you have to turn a one-eighty. Don't think about the total, enveloping blackness you'll encounter when you do. Don't think about the way the zombies will throw themselves, bloody and clawing and hungry, out of that cold darkness and onto your face.

arktimes.com  

I need a moment. 

I blame two people for this fear. First, I blame an ex who made me watch that movie, World War Z. I was never afraid of zombies until they became wall-scaling, leg-pumping, frog-leaping athletes. Zombies are supposed to be galumphing fools, endearingly trailing bloody intestines behind them. Easily outwitted and outrun. Only a threat in great numbers that would not be able to lurk silently in my hallway. But fast zombies? FAST ZOMBIES.

Second, I blame my flat mate, who innocently suggested, a week or so after we moved in, that the second light switch at the bottom of the stairs was inconveniently positioned, as one must walk through the dark to reach it, and there could be zombies. She giggled. I giggled. Fun and games.

But then I couldn't shake the thought. Now every time I need to leave the flat after nightfall I go through a painfully intense internal struggle. I count off the reasons why I am sure there aren't zombies in the hallway. I run that mental tape on repeat that goes, they aren't even real, they aren't even real. I laugh at myself. I jump up and down and shake my arms. I pep talk. I am a zombie-killing machine. Then I spend a few minutes freaking out with my feet stuck to the floor and the door open, re-pressing the timer switch to keep the light on and sobbing loudly to the flat in general that I can't do it. I can't go down those stairs.

I've taken to carrying my umbrella. Not that it would do any good. But I don't own anything more dangerous that I can justify putting in my handbag. 

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME? I know there isn't a zombie in my hallway. I understand that the odds of the apocalypse starting with one of my neighbours, in this particular hallway, are about ten thousand bazillion to one. I understand that there are real threats out there, and that I should probably be more worried about rapists or that shark tornado movie coming true. I walk home at midnight, in the dark, in London. I can sleep with hairy spiders in my bedroom. I count myself a passably brave human. (Theme alert: that courage thing again, like here and here.) 

So I've been thinking about it a lot and here's my conclusion:
 It's the unknown.

When it's dark you don't know what's down there*.

 *(BUT YES I DO: IT'S ZOMBIES).

Scientia potestas est. Apparently Sir Francis Bacon said it first, but I reckon people have known it since forever. Knowledge is power. Knowing about a potential threat affords the power to combat it. If I knew for certain that at the bottom of the stairs there was a six-foot-three, left handed, heavily bearded guy with an 8.5cm knife, three toes on his right foot, and garlic breath, I might feel less fear. At least, it wouldn't be the sweeping, irrational fear that stretches and extrapolates until the hallway is packed with fast zombies like vicious, gory sardines. It would be a considered fear, an informed fear. A fear I could tackle by taking appropriate preventative measures (call police/climb out window/master muay thai). 

It's like the fear of pain compared to the fear of death. Pain is understandable, predictable. I know that to amputate my leg without anaesthetic will be agony. I will probably yell. I might pass out from it. But then I will be just me, only without a leg. That is what will happen. But to be told, You are about to die? This invokes that wild fear. I don't know what will happen when I die. In death I've lost all predictability. I've lost my ability to plan, to control. Almost anything seems less scary.

And I'm not the only one who's said this. I got more Elizabethan backup, guys. Shakespeare is like, so respected for his human insight and stuff, and some tormented soul in some play by him points out that almost anything (including your uncle killing your dad and your lover going round the bend [because you killed her dad] and drowning herself and your mother [maybe?] being a little bit incestuous) is better than that deep, strangling fear of the unknown.

So...
death = unknown = dark

That's why I can't walk down the stairs. I can't see, so it's scary. And I've made up some zombies to embody the scariness of it. Analysis complete. Being scared of the dark is so logical.

Basically I'm just like Hamlet. I barely even feel weird about admitting the zombie thing any more. 

Still can't walk down the stairs though.