1. I am walking up to Oli’s to get my morning lift when I suddenly smell something that makes me think ‘Tunbridge Wells.’ You know how smells are -- you can’t remember them when you aren’t smelling them, and you can’t say exactly what they are; but they can stir up such a strong feeling. So... what do you think I could smell? What is the essential Tunbridge Wells fragrance?
2. Walking into the office and feeling very cheerful about it. Travelling is all very well, but for me it isn’t a sustainable lifestyle -- I let it take too much out, and it’s hard work wondering at things all the time. Whereas I can keep up flatlife and worklife and Tunbridge Wells life for a year or two at a time.
3. I keep finding little things that I have not even thought of missing while I was away, but make me feel joyous to pick up again. Today it was a pint of Harvey’s. Oh, and English trees -- palms and sausage trees and marula trees and umbrella trees and acacias are tremendously exotic and atmospheric, but I never stood under one feeling awestruck as I would under an oak or a beech or a yew; and I could never feel the same affection for them that I feel for a hazel or a hawthorn.
