A beautiful day in Plymouth

(This post actually describes Saturday the 29th of August)
A beautiful day in Plymouth. There are not many! It rains a lot here. Another factor that will help shift my life from wild outdoor adventures into serene intellectualism and scientific progress. I am a member of the library, by now; it is properly housed in a gloomy, grey neoclassical building on the other side of the street from university. My first activity there was borrowing “Shalimar the clown”. It is a most addictive book.

Me in front of the library

Saturday was one of these few beautiful days. I first needed it for plain, vulgar shopping: Tuesday morning we leave for Iceland, and Monday is a bank holiday here, so this was my last chance for a whole town filled with open shops, which I needed for buying rubber boots. Wellingtons, I must say now. I have rubber boots, they are however not fit for Icelandic fieldwork due to being somewhere in a lorry between Tromsø and Oslo.

I found a pair of pretty, girlish, pink boots. Good. And I got my hands on another pair of zip-off pants. I only have one pair, and not only do I sometimes desire to wear it more often than hygiene permits, it also already suffers from wear and tear. An extra pair for fieldwork would be desirable. I succeeded.

That left the rest of the day for fearless exploration. In theory. In practice I was tired. The day before there had been Friday beer. My boss Roland, and the earlier mentioned political geographer, who happens to go by the unusual name Veit (yet has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with Rhijnvis or sentimentalism), are good friends. Veit, however, will move to Germany before Roland is back from Iceland, and this weekend was their last chance for going on shared irresponsible pub crawls. I joined. We only crawled two pubs, but on an empty stomach two pubs can already have noticeable effect.

Beside the alcohol I tend to have generally reduced energy levels, which I blame on restlessness. I am, in a way, homeless. The by now only moderately smelly room does not feel like home. I do not like being there. And thus I can never really relax. This will soon improve…

Anyway. I decided to have a jacket potato at the water front. And read on in Shalimar the clown. And then take a stroll through the Barbican, the reconstructed medieval part of town. Later I added a stroll through the cemetery and through Central Park to that. I was homesick. Yes, the barbican is beautiful, but how it pales in comparison to any rock or shrub in Troms. But such is life. Maybe paradise only exists when it must be left.

The unusual creature that guards the harbour

The Barbican has cute alleyways

A cemetery tends to breathe a reassuring resignation

Some things are the same in Tromsø and in Plymouth! Such as noisy gulls…

Things will change. Monday night I move all my stuff to Roland’s, and Tuesday we reach beauty again. I look forward to a rendez-vous with Iceland! And after I get back I hope I will soon be able to move into my own house. And then I have a home. And from home I can wait for beautiful days and go hunt for beauty here too. There are Stone Age structures on Dartmoor. That would be a good start. And I can also pick a random day, dress to the occasion, and hunt gloomy, grey, melancholy beauty.

And until Monday evening I can well amuse myself with Shalimar. And with the politics of international crisis escalation. And with an Endnote library with 110 foraminifera and sea level articles in it.