It’s a month since we came back to Vancouver. The week before Christmas was unseasonably cold, with snow lying on West End roofs, sidewalks, and streets for days on end. It’s now warmer, and the relentless Pacific Northwest rain has returned. I’ve become familiar again with morning choices of waterproof clothing (raincoat or gortex?), footwear (rubber, hiking, or leather boots?), and decisions over the size of umbrella. We check weather apps and look at the sky and make our best guess. We’re well past solstice, but it’s that time of the year where the days grow longer only very slowly. The sun rises at eight in the morning, and sets by 4.30 in the afternoon. If I go up to UBC, as I do twice a week, I set off by bike or bus well before it’s light, and return after dark, passing the glass braziers on the entrance to Burrard Bridge and then following a rising line of standard lamps in red, blue, and green up, over the curve of the bridge, its grey girders and cream concrete statues and crests glistening in the darkness, and then onto the downslope on the other side.

Now that I’ve finished my course, I’m confronting that challenge that afflicts everyone in retirement or pretirement seems to encounter: how to structure a week. All those tasks that at one time seemed small, discrete, and manageable seem to suddenly expand, filling up any gaps in your schedule. I’ve planned to come up to UBC twice a week not really through necessity—although being on campus does give me access to electronic resources I can’t access at home—but to give shape to something that otherwise would look formless, to carve out a time in which I can focus and get into flow. Over the next two weeks, if all goes to plan, my schedule will begin to get busier:  I’ll begin to facilitate an online Guided Autobiography Group. And then, in early March, I’ll give a seminar on my research. In April I go back to London, for another period in the archives.

Over the last few months I’ve been watching myself being pulled back into archival work, even as part of me still feels I really should be moving in another direction — into counselling, developing and making use of skills that will otherwise atrophy. At this time in history, perhaps it’s just comforting to escape into the fullness of the past. And the way in which I escape is a little different from how it used to be.  In Singapore, I still examined some documents in the original, handling them gingerly, opening crumbling pages with infinite care, and then making sure that I returned every enclosure to its original setting when I closed the folder.  But rather than making notes, I took photographs, which I now review on my computer, along with copious pdf sources from online archives. It’s a more efficient mode of working, but it’s also more disembodied. I’m interested in the early years of S. Rajaratnam, Singapore’s first Minister for Culture and then long-standing Minister for Foreign Affairs, and especially the formative time he spent in London during the Second World War. In this work, there’s a sense of folded, triple time. I follow his movements in Camden and in Bloomsbury in the late 1930s and 1940s, and I map them onto my own daily routines in the areas as a student in the late 1970s and early 1980s. If I move forward another forty years, I reach the present. And in that present there is another splitting: in reading, in contacts through WhatsApp and email, I live simultaneously in three cities, in Singapore, Vancouver, London, in time zones that are each eight hours apart. I walk out from the library at UBC and see the parade of mountains on the North Shore, but part of me stays in the documents I have been reading, in the rain and fog, the grey Portland stone and the red double decker buses, an ocean and eighty (or maybe forty) years away. 

It’s an experience that is at once unsettling and quite beautiful. I’ve been having a lot of conversations in the month with friends here who have tried, and ultimately failed, to root themselves in Vancouver, to feel at home. This lack of a feeling of belonging has been part of my own self-reflection, and puzzlement, in the months since I returned. In the previous times that I was here I was passing through, on a journey elsewhere. My doctoral studies were a key time in my life, but I always knew that I would move on. And then later we’d come back here, for long holidays, sabbaticals, and even, a decade ago, a two-year time out. At none of those times did I want to belong. In the last five years I have tried to belong, to put down roots, but I still find them to be mostly shallow. Is this the nature of the place, or of me, or simply of a time in life when the world leaves a much shallower impression on the self? 

Darkness comes quickly in the evenings. We watch K-drama, and then go to bed early. In my sleep I dream, mostly, I think, of Singapore and at times of London. And then I wake in the morning to a darkness that gradually vanishes, and to rain that does not.