Yesterday, November 5th, marked eighteen years since we moved to Davis. I had never even heard of Davis until a few weeks before. I knew quite a few people with last name of Davis (actually mostly Davies), but when our plane landed from London in the fall of 2005 I was unaware of the college town in the central valley of California that would come to define this latter part of my life. I didn’t really have an idea in mind of what life over here would look like when we emigrated, find a place to live, find a place to work, turn thirty and get busy living in America until we got bored and moved somewhere else. I remember the first visit to Davis; my wife had a job interview here at the university, so I tagged along and waited downtown while she did that. I liked the downtown; there were several bookstores, including the Avid Reader (where I eventually got my first job in the US) and the now-gone Bogey’s Books, which was where Bizarro World Comics is now located (they used to be on 5th Street), and they had a good language section. There was also the Soccer and Lifestyle football shirt shop, which to me was a massive bonus, and the guy who still runs it was the first person in Davis I ever spoke to. I remember asking if they got the Spurs shirts in, but he said that Kappa are really bad at distributing in the States. (Spurs are made by Nike now and they always have our new shirts in stock). I wasn’t sure about the landscape around Davis, this huge hot, flat valley that reminded me of Tatooine, and it was a fair ride from Santa Rosa where we had been staying with my wife’s family, the idea of moving to America being that we’d be closer to them. When she accepted the job, we came back one more time to look around at apartments, using the DavisWiki site to look for apartment complexes, and we ate at Sudwerk back when they still had genuinely decent German style food (we ate there again a few weeks ago in the newly reopened restaurant part; their food is pretty bland now, though the beer is still nice). And then on November 5th, remember remember, we moved into our new apartment in south Davis. I just recall walking down to Nugget and getting a bottle of London Pride beer, which was a nice find, to celebrate our new home and also celebrate Guy Fawkes Night, which is (obviously) not a thing over here, but was always one of the big days/nights when I was growing up. Bonfire Night. It sounds strange explaining it to people over here. I remember hearing on the news here back in that first year that November 5th was ‘Britain’s Fourth of July’, which made me laugh. I would tell people, no it’s America’s May the 11th, which took some explaining. Those first few months were an adjustment, living in Davis. Those first few eighteen years have been an adjustment.

So on this day, eighteen years later, I cycled downtown just to get out of the house for a bit (being stuck in the ‘I am bored but don’t want to actually go anywhere’ rut, and the ‘there’s nothing to do in Davis’ rut), and stopped in Central Park to draw that caterpillar sculpture I think I’ve never sketched. It’s very autumnal right now, and we had a little bit of light rain, Fall is here. I was listening to something about the Beatles. ‘Now and Then’ has been stuck in my head since Thursday, growing on me more and more. I can’t stop playing it on my guitar.

And I go back to thinking myself about Now and Then. 2005 was a different world, the last year of my twenties, the last year of my life in London, in Europe, with my ever-expanding family back home. When I think about how that was eighteen years ago I can’t help but think about where I was eighteen years before that. The answer was the first year at Edgware Secondary School, I was a lot smaller, everyone else was a lot taller. I had left my primary school Goldbeaters a few months before, and Edgware was a big new world, school uniforms, bigger playgrounds, getting the tube from Burnt Oak and walking up Green Lane, all those different teachers, some nice, some scary, some bored. It was not long after Tottenham had lost to Coventry in the FA Cup Final, the only one I ever went to, I’m still not really over that. Most of my friends from Goldbeaters went to Mill Hill County High, but I made friends at Edgware, including one who I knew from Goldbeaters but we didn’t hang out together until Edgware, that’s my friend Terry who I’m still friends with but haven’t seen in years, because he moved to Asia at the end of 2006 (he’s now in Japan). We both moved out thousands of miles from Burnt Oak, never to return. So eighteen years before my move to America I was 11; you can’t compare the difference between 11 and 29 with the difference between 29 and 47, but there’s a lot of life in between. I was obsessed with drawing and Tottenham when I was 11, and I still am now. Next year it will be nineteen years, and so I’ll be comparing nineteen years before that, when I was 10; in 2025 it will be twenty years, and so on. Eventually it will be fully half my life. You might say in reality it already has been. Well I’m still here now, and now and then I think of the old world.