January/February 2022

“…something permanent enough to exist for ever and too ethereal to exist at all.” Worthing, for me, has a little more solidity than ether. I’d guess it’s not a place that leaps to mind for many people when they read of Shangri-La, but it’s one where, since we moved in, and even when her sciatica was at its worst, Teri has felt she’s on a permanent holiday. 

  Her love for the town is summed up (I like to think) in the contents of a box frame 10 inches square hanging by our front door. It’s the creation of a local artist, Sylvie Howitt, who specialises in paper-cuts using old musical scores and maps. I’d seen examples in a gallery in Worthing of her work on maps, intended for people who feel wedded to a particular place, and asked whether she could make one for Teri. The heart-shaped cut-out, floating in its white box frame, incorporates turtle doves, rabbits and palm fronds and, at the point of the heart, in bold capitals, “WORTHING”. The section of map is big enough to encompass both a stretch of coast and greeny-blue sea and some of the South Downs — including those prehistoric landmarks of Chanctonbury Ring and Cissbury Ring, to which we hiked a few days after moving into our new home — plus the village of Dial Post, which we drive through on our way to the Knepp Wildland Project. The artwork’s title: “I Found Your Heart”.

  Teri, who needed a lift to the beach on Christmas Day, was not only able to walk there on New Year’s Day but to have a quick dip. She’s since joined a cheery group of sea swimmers, who call themselves the Worfolk, and is enjoying their sessions so much that she’s invested in a wetsuit.

  As cold’s a trigger for my asthma, I’ll give swimming a miss till nearer the summer and stick with the running. I’m fitter than I’ve been in a long time. From Stoneleigh, most of my runs were three or four miles, and I’d do a six-miler only about once a month. Here, I’m running six miles, sometimes seven, once a week.

  My outward run is usually west to east, from Worthing towards Lancing. (Along the way, in the East Beach area, I pass a terrace of pastel-coloured houses from the early 1900s that puts me briefly in mind of San Francisco — though the Painted Lady mansions there climb a hill, and the East Beach is entirely flat. Maybe it’s the Teri Effect.)

  The wind along the prom at the start of the year has taken some getting used to. Nine times out of ten, I’ll have it against me on the way out, with me on the return. In autumn, as I said earlier, out and back felt like running on different days. In winter, when the headwind is sometimes not so much fresh as freezing, it’s like running in different seasons. I usually glance at the forecast before I hit the pavement. On the prom, if I’m heading into the wind, I’m often reminded that meteorologists and runners have very different ideas of what constitutes a “moderate” breeze.

  Come July, though, when I’ll be looping round queues for dodgems and carousel on the way out, it’ll be heat rather than cold that bothers me. On the way home, I’ll relish the odd headwind.

  Whatever the weather, I’ll have the company of birds. Pied wagtails, starlings and juvenile herring gulls take flight at my approach on the prom. Crows hop a foot or two. But adult gulls, when they see me bearing down, just sidle casually to right or left. They seem to know that the “PB” a heavy-breathing human is intent on is a personal best rather than a plump bird.

  Teri can sit long enough to enjoy a jazz session, so we’ve become regulars again at the Hare and Hounds, where, by the first Tuesday in February, the perspex screens around the bar had disappeared, and only a couple of people were still putting on masks when they went up to buy drinks.  

  We’ve returned to regular, and increasingly long, strolls along the prom. When Teri paused during one of those in the middle of February, it wasn’t to take a rest, but to take back to Boots some of the meds she no longer needs.

 We’re looking forward to another wander around Knepp and — when Teri is ready again for the hills — to further outings in the South Downs. Further afield, we do have one trip planned for later in the year: to a seaside resort that, in common with Worthing, is celebrated in our hall. Next to Teri’s heart-shaped cut-out is a print our elder daughter, Laura, and her husband, Tim, gave me a few years ago. It’s of a coloured lithograph of Portstewart, one of a series made by the Sheffield artist Kenneth Steel, who was a prolific producer of posters for British Railways between 1948 and 1964. (I have a memory of the same poster appearing on the front cover of a little booklet about the town, one from which I cut pictures for a scrapbook while I was at primary school.) Steel’s vantage point is the edge of the Harbour Hill; that hill where, at the age of 10, whacking a ball between woolly-jumper goalposts, I could be Bobby Charlton, Georgie Best and Eusebio, all within the space of a few minutes. He looks out over the harbour, where we boys fished lucklessly for thick-lipped grey mullet, and then, one day, goggled at a 25-foot basking shark that salmon fishermen had caught in their nets by accident and towed into the harbour. 

  In Steel’s painting, where there’s maybe a little artistic licence in the warmth of the harbour walls, two sailing boats set out on a course that will take them past the cliff-edge site of the Convent (as we still call it in our family, though it’s been the co-educational Dominican College since 1968) and towards the Strand — that stretch of dune-backed, golden sand which, when I was running in the London suburbs, I’d summon in my head. Teri and I will be walking it in reality later this year. Our nephew, Marc, and his partner, Sean, are due to marry in a civil ceremony there, in a seafood restaurant called Harry’s Shack. Even Teri is prepared to tear herself away from Worthing for that.

  As for the post-pandemic world beyond, Teri — still feeling as though she’s on holiday in our new home — feels no need to rush into it. Nor do I, for work or pleasure. 

  I was able to give up flying as part of the job because I no longer need to sell travel articles to make a living. At the time, I expected that I’d carry on boarding boats and trains and writing the occasional piece. But, given the hangover there’s bound to be from Covid, I’m not desperate to get back to it. I think of Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998), author of that travel classic The Way of the World. He grew up in a Protestant, bourgeois household in Geneva, and was itching to look beyond it. “At eight years old,” he once recalled, “I  traced the course of the Yukon with my thumbnail in the butter on my toast.” I no longer have that itch. Since the mid-1990s, thanks to the job I’ve done, I’ve more than made up for the travelling I couldn’t do at eight or 18. I’m content, for the moment at least, to be a deskbound traveller. I look forward to burrowing into the pile of new books that’s been building by the desk while I’ve been doing some scribbling of my own: journeys of explorers, exiles and refugees; portraits of Jerusalem, Berlin and the Shetland Islands. 

  I’ve started to read, too, an older  book, by the journalist Tim Judah, in which he gives voice to people caught up in conflict. It was published in 2015, a year after Russia, disgruntled by developments on the territory of a neighbour, annexed one part of that territory and fomented a separatist uprising in another. In the light of Russia’s action on February 24, which drove the ending of Covid restrictions in England off the following day’s front pages, Judah’s book seems both essential and, in its title, remarkably of the moment: In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine*.  

* In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine by Tim Judah (Penguin)

Canadian regiments were stationed in Worthing and elsewhere in West Sussex during the First and Second World Wars. A memorial to those who lost their lives in the conflicts was erected on the beach in 2013 and the Canadian flag has flown above it ever since. On March 23, 2022, at the suggestion of a local councillor, a new flag went up there temporarily: the blue-and-yellow one of Ukraine.