Leicestershire

I went to Nottingham because of a family connection - one of those stories where genealogy gets overgrown with mythology, like lichen on a gravestone. What started as a researched story about my paternal family's connection to the Nottingham lace industry sort of became in my imagination a deep ancestral connection stretching back to the crusades.

So maybe I was primed to connect with the place before I had even arrived there, no matter what it was like.

But it really was EXACTLY my taste. We started our morning there going for a swim at our host's posh corporate gym, a converted railway station with a massive underground shower / changing / locker room. (The only thing I've ever seen like this were the showers at the Hilton in Queenstown where, frankly, I could happily return when I become a spontaneous millionaire, or at least when I get hired to act as caretaker of its hedge maze when it gets snowed in. This tangent was a reference to "The Shining.")

We went for coffee at an outlet for 200° - Nottingham's local roastery. This was exquisitely good coffee, matching the Australian standard and perhaps even surpassing it. I did find it strange to see the local hipsters ordering a "flat white" as if it was the most stylish thing ever. Strewth. It's bloody International Roast mate! But 200 ° was like much of Nottingham some red brick industrial building happily repurposed, its original aesthetic touches now gratefully displayed.

Stu and I went for a walk along the canals, looking at the whole Lace Market district and even doing a little shopping at Marks and Spencer.

There were flowers laid on the steps of Council House for Queen Elizabeth, and posters of her face everywhere. I saw that one had been smashed. Former Prime Minister and interview darling Kevin Rudd was on British television giving an eloquent colonial viewpoint on the tragedy.

Elizabeth's death has been accompanied by no shock at all. In fact, the death of Olivia Newton-John back home was a bigger shock. We've all been doing preparatory grieving for years now. If I were writing this as a fantasy story, I'd probably have King Charles dying within a year of his accession, but then I have the typically sadistic imagination of any fantasy author.

That evening, our host Luke was convening his LGBTQIA+ Christian group at St Andrews Church with Castle Gate. Stuart was to be a guest speaker. I didn't want to go, and in fact had a full on freak out about going which left me a wreck. I had been so uneasy about Luke, a stranger, offering us free accommodation on the strength of him liking Stuart's book, only to find myself standing at a Church door feeling pressured to go in. And I really lost my shit.

It was a horrible night after that. I walked around until I didn't feel upset anymore. Talking to Stuart about it later, I realised that I had been "triggered" - a word that gets thrown about so casually, but actually represents something quite devastating. I'm scared of being recruited into a religion. I'm scared of being love bombed and won over and broken down. And I was so far from home, I didn't have anywhere safe to go to, just this Christian man's house. I've stayed in a three houses now for free accommodation from fans of Stuart's book; it gets harder each time. I'm not sure how I'll handle the publication of his memoir. Maybe I'll invest in a Romani caravan and follow him around the world on that, I don't know.

Every holiday it seems I have some really shitty moment, and my panic attack at the doors of a Church in Nottingham was this holiday's shitty moment. I toyed briefly with the idea of abandoning Find Penguins because my inner goblin now was pointing out (with a factual air that was very Kevin Rudd) that all travel was irremediably ruined forever. But what would my inner goblin know? And what would Kevin Rudd know for that matter?

I asked the next morning if we could just move on to York one day early. Stuart was more than amenable. I had scared him with my freak out, and frankly I had scared myself too, walking off in a strange city.

I love Nottingham - I want to go back there - but maybe not the religious side of it. If anything, Nottingham struck me as kind of countercultural and irreligious - and certainly very multicultural. There was melanin here that was almost absent from Surrey. And for all the scruffiness of its architecture, the streets were clean - clean of litter, of pigeon-shit, of takeaway containers, of cigarette butts. Clean! Livable! Growing! This place wasn't a repository of yesterday's dreams, excepting the dream of renewal. I felt it giving me energy somehow. I felt so weirdly at home.Read more