The Rock

When I was a kid, away at school, I would go to the big church in town, sit on a pew at the back, smoke cigarettes, and think how I could find a way out of my problems, which often felt overwhelmingly big.

Actually they weren’t, not really, just how to deal with a conflict with Samson, the school’s best bully, how to handle the heartbreak of splitting up with the extraordinary Petra, my first love, and how to not get expelled for spending hours one night taking the petals from every rose in the headmaster’s garden.

Nobody ever came to the church but me, or at least that is how it seemed, and I thought of it as my sanctuary, a place to find not God, but some sort of goodness.

Ever since I’ve always found places where I could be alone, and think, and write in my notebook, cry without consequence, and find a little bit of peace inside me.

In London, in the first place I lived, a cockroach infested bedsit in a house of hookers and drug dealers, I would climb the six flights of stairs, pick the lock of a padlock, and sit on the roof half the night, with a blanket wrapped around me, and the light from the sign of a department store, Whiteley’s, shining like an unlikely beacon.

Then there’s a bench by a pond, on a farm quite a few hours drive away, and I would walk it if I had to, just to sit there for ten minutes and regain my calm. Any beach where I can make a fire is good, walking through the night to morning works, as does, bizarrely, being out in the middle of a thunderstorm.