Au Delà Narcisse smells of grand gestures and time slips, a glowing rush of ideas and intensity.

I loved my second-year rooms in college: a long narrow garret with a tiny bedroom at the end. It felt like the 1930s. Particularly when hollow-headed at dawn, wrapped in an astrakhan coat of the appropriate vintage, fingers yellow and black from nicotine and ink, drinking cold tea and racing to finish an essay after wasting the night absorbed in all the wrong books.

There was never enough heat; the single bar electric fire almost made a difference to the cold, but was more useful for making toast. There was never enough light, but if I stood on my desk, I could just see Port Meadow. Sometimes I would climb out onto the parapet at night to sit like a gargoyle, looking down at the mist and up at the moon. There was not enough wall space for my Haring and Gruau posters, or the inevitable collages cut from i-D, Blitz, and the Face, but I had a borrowed Henry Moore sketch at eye level by my armchair, and maybe a dozen gallery postcards that I’d unpin and rearrange when I couldn’t think. I had a pile of hat boxes on top of the hideous wardrobe that always took three tries to unlock, and tangles of clothes in a leather suitcase under my lumpy single bed. There were not enough bookshelves, so there were mazes of heaped books and notes across the battered boards and the rug that had once had a pattern. I emptied my ashtrays too rarely.

M, on whom I had the most enormous crush, sailed through the door in a blaze of light one morning. She had brought me every single daffodil in the world–a double armful of gold, and another basket hanging from her elbow. Every empty bottle and mug was crammed full, even the dented waste paper bin. My room glowed like a Van Eyck painting–though M looked more like a Tamara de Lempicka–and radiated with that heady floral smell of complicated hope.

originally posted 8 July 2025