In the magical film ‘I know where I’m going’   the young heroine (played by Wendy Hiller), bright and determined, is clear-sighted and purposeful about what she wants to achieve.  Until the fog halts her journey and a Scottish island – along with the rather wonderful Roger Livesey – frustrate her plans and offer her unexpected happiness.  A slight and charming film among Powell and Pressburger’s wonderful oeuvre.

I’ve never known where I’ve been going in terms of my life’s journey.

At college, I was introduced to the wonderful opening lines of Dante:

 Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

[Midway in the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost]

Even in my early 20s I identified strongly with these lines and now I’m in my late 50s I continue to do so.  No mid-life crisis for me – I’ve always felt that my way ahead has been unclear and uncertain.  Even my decision to study English literature was based on the logic that I’d always be able to orientate myself round a library and know enough to find exciting things to read, if I was unemployed: career plans never existed.  While geographical fixity went slightly awry once I got involved with a Naval chap.

Had I thought forward from my 20s or 30s I think I’d have guessed at stability by my 50s.  And indeed I suppose we did do that for some years in Hampshire.  What I wouldn’t have anticipated was the changes of the last few years – I’d have expected my tastes and habits to be more firmly formed.   I didn’t think I’d be searching out new events, lectures, exhibitions, with quite this momentum:  I didn’t expect that I would still feel on the brink of something new, with so much to learn.  I didn’t expect to feel so ignorant.  But that also makes it all continue to be so interesting – to realise that I’m not finished yet.

Even ten years ago, I wouldn’t have thought I’d spend a Saturday night sitting in an Irish bar in Amsterdam, drawn in by the offer of live music [Uilleann pipes, concertina, guitar and vocals since you ask] and feel comfortably at home. I didn’t anticipate that an art gallery and a museum would be the genuine highlights of a visit to a new city.  For that matter, I didn’t think that I’d get so worried about national politics that I’d flee the country on 31^st January to stay in Europe just a couple of days longer in a gesture both symbolic and silly.

I know all my ‘new things’ are tiny.  They are largely metropolitan and euro-centric.  I know there is an entire globe out there, while I haven’t even started to understand my own minute corner.  I suppose I thought that, by now, I would just know myself better, that I would change less, and that things would feel more fixed.  That I’d see patterns more clearly and be able to predict the way ahead.  Whereas it feels more indistinct and harder to discern than ever before.

I’ve just seen Alice’s Adventures Underground at the ROH and it brought home to me that there is little structure to either book – the journey is episodic, merely sequential –she meets… and then she meets..  Alice doesn’t know where she is going, but the encounters and experiences en route are what makes the books memorable.

So without the validation of a destination to aim for, I need to find pleasure in the journey, the immediate and the actual all around.

Being in the Netherlands, I re-read Girl with a Pearl Earring.  Griet, the servant girl, is berated by her mother at one point, that the paintings she describes sound idolatrous –

‘There is something dangerous about your description of his paintings. From the way you talk they could be of religious scenes.  It is as if the woman you describe is the Virgin Mary when she is just a woman writing a letter. You give the painting meaning that it does not have or deserve.’

When Griet asks Vermeer about this, he suggests that paintings may serve a spiritual purpose, but that protestants see God everywhere, in everything.

‘By painting everyday things, tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids – are they not celebrating God’s creation as well?’

The journey may be without a clear destination, therefore, but that doesn’t make it aimless.  The aim is to appreciate the journey itself.  Amongst the many lovely moments in Amsterdam, the unexpected pleasure was the Museum Ons lieve heer op solder, a 17^th century canal-side house and house church.  The chapel is lovely, but it was the house itself, the rooms we passed through on the way up through the house, which charmed me. We were given an audio guide and left to wander freely, to look at the tiles and panelling and original wallpaper, gaze out of windows and imagine life through the centuries. There is one 17^th century staircase still intact.  Generations of people clambered up and down its steep and twisty, beautifully shaped steps, and as we climbed up it, we were added to the domestic procession stretching over the centuries.  A moment of beauty and connection and at the same time utterly prosaic.

Everyday things, tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids – staircases and concertinas – are they not celebrating God’s creation as well?