A Hole in My Life. Battling Chronic Dizziness. by Philippa Thomson

Author:Philippa Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Philippa Thomson
Published: 2016-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

13

Atlantic Crossing

I had only been to America once before. For nearly ten years I had been in a relationship with a journalist, the younger brother of Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue. During a bitterly cold December in the 1980s, we had travelled to New York with a small group of friends to attend a wedding, and stayed in Anna’s beautiful 19th-century townhouse in Greenwich Village. At that time the city was in the grip of a homeless crisis, and there was a disturbing contrast between the chauffeur-driven, opulent lifestyle of one world, and the bleak poverty of the other. During this ill-fated visit, I lost a large sum of money to a taxi driver, by wrongly identifying my American banknotes, which to an outsider all look very similar, and then contracted food poisoning from a salad lunch at a Bleecker Street café. I’d been barely well enough to attend the wedding reception. My hopes were pinned on a more successful American trip the second time round.

Baton Rouge, in southeast Louisiana, was going to be very different to New York. It has a semi-tropical climate and, as our visit was in July, we were expecting high temperatures and humidity. The capital of Louisiana lies on the Mississippi River, and is a major industrial centre of the American South. Its name, red stick, dates back to 1699 when French explorers caught sight of a red cypress tree, stripped of its bark, which marked a tribal boundary. I had not had any reason to learn about the place except that, by strange coincidence, I had just acquired a pair of chairs that had had to be shipped all the way over from there. My penchant for vintage Scandinavian furniture meant that I’d been delighted to win these items at a remarkably good price on eBay. They were by Hans Wegner, the undisputed master of Danish chair design. It was then that I had looked up the city’s exotic-sounding name.

My sister, who is five and a half years older than me, was christened Georgina, but she has always been Georgie to me. Because of the age gap, we had moved into adulthood without ever spending large amounts of time together, apart from family summer holidays when we were both young. On leaving school, Georgie spent a number of years studying and working abroad. She was miraculously transformed, in my eyes, from a skinny, volatile teenager, prone to flare-ups with my parents and middle sister, into a confident, stylish, French-speaking mademoiselle. I watched the change with envy, keen to advance into her adult world. I’d been delighted to act as her bridesmaid when she married in her twenties, and I made a conscious effort to maintain close contact with her two children as they grew up. We had seen each other at regular intervals over the years, but we were now going to be spending a whole two weeks together. A steady trickle of emails and phone calls occurred, while we finalised all the arrangements.

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