London Diary #Three

The glorious summer was coming to an end. The pink and purple was beginning to look inappropriate and tacky despite sparking memories of high enthusiasm. As he walked down the north bank of the Thames he looked up and saw a red bus roll across Blackfriars Bridge.

He is on his way to Alexandria and it is taking a long time for the Thames path is busy; people flowing over and around him, the throng comes and passes and more turn up in front and he wonders how they could be so many. Clouds are taking over the blue sky, unremarked upon, and he bumps into one he knows, in the throng: ‘Off to work in Acton -acting!’ she says. ‘Don’t know really, just heard about it and here I am … not long, off to Paris on Tuesday!’

The river next to him draws his eyes as it presses against the stone and steel of its barriers. It swells and threatens to one day take back this city to earth and rubble as which it arose from these depths. It heaves up to him and sinks back down speaking of hot horror and animal ferocity.

He left London for Berlin one weekend. A city that stands as both the great demonic head of the Fearsome Fourth Reich, home of jingoing pockets, as well as the scrappy self-deprecating but vicious underdog with peeling graffiti splattered across war torn buildings, mispuzzled and bright. Here punks strut around and have a tendency to pose like paintings, grimacing sulkily. Bubbling with a tame danger, lazing in the sun, he sits in the city and looks at the words liebe luxus anarchie scratched into the door frame next to his head.

Not the rush and corporate of London; not the grandeur and intimidation of business and doing but being, allowing old fashioned trains to glide into large glass stations - functional and clean, practical. Looking like those on the south of the river – proud, cold and ordered.

Where is the whip of shining polished boot, the big boys and Bollinger-scented breath? Here, are the rich embraced tight and the foreign welcomed frantically? In this city do Royals not build palaces but shimmy down them?

Alexandria is leaving her apartment soon to a house in Kent. She will be commuting in from then onwards. Her mother bought the apartment in 1948. ‘Nothing lasts. Now what awaits is a sad, slow decline to a grumbling unimportance in the future’ she had said.

‘It began with a great show, and is secured with one …’ …fizzing and bubbling, like the final frantic gurgling whirl before the plug; the last bright lights flicker.

‘Maybe she is just tired; it was only ever an accident of water and time; lucky daylight hours and thankfully a safe enough distance from them with their vicious tendencies!’

#stagetaken and deflation creeps over and seeps in, thickly. Outside the O2 arena officials stand to guard nothing; railings passing back and forth, splitting up empty air. Everything is still, very big, looking clumsy and flaccid without the crowds.

He walks on. He is ready to learn something tonight. He feels like a little boy. He is not wearing his tie so his waistcoat and shirt are getting squashed in his rucksack. He smiled as his hood blows out behind him, like Zorro’s cape. He walks along the river with a spring; the wind ruffles his hair and he tilts back, his belly protruding forward, his palms open.

He’s come to Westminster Bridge now and looks out over the ships and the towers and the domes, theatres and temples, Open unto the fields, and to the sky …

It is still beautiful here and feels yet more so when Alexandria opens the door to him, jabbering, hysterically on the phone – ‘well she keeps spreading doom and misery and after a while I just want her to get on with her life and allow me to’ – he is ushered in and pushed up against the wall his nose pressed against the rugs and canvases that harbour a strong childhood excitement.

He walks into the kitchen while she loudly clatters behind him. The kitchen ceiling a bright white and the walls a swirling, vibrant orange. The counters around the edge are cluttered with pots and glass containers of nuts and seeds, spelt pasta and quinoa. There is a cut open loaf of rye bread on the side, with a bowl of fruit – grapes, bananas, apples, pomegranate and others he didn’t recognise flowing over and out of the bowl.

Walking down a step to the sitting room which lay the other side of one of the counters he can see Alexandria in another room through a thin, indigo veil, surrounded by islands of bright pillows sitting upon the deep blue rug. The twin of that blue rug he stood on now, next to a fireplace in which crystals, pebbles and candles were dotted about the grate, a stone Ganesh at the front in the centre.  

Hazy in the light, he could smell a strong incense candle that Alexandria had lit. The light curls of smoke drifted towards him, stinging his nose and moistening his eyes, eventually causing him to let out a little ahtishoo!

Around this room he looked at the throws with the elephants in embroidery and the magnificent skyline of cities of the Orient. Here he had dreamt of winding steps, exotic markets, wide streets, great white houses, dancing chimney sweeps, empty mansions and that lovely sooty air.

Alexandria was out of site now. He walked over to the window and looked out over the gardens of the next door houses and beyond that the rubbish bins, a small lane, more houses and then the tips of the trees that lined the park.

He waited and dreamed and eventually he turned back to the house where in a great, magnificent mirror that stood on the wall opposite he saw himself amidst the skyline of the city.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Liverpool 2012

London Diary #Two

On the first weekend of the Olympics he found himself next to his sister, drinking local ale in an empty village pub somewhere in the hinterlands beyond the Great Metropolis. She picked at peanuts while her eyes rested on the rowing on the television; the eyes of the young snuffling barman were darting from them to the television and back again.

The day before he had been at a Farmers Market, the two of them scuttling in and out of the blooming crowds to fawn over Italian pasta and sorrel from Cambridgeshire, Kids Company helium balloons attached to their wastes. It was hot and the smell of tomatoes strong; dogs scuttled about the tottering legs of stilt-walkers and at one point he was certain he saw Judi Dench gliding through the crowd.

Here the city hums loud like a machine or a slumbering beast but that morning, walking the dogs in Bishop’s Park, it was quiet. The water is sleepy and when the tide is out birds with twig legs and big beaks stand in a line on the soggy mud marshes as if queuing for morning croissants and coffee. When the tide is high there are swans and one morning he spun round as he followed what appeared to be a cormorant into the water. But nothing came up so he turned and kept walking.

The day after the Opening Ceremony the park was packed with people setting up to watch the first day on a big screen. That uneasy excitement was bubbling over.

We Salute Sir Wiggo ...Go Mo Go! Run Jess, Run! Eyes and lenses focus in a new found blusterous patriotism, bright and shameless and ready to snap at dismissive smirks of condescension or superior derision.

As the crowds arrived and the streets became quiet the warnings from the Mayor, Supporter in Chief, were replaced with unheeded calls for those savages up North to come down to sunny Boris Island and taste a bit of Olympics.

At the coffee stall a beautiful lady and a jogger struck up conversation with the grumbling grizzly; the jogger was red in the face and the satchel strap around his waist dug into his side pulling his t-shirt up and revealing a pale pink wedge of flesh.

‘So much for the traffic warnings. Like living in a Ghost City!’

‘What did you expect? It’s a drop in the ocean.’

‘Not the chaos they were predicting …’

‘It’s worse in the West End apparently - Ghost City.’

‘Fucking Boris …’

He felt like he was expected to either concur similarly or offer an interesting retort. He did neither and stared at the filter.

To and from work he principally walks past yacking Yummy-Mummies from the States and Arab lads crying out in thick cockney – bright teeth and jabbering lips and chins. Quiet loners like himself pass – puffing red and serious; their faces fiercely looking out over the road and for a second into his. Everyone is very loud or very quiet. Husky voices from the Home Counties pipe up to surprise. Most cry that gentrification is on its way, some that is has already left, po-faced.

In the shops the keepers chat to him and often on the underground someone will step back to let him pass. Not what he had been warned of up North. ‘No one speaks in London!’ They had said. ‘Everyone in their own world – rushing around. It’s like a warren; packed tight together but no-one knows nobody!’

Worse is also said; mainly from those who would take inspiration from the story of Boudicca with her flaming hair razing the new Roman settlement of London to the ground. That doesn’t look like my England!  

Sitting in a theatre beer garden he felt out of place in his suit as he drank surrounded by actors and directors and an ‘up-and-coming producer.’ Ford Maddox Ford wrote that your profession makes the London you live in and he thought of the man in red chinos who he passes each morning on his phone, making deals and walking oblivious to all in front and before.

Similarly on the Uxbridge Road he slips up and down unregarded while they salute each other, and shake hands, laugh, gripe and sing together. He would like to think that they show his acceptance by not acknowledging his return but really they are unaware of the initial arrival.  

It is not villages that London is made up of but little personal pods in which Londoners feed and sleep and travel in and the taint of the pod colours their perception and the curve warps their vision and the seams and strappings blind them to the love and work being done elsewhere in the city.

‘You’, he says to himself, the Standard on his lap, ‘can never know anything about London; all you ever know about is yourself in London.’ Elusive in its multi-faceted nature fostering that slipping feeling. There is no Bronx, or banlieue, no need for compartmentalisation as anything can exist gently unnoticed and if ferocious home heroes run down from the North the flame will burn in Tottenham and it will flame in Ealing.

The night it had all began he got a quiet tube on the District Line to Tower Hill thinking that this is the most excited London he is ever going to see. Sirens could be heard all about and policeman lined the streets; warm, hazy feeling of a storm approaching as the humming grew louder than ever before and hot mouths exhaled over the roads.

It grizzles and shrieks, rumbles, leaps and through the cross of figures a girl in a flowering, layered dress and a white sleeveless shirt, open, spinning ungainly, her arms outstretched. The image flickered at him through the evening and, circling out from the whirling of a carnival vortex in hot frenzy. 

 The snivelling barman poured them some more peanuts and looking up at the celebrating champions said, tentatively, ‘Must be mad up there.’

‘Ghost City.’  

Bertie Digby Alexander

Liverpool 2012

London Diary #One

They aren’t there yet and the Great Road rumbles grey on towards a single house in the distance and a figure waving madly amongst aromatic scent and brightly coloured pillows. 

It isn’t yet here but a whooshing cry and the tunnel is filled as out of a black mouth a great dirty serpentine tongue slips. A little hub of smart-suit-bright-ties stumbles on with him; silent, serious, calm, he despised them, before he realised that he too was wearing a smart suit and bright tie and beginning to hate them a little less and like himself a little less he stuck his nose into his Metro and sneezed.

One hot hand was grasping at the sweating pole leaving a grimy stain on his palm while the other held the pages closer to his dripping nose.

At Baker Street they moved fast. He dropped the paper on to a bench and picked up another on the next line.

David Cameron was to be holidaying in Catalonia.

He was beginning to enjoy the silly Metro whereas he was finding the Standard a nuisance, whining and whimpering each day for a conclusion to the ‘aviation crisis’ and expressing shock at the little effect its own forum had.

‘The Standard isn’t about London; the Standard is about the Standard’ he thought to himself.

The other day, with a thrill and a thumping heart, in Fulham, he thought he was looking at Nick Clegg passing leaflets through doors, like in Love Actually. On second glance he thought it might be Jeremy Hunt. But it wasn’t either, just another well-fed, pointlessly good looking smart-suit-bright-tie. The man simply looked like he should be in government, though he was quite far away. He was reminded of Notting Hill and thought that he still hasn’t yet been to the blue door; or the market for that matter. Indeed, he’s not completely sure he’s been to Notting Hill.

He had been to Trafalgar Square though. His heart beat loudly when he walked into it and he looked at the waving flags blowing strong in the wind and saw how the lions looked yet more magnificent for the children scrambling over their noble noses. Nelson’s column stretched proud above him and he saw characters everywhere, even where there were none.

He was now pulling out from Piccadilly Circus. A grim couple looking just like us have just got on and pull out little devices and say ‘tickets and passes please!’ He jumps out with them at Leicester Square. They get on the next carriage. He looks for the exit before realising this is Leicester Square. A booming voice begins to thunder overhead warning of travel disruptions to come.

Hot breath over flushed faces drags hair back along with it. Tinkling and warbling silences with the whoosh of the wind enveloping ears and wrapping shuffling bodies. Outside his station he had found a little independent coffee stall. The man tending the stall is grizzly and abrupt and when he goes to reach for what he thought was his coffee he is accosted with a fierce ‘Does that look like a Tall Filter Drip?’

On the second day, he didn’t want to order another Tall Filter Drip for it had been tepid by the time the coffee had dropped. He also hated it when people said to him ‘The usual?’  But if he didn’t order it again he feared that the grumbling barista would think he objected to the wait. So he ordered the Tall Filter Drip. 
 

After that the grizzly would grumble to him ‘The usual?’ and not wanting to aggravate he assented, and waited, his shoulders hunched against the wind.

He was able to take the Jubilee Line to work- panting like an excitable child or dog as it tingles into each station – and avoid the sinister Northern Line with its sombre creaking tones and the woman’s voice at Belsize Park sounding as if she had just come from announcing the death of Edward VII.

‘We weren’t really excited about London at all,’ the Canadian said to him, watching him pick up the dog poo. ‘But you know we thought, we’re travellers, so we should probably look around, as we were flying here. Y’know, the history.

‘My grandmother’s corpse is also here.’

Forty years younger than Christ; blooded heads at Traitors Gate, vampyric clerks skulking about Lincoln Field Inns and in the domed gloom of Baker Street station frightened faces fly frantically down the steps to the sound of the air raid under the black figures ‘1911’.  He sees shadowed characters scuttling down narrow, cobbled alleyways, as he gets lost attempting to find the pub, trampling over little girls. He peers into the dark expecting to see ashen cherubic features skipping towards him – ‘one for the evening guv’nor?’ He avoided the park.

‘Yes, as you should have,’ they said to him in the pub. ‘Just this month a man was stabbed in there and another had his arm chopped off with an axe – just walking along he was, and then they just grabbed his arm and – whoosh!’

He had told them about the people who lived above him.

‘O yes I have that where I am. Can hear everything from her charging her iPhone to her bum sliding along the bottom of the bath. I have stopped making a fuss though, ever since I stormed out once, raging about the rumble outside, only to find the ol' boy from upstairs being taken away on a stretcher.’

This makes him feel better; he sips again and ignores suppressed dreams of gardens.

At midnight they were ushered off and he sloshed home in the rain that had been there all month. Miserable wet faces appeared in the crowd out of the black. Maybe it’s the effect of the city, he thinks. A friend had warned him of this.

‘It has been worse up North,’ he commented.

‘They are miserable anyway,’ the friend responded. ‘Just for being up North.’

Then, quite suddenly, the sun came.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Liverpool 2012