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
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