Earlier this week I dipped a toe into the forgotten world of Abney Park cemetery. Think Highgate is gothic and overgrown? Forget it, it's a bowling green, centre court at Wimbledon, compared to this wilderness. This is post apocalyptic London. Survivors London, when the city has been cleared of almost every inhabitant and nature has stealthily crept back through the outer suburbs and then rampaged, bloomed and dominated the ravaged inner core.
It is the Amazon with headstones and memorial tablets; an enormous, dense canopy of thirty, forty feet trees; thick, long established bushes obscure even the tallest tombstones, the smaller ones are buried under a thick matt of vegetation or have sunk back at crazy angles in to the earth.
Nowhere is in the same breath as melancholy or as menacing and laden with brooding gothic unease as this cemetery. It is as if it was designed for modern day vampires.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
London
London, yet again, enthrals me (as if it had ever stopped); the opportunities this diamond city offers are endless. In the past four, maybe five weeks, I've wandered across and through London with a quite incredible woman. It's been a voyage in the good ship Serendipity, bound for nowhere; we have unlocked London: for her, the chance to peel back the covers and see the London outside the charmed tourist bubble; for me, the opportunity to see London through the eyes and ears of another.
The way we think, the way we talk - the timorousness of the way we speak; think about it, how many of these meek, vanilla intensifiers do you use in a day - actually, really, quite - they say nothing and are fully inhibitory to any action. Even getting off a tube can be an action of hesitation as everyone eyes everyone else as to who will take that tentative first step and break the log jam before the door closes and we hurtle towards the next stop.
This both bemuses my friend and vexes her to the point of explosion. She dealt with this tube incident (because it actually happened to her) in the manner a wine waiter pops a cork from a bottle, boldly and impressively: "get off the train, will you!". To a Brit ear that's Latin temerity (that's where her roots lie), but to the rest of the world, no six truer words have ever been said. Firm, direct, expressive, and clear.
We need more of this and less Hugh Grant mumbling, and definitely non of the allegedly endearing stammering of our faux wodehousian mayor.
The way we think, the way we talk - the timorousness of the way we speak; think about it, how many of these meek, vanilla intensifiers do you use in a day - actually, really, quite - they say nothing and are fully inhibitory to any action. Even getting off a tube can be an action of hesitation as everyone eyes everyone else as to who will take that tentative first step and break the log jam before the door closes and we hurtle towards the next stop.
This both bemuses my friend and vexes her to the point of explosion. She dealt with this tube incident (because it actually happened to her) in the manner a wine waiter pops a cork from a bottle, boldly and impressively: "get off the train, will you!". To a Brit ear that's Latin temerity (that's where her roots lie), but to the rest of the world, no six truer words have ever been said. Firm, direct, expressive, and clear.
We need more of this and less Hugh Grant mumbling, and definitely non of the allegedly endearing stammering of our faux wodehousian mayor.
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