Gothic London

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.

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.

Crooked timber

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made"

Immanuel Kant

Flight Behaviour

"She wondered if humiliaton ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like sunburn, or just kept blazing"

Flight Behaviour
Barbara Kingsolver

Bow Lane

" My eyeballs were burning. I could n't breathe in or out.." Oh, you should n't have said that to your friend at the very the moment we happened to pass each other on Bow Lane this lunchtime.  What was going on? What happened? What was the in extremis event that got you to this point?

 I've been thinking about this ever since. Can't ask you because I don't know who you are, and to be honest, I've only a vague recollection of what you even looked like. Young woman...mid twenties..office wear...and that's about as good as it gets.

But the words, and then how you said them, with such lightness, almost gaiety in fact. I'd really only expect to come across a remark like this coming out of the mouth of an action novel hero, or perhaps, a piece to camera clip from a survivor of something truly harrowing. Yet you were talking about it in the same tone as I could imagine someone buying a cup cake

Beautiful noise

Last Saturday I was on Oxford Street which, like every day, was a roaring river of noise. It was an experience like I imagine a surfer feels hugging the inner curl of a wave, enclosed in a near wall of water, alone and in a situation perilously close to overwhelming, yet at the same time, madly intoxicating .

That particular evening was extraordinary though;  the nearer I got towards Marble Arch, the more I thought I could hear steady, rhythmic drumming albeit on a monumental scale. Like a shape clearing in the fog, the drumming became clearer, the drum patterns more evident, then a throbbing bass strode out to greet me by the time I'd reached Marble Arch. The Stones in full flight. So this is how live is on the runway. Thudding, numbing, and bizarrely arousing.

It's the unfinished symphony of car horns, sirens, roadworks, throaty buses, squealing taxis, buskers, music leaking out of store doors, the hubbub of conversations in hundreds of languages that has melded effortlessly into London's now ever present and un-choreographed  sound track. If Babylon was being blueprinted again, I'm pretty confident it would sound, smell and look like today's London.

The Victim

I always look to the first line of Bellow's The Victim as the summation of all that hot weather is, even if it is place specific: 'On some nights, New York is as hot as Bangkok'  Ten short words and only one  of them polysyllabic'; but this is an instance where the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. Simplicity that would grace a poem. Unadorned, unfussy, I've loved this line since that day back in the early '80s when I found a cheap copy in a gas station book rack somewhere in upstate New York.

London feels like Bangkok today - pulpy, muggy, steaming - the thermometer seems set to keep this way for sometime now.

It's also had me thinking of those French novels I've read where summer is more than background, it drives behaviour; surfaces hidden, even unknown desires; and there's an alchemy present where bored dreams carry the seeds of solid reality.

In my mind here, I have a picture of middle aged office drudge alone in a Parisian summer with his family away in Normandy slipping into a series of fruitless, casual affairs. Driven out his apartment by boredom and broiling nights, it's an inevitability. As it is that there'll be no change at the end of the summer. The jigsaw reassembles itself, the old picture reforms. He'll be there at the Gare Montparnasse or Gare St Lazare, to twirl his kids in the air and kiss his wife as they step off the homecoming train.

Cram it in.

Started this week a la street urchin cheekily peering over the fence at the Stones Hyde Park gig. Good enough view and the sound surged in all the right places - especially so when it came to the audience  picking up as a single unified voice that eerie whooping that heralds Sympathy with the Devil.

But why did someone in the mass of people listening on the the other side of the tracks as it were decide to play his mouth organ nearly every time there was a solo going on? Take it from me, you don't want to hear Jumping Jack Flash played on a mouth organ.

Then the week ends up with an unexpected long, glorious evening in a pop up restaurant in London's über hip nexus - Hoxton Square. A building due for the wrecker's ball been temporarily reclaimed for sanity and humanity by an enterprising husband and wife and turned into a delightful place to eat.

 It must be one of the oldest residents in the square even if the front looks like a sixties mini office block. The husband reckoned it had been there since the 1820's; the stripped back, pared down look of the internal building certainly attests to that. Just looking at the worn down steps on the staircases testifies to an unknown number of feet running up and down. So why demolish it?

Night of Silience

I'm fresh in from seeing yet another remarkable Turkish film - Night of Silence - and as with the others I've seen (One Night in Anatolia. The name of the other, though, escapes me), it's echo has carried all the way from the Curzon Renoir to my home and it's not lost it's strength either.

Two people on the honeymoon night of their arranged wedding alone for the first time. Everything is set for cliche - an elderly, pot-bellied man and a tender, almost orchid like, teenage bride. The very grist of a potboiler, except it's not: he was not predatory nor forceful, a little wheedling perhaps, and as patriarchial as one might imagine a conservative Anatolian country dweller to be, but there is decency and an honour in him; she as might be imagined was a timid, clearly nervous, and obviously a young girl both in manner and sensibility. 

One critic called this film a chamber piece and that's what it was - two instruments, one in a major key, the other in a minor, playing in a very intimate setting, almost conversing. The almost is important: some threads were intentionally side stepped or ignored, by the understandably apprehensive bride. The intimate chamber piece image fits the setting of the film too: a single room and just two players in it. 

The claustrophobia could have been a third actor, never overt, but there nevertheless, brooding quietly, imperceptibly pushing the walls a little closer as the minutes ticked by to that critical moment before the first morning prayers when a new husband traditionally fired a shot to signal consummation. 

The power of this film was that it was a slow curtain pull-back of the constraints and expedencies levied by custom and tradition on to the Anatolian peasantry: the ancient blood feuds that arranged marriages try to end; the pernicious notion of honour; the sanctity of tradition - it can be no other way. The other Turkey explained. The one seldom talked of.

London Fields

Wherever those rooks in London Fields go to roost tonight, there's the guarantee that at least one of them will be having a poor night's sleep. Whilst a friend and I were chatting on a bench there, we both saw an enterprising rook grab a can of red bull with their beak and gulp down whatever was left in there. Twice. Caffeine before sleep is the sure road to insomnia whether human or Corvid.

Now that felt good. Cleaning my kitchen, washing crockery, bleaching surfaces, getting the vacuum behind the fridge for once. I had to do this; there's a lot at stake. I've begun to feel cowed by the stuff that has to be done - the walls are grubby, the bathroom suite's a shocker, the kitchen filthy, my living room overflowing with books, papers, clothes. In the right hands, the right writer's hands that is then this tiny flat could be as epic as Quentin Crisp's legendary New York apartment. My hands are n't those and I don't want that.

It's the last thing; no, what I want is somewhere clean, quiet, pleasant, that I can gladly invite people to see, drop-in if they do wish. I don't want to have the cortisol jolt of wondering was that mice scampering along the roof space, or the indignity of having to bear someone else stamping across their floor (my ceiling) in the wee small hours.

Tonight I think I've stopped myself going into a state of near domestic suspended animation where nothing would have happened. All sounds quite melodramatic, does n't it, but understand this: I've turned something like a corner here. I've taken a stand against that other me - the idle, the worrier, the sometimes despondent, the procrastinator, the talker but not the doer.

The other me, incidentally, is a reflection of only an aspect of my personality, not the fullness of me; after all we are complex, often contradictory beasts, perplexing to our own self as well as others, resilient, introverted and extroverted according to circumstance, active and passive.

Caution items may have shifted during flight. They have. My back's killing me since I got off the train from Birmingham. I'm having to do the old man shuffle - two hands massaging an unforgiving back muscle and all of it bent double - just to get around my flat.

This is definitely muscular. Wonder if toting that damn laptop across Birmingham is the culprit? I need everything to shift back the way it was status quo ante. Looking to you, Sleep, to do what you need to. In your hands right now. No pressure.

In London you trip over other people's conversations from the moment you close your front door and step into the public domain. It's like the city was designed for it: waiting to pay at Tesco, anywhere on the tube, even walking home through the park, the one sure thing is that you're going to inadvertently wander in, through, and then out of the smoke and fog of someone else's conversation. It's a given. A certainty.

No reason either why it should n't be either; there's nine, possibly ten, maybe eleven, or even twelve, depending who you believe, million people squeezed in to London. So why should n't we be dipping in and out of a smog of small talk?

As I ploughed through Holland Park on my way home earlier this evening, I fleetingly drifted into range of a kind of Q&A going on between a family of three, and snagged a line that resonated instantly. The father was agog about a bird of prey they'd once seen. I don't  think it was recent - something in his tone suggested that - nevertheless it carried epic connotations. It had taken his breath. It had awed him.

I know all about that despite never seeing whatever he saw; something similar happened to me at the Barnes Wetland Centre one late winter's evening last year. I'd just followed a friend into the quiet gloom of  a bird hide. He turned towards the larger front window and I made for one of the smaller side panels. In front of me, perhaps no more than six or seven feet, sat an impassive sparrow hawk, tawny brown and steel-eyed, the lean face of death, the master of the urban skies. I felt like a veil had been pulled aside and I had been given a glimpse of another reality, where I was the intruder and the sparrow hawk was master.

I've had very few moments where nature has allowed me this snatched view of a master hunter's almost imperial disdain. Quite unforgettable. For me then and just as much for the anonymous father I overheard a few hours ago talking about his own moment of wonder.

I was in a cafe this morning listening to a friend go over her holiday plans. She's been a roamer like me - the more offbeat a destination the better. It's a chronic sign of wanderlust; I know, it's printed into my DNA.

 However, she's a quieter gal these days with a partner in tow, who like her seems to exist under siege like conditions at work. So she's looking at somewhere to let the work bruises heal, the sun to carry out it's magic, and generally get the office life wrinkles ironed out. But there has to be a little culture in there alongside the beach and the sea as well. Prose and poetry.

Malta? What did I know ? Had I been there ? Thoughts? Been there and, yes, it'll probably press all the right buttons: picturesque, warm, good food, generously natured people, layers of history; in general, a place to let the imagination wander. Her kind of place in other words.

And this is where I ran into problems. Straightforward enough to emphasise that it's the ideal sanctuary cum holiday destination she needs, got no doubt on that. But harder, much harder to actually express all this in words. You should go here...pause...then here...had a great time there....pause...easy to get around...pause...people friendly, not get ripped off, and so on in that staccato style. It's something I've noticed not just me, but others falling into: the power of expression takes a swan dive right out of the window when we're trying to say what somewhere is really like.

How difficult it is to articulate the sense and effect of a physical place. It ends up coming down in my case: to gestures; 'it just is' repetitions; and salvos of go and you'll see what I mean exhortations. I might have better luck describing the the nature of the soul than this.

Still it looks like she's going to go to Malta. So something seems to have worked. Let's call it the alchemy of inarticulacy or the enchantment of the tongue-tied.

Just woken up and read that James Gandolfini died last night. This is not right. Such a fine actor. Mesmerising in the Sopranos. I'm shocked. My age too. Underlines if it ever it needs to be that every day is singularly precious.

I got a clearer view of a coastline that I've only dimly glimpsed and then only through the eyes of various conflicted characters who populate a number of Saul Bellow's novels - the unknown land being that of Wilhelm Reich. His analytic style, and particularly, the orgone accumulator he developed, mattered to Bellow for a time, cropping up in his fiction and in his real life; an article I read sometime ago had Bellow sitting in one of these wooden, metal lined boxes for hours at a time, trying to get elusive "orgone energy" before being told to run out into the woods and scream like a banshee.

Reich earlier in his career, this time in Austria, simultaneously shocked and wowed with his advocacy of something that today we take for granted because we talk about it like we do the weather - the orgasm. 

My Reichian insights owe their origins to a film I've just seen at the Austrian Cultural Forum earlier this evening. Shown in a tiny, first floor room with a disproportionately large chandelier in front of maybe thirty people. All with some interest, professional or personal, in Reich. 

The Q & A that followed was as enjoyable as the film. It felt like being in a very large Hampstead sitting room surrounded by engaging, educated, articulate Mittel Europeans, who each had some personal stake in Reich. One elderly woman, wearing a red sweater, in particular stood out: she bounced with questions, in fact it was more like a conversation she was having with the film director, which he equally enjoyed. I caught the pride in her voice when, as I expected her to do all along she said she was Viennese by birth. 

I love events like this. My intellect needs stretching every day. Evenings like this are like going to the brain gym for me.

Another four to go then it's me in front of David Sedaris. He's going to ask me what I want him to put as a dedication when he signs the new book of his I've just bought. Ask me about the weather, David, or why cats have four feet, anything but what dedication I want. I can't think of thing. Nada. Not a sausage. I'm blank, and, bizarrely, starting to feel something not unlike the tremors of a mild panic attack. C'mon Archimedes, pull it together, take a deep breath or something, he's a writer, a generous, funny, spirited man, not Torquemada...

 Sounds like the Brummies he's talking with now are having a hoot. Down specially for the reading, they're saying. That's love. Reciprocated; he's just given them some free tickets to another event he's booked in for. They're walking away in a collective swoon. 

Wonder if he thinks I'm Italian because my friend in front of me whose book he's just signing actually is. Oh, he's asked the question. I am Italian, she's saying, and now they're rapping about the UK citizenship test and a book festival near Torino. 

And it's me up, my turn, and I'm doing it already...mouth flopped open like a middle aged guppy...here we go...My name?...Archimedes. Do I speak Italian? I can, but I dare n't say so since you might be fluent in raw Tuscan or earthy Roman and ask me something or fling an Italian Bon mot at me, and I'll clam up even more.

 He's doing a doodle, I'm not that boring am I? No, not a doodle, it's a signature owl...that's different...not had that before. Most authors are scrawl and pass; scrawl something illegible then pass on to the next person. 

It's come to me! I know what I can speak to him about. Did n't he mention swimming at Kensington Leisure centre? Near enough to where I live for me to smell the chlorine and the bleach...we have a common point...finally.

This is something I never expected to see amongst the foliage of cab company stickers, flyers for gigs and missing pet posters that cover most bits of street furniture on the Goldhawk road: missing wand, sentimental value. Wand? Is there a coven in West London, or someone just a little too deep into Hogwarts and Harry Potter?

I've said it before and it's likely I'll never stop saying it or thinking it: without fiction, I'd have no sense of empathy. None at all. Well, perhaps an operating function, a sense, but nothing any deeper. Able to observe, but not able to connect. Get in there and understand, see through another's eyes, feel someone else's emotions. All of that immeasurably valuable. Humanity plus.

Since finishing "A long, long way" a few days ago, I've been wondering if any of these modestly sized turn of the century houses were handed a telegram during the first world war which spun them from one life into another. And now barely a few pages into Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" I've been gifted an insight I never expected; I can't think of describing it as anything other than 'will this be place"? Wistful hopes, if that makes sense, might be another.

The insight is this: a freshly married couple spend their early years moving from town to town as her ambitious salesman husband steps up the career ladder. She gazes at: ...each new town with hopeful eyes and think (s): this may be where I'll have my son..."

I read that and almost instantly thought of several women I know; have they felt like this, were this character's inner hopes, theirs? In the house I'm in now, did the couple who live here, imagine, mud, strewn toys, sleepovers, parties, ferrying kids to after school events? There's another woman, one who I have felt the most I've ever felt for any living person other than my parents; did she look at London and have this hope deep in her heart?

God bless fiction. Without it, I'd probably be an emotional still-born.

Holidays are a problem. The people you're with sometimes, where you go can be another, whilst my perennial is sheer reluctance to come back.  I can never over come that. No home sickness in the classically accepted view; mine is much more idiosyncratic, I'm simply sick I have to go home. That's it. No more, no less.

Half a dozen of us spent the tail end of last week in Northumberland: beautiful scenery, the most accommodating, friendly people, and a generous dollop of fine weather spread across the whole time. Blissful. And littered like a first world war battlefield with all the snares, traps, encumbrances and petty grievances of a problem holiday. A real, real pity. I think I was probably the only one not nursing some sort of injury or vexation.