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?