London Lives

Saturday was frustrating. It didn’t start out being frustrating. After listening to Saturday Live I managed to have a lovely bath and breakfast and be out of the door by 10.45. Early indeed.

The problem is the transport at weekends. Victoria line completely closed. Circle, Metropolitan, Hammersmith and City closed at random points. All these connecting arteries not really connecting. I hope the Olympics will be worth it.

And then the buses were diverted around the Square Mile because of the Lord Mayor’s Show. So, a combination of tradition and modernity conspired to snarl up a simple journey to the library to write.

When I got to the library to write, a power cut had snarled up the computers.

So, writing today was not to be and I was feeling philosophical about it by this stage. I chatted with an officer from the City of London police and established that yes, the buses were still diverted and what a bloody nuisance it all was. At 1.30 I gave up the ghost to go home.

There was relative sanity on the Piccadilly line.  Opposite sat a beautiful man asleep with his book open. And above him, part of the Poems on the Underground series, was this newly-discovered gem by Katharine Towers entitled The Way We Go:

the way we go about our lives
trying out each empty room
like houses we might own
eavesdropping for clues in corridors until

standing at a gate or attic window
seeing beauty in a flag of sky
we’re gone, leaving the doors open
all the lights burning

(copyright Katharine Towers)

Simple and beautiful.

on the Number 13 bus…

I’ve managed to start my Christmas shopping in November, which is impeccably organised for me. After mooching in bookshops in Fulham, I headed to Shepherd’s Bush and the delights of Westfield. I bought some things for my parents, and cards to thank friends for the lovely weekend. I also tried on some coats, including a lovely Betty Jackson one.

I caught the bus from the shopping centre. The top deck was packed with schoolchildren on their way home, which was a revelation. I’ve got a week’s annual leave (brilliant!) but it’s amazing how quickly one forgets that others are still going about their usual routine. The growing darkness outside made me assume that everyone was home from school. Of course they’re not, and they’re standing in the stairwell of the bus where they shouldn’t be, and shouting across the top deck and eating smelly chips and texting their mates. And the feisty girls are shouting back at the boys on the seats behind. Way to go. Noisy, alive and fearless. And not full of the harm that we like to imagine.

The bus across this area is the way to go. On the Hammersmith and City Line of the Tube, you just get flat slabs of warehouse West London land across Royal Oak and Latimer Road stations. The bus always reveals more.

I really must make a decision on the winter coat, though. The weather really is decidedly nippy now.

The day dawned in an unpromising fashion then the weather became unexpectedly lovely as it went on. At about 10am, I spotted a fox asleep on the wall of next-door’s garden. He was well camouflaged and snoozing peacefully. I’ve spotted him in the undergrowth at the end of the row of gardens and also sleeping in our own garden. The slinky tabby cat from next door-but-one sometimes sits on the same wall, peering intently into the undergrowth. Now I know what he’s looking for.

I went to Chiswick today. It’s a fairly long ride out west, but the weather was lovely: a beautiful autumn day with a gorgeous sky and shimmery sparkles glinting from anything shiny at street level. The bus noodled gradually, heading out along Marylebone Road. I could write oodles on this blog about Marylebone, but that will come.  There was a wedding taking place at the old Marylebone Town Hall. Always lovely to see happy people and beautiful coloured clothes spilling out onto the pavements as you slide by on the bus. There’s a sense of sharing that snippet as you pass by.

Sweeping across Edgware Road, the bus went on to Paddington and Notting Hill.  There is a road just past Notting Hill Gate called ‘Palace Gardens Terrace’ which I think is a wonderful road name. Palace Gardens Terrace. Lovely.

On Chiswick High Road,  the park at Turnham Green was bright and green and clipped, the church at its centre looking solid and wonderful. Cyclists swooned past, giving off gentle smells of fabric conditioner. I was looking for a shop called Dada, which sells books, CDs and DVDs. Last time I was here, I picked up a CD of Nat King Cole (like having velvet gently fed into your ears) and DVDs about Joe Strummer and the Old Grey Whistle Test. This time I picked up a Julie London CD and a DVD of Leonard Rossiter which I’m planning to give to my father for his birthday. He’ll love it. I think I’ll get him a Hairy Bikers cookbook as well.

When I was a child and living in the Midlands, my parents used to bring us to London to visit various relatives and friends. We came to Chiswick on those visits, to see a friend and former neighbour of my parents. She had a fabulous three-storey house and her husband had a bedroom on the middle floor (they were a couple that had separated but never divorced). Their children had other bedrooms on the various floors. One of the things that intrigued me about this house as a child was that the bathroom was on a ‘middle’ floor. You climbed two flights of stairs to get from the ground to the first floor and this bathroom was reached on a level between the first and second flights. Big chequerboard tiles and you had to stand on tiptoes to reach the long handle to the pull-flush, with the cistern high up near the ceiling.

I remember us visiting in October 1981 and we had an ‘early’ Christmas dinner, because we wouldn’t see them at Christmas. The IRA had left a bomb in a Wimpy bar in Oxford Street and it killed the bomb disposal expert. It was all over the news. I remember it on the TV just before it was switched off as we ate our dinner.

Some years later (1993, I reckon, the year after I’d moved to London), my mother and I travelled to see her friend and we spent a lovely afternoon in her garden, eating food and chatting over old things. Her husband had passed on, and she has since. At some point, I will walk back along that street in Chiswick and look up at the house where my parents’ friend lived and at the neighbouring house where my parents lived as younger people.

At Writing Group on Wednesday, we discussed coincidences, the morality of lying and favourite Beatles’ tracks. We will be writing a character sketch for next time, which I am looking forward to doing. It’s meant to describe someone in terms of events and their reactions to those around them, rather than saying “He was tall with dark eyes,” etc.

Tonight, I headed home on the Tube after a mammoth busy week at work. Quite gloriously, the song on my iPod as I stepped onto the train was Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express. Hoorah! I love it when it works out like that. It would be great to ascend the escalator at Angel station (the longest escalator in the Tube system) to the sound of the Stone Roses’ I am the Resurrection.

And as I walked home from my Tube station to home, I was treated to the full eight-minute version of Ride’s Leave Them All Behind. An appropriate end to the working week.

The nights are drawing in, the leaves are falling, warming food is calling.

At Euston Station, a woman was singing an operatic version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ on the main concourse. There were people with collecting buckets. It was unexpected and oddly beautiful. An emotive song, it seemed poignant for it to be sung in Euston, when so many of its trains head to Liverpool.

The tube was hot and packed, unusual for a Friday evening. People are usually stopping at pubs and restaurants to meet friends, giving the Friday journey home more of a loose and staggered feel. Not tonight, though.

At King’s Cross, a very tall woman (easily 6′ 2″, possibly more) got on. She wore a long thick plait and had an intense look. I remembered that she was behind me in the queue in Waitrose yesterday. I am still, after a number of years of living in London now, intrigued when I see regular ‘faces’ on the Tube, particularly if they have popped up in a different context before.

Okay, I am now busily eating some more kedgeree, which I’ve just made. There are mounds left to eat over the weekend. There is a loaf baking in the oven. My attic kitchen may be small, but I am producing good things in it.

London’s latest micro-pet seems to be the Dachshund, and is often to be found in the company of a youngish man. We saw an example at Waterloo on Monday and I have seen smart male couples with two or three in tow. I suppose they must be a fairly hassle-free dog for a city-dweller to own (I assume they don’t need to be walked for hours each day…)

They are a different micro-pet owner from those who own Chihuahuas, who tend to be young giggly women of the Paris Hilton type. The few exceptions to this I have seen on the bus and Tube (where else would any self-respecting owner show off their Chihuahuas? Have dog – will travel). These have been young men who look like Joe Orton, carrying their small decorated charges with amusement but without fuss.

This blog should probably be called “Mogs on Pavements”, as I found another example on the way home this evening. This is a familiar one, all patchy colours, that leaps onto the wall outside his house, demanding to be stroked.

It is a lovely balmy evening, even now, and September upon us tomorrow. The time just slipped by this afternoon in Westfield. Shepherd’s Bush has come up in the world. It still has the tower blocks on its Green; I rather like them and they remind me of the ones on Edgware Road. The tube has been expanded and the rail and Overground stations nearby give a wide and expansive feel to the area. This is before you even set foot into Westfield. We had good Italian food (seafood en papillotte) and nice wine and natter. Spent hours mooching in the big cool centre, then picked up food for tomorrow.

The Central line was packed with people coming back from the Carnival, a hot fug of people holding on and grabbing seats where they could. The Piccadilly was an oasis of calm by comparison.