Left early, took the car

14 Sep Left early, took the car

Saturday 

The title is misleading. As I start to write it’s not early and I haven’t travelled anywhere. But my mind is full of the plan for tomorrow. To set out early by car and drive to London. Feeling full of anticipation. Maybe a bit nervous. First time in more than six months. Got a sense of being slightly deviant, as if I’m about to do something that would be disapproved of by the people in my head who prevail upon me to be sensible, not misbehave.

Sunday 

We drive east from home, flying high over Hammersmith, coasting down Cromwell Road past the Natural History Museum whose multi-coloured brickwork and solid grandeur always make my jaw drop a little. Past the V&A. A little further on the Brompton Oratory, the strains of famous requiems drifting into my mind’s ear –  I sang in a choir there in a past life. Sweeping past Harrods, trying to catch the window displays that always seem to be self-consciously abstract-expressive but utterly unintelligible. Garments and footwear unsuitable for any human I know. Down the tunnel under Hyde Park Corner, eschewing a glimpse of the Wellington Arch with its flamboyant statue on top, a huge winged angel on a chariot. This used to be the view from the old St George’s Hospital when it was located here; I always imagine people might have woken up in a second-floor ward, seen that statue and imagined the operation had, after all, not gone well! Along Piccadilly, turning left to park at the edge of Berkeley Square where the nightingales had already knocked off and the trees were silent.

As were the streets of Mayfair. We start to walk. We are quiet. There seems little to say. Crossing Regent Street, we keep ahead into Carnaby Street, then around the edges of Soho with its warren of intersecting streets. Easy to lose one’s way. Few people are out this early on a Sunday morning. Down to Piccadilly Circus, where we cross easily in the sparse traffic, and walk the length of Waterloo Place. A nod to Frederick, the grand old Duke of York on his 38m-high perch enjoying a perfect view over St James’s Park. Along The Mall, past Admiralty Arch, down Northumberland Avenue to the Embankment for a stroll along the north side of the river. A shimmering white launch is moored here, the Silver Sturgeon, and I find myself fantasising for a moment about a floating London base for Scotland’s First Minister (clear COVID messaging at last?) but dismiss it as wishful thinking. We cut north from the river towards the Courts of Justice and then west again through the back streets of Covent Garden, slipping quickly through Leicester Square, back along Piccadilly pausing to genuflect at the Royal Academy and wonder, a little mournfully, when we will be able to go inside again. Back to the car. All inside two hours. A perfect duration for maintaining bladder control, I think to myself, remembering how many things there are to consider these days.

Now I’m back from the city adventure, the trip around the Monopoly-board London that is how I first encountered the city 45 years ago. I’m glad to be home. It wasn’t quite as I imagined it would be. I had expected to feel a thrill at being back in the big city, albeit on a quiet morning, back among the streets and the buildings and the energy. Seeing it at its best in warm September sunshine, summer lingering, autumn showing restraint. And it did look stunning, astride the sparkling river, the grandly old and eccentrically modern fused along its banks. But in my head it wasn’t like that. I walked these streets where I’ve lived for all those years but it was as if my feet weren’t quite touching the ground. Or that the ground wasn’t quite firm. Nor familiar. I felt cautious, like a stranger. I recognised streets, buildings, landmarks, and their relationship to one another. But their relationship to me seemed altered. I used to count them as the street scene of the city where I live but today they felt like memorials to a life that no longer exists. 

In a sense that has nothing to do with the pandemic. Even before it, my visits to the centre of London have been less frequent as the years have passed, no longer commuting, the need to go restricted to occasional trips for specific events. My life had already changed. Perhaps in yesterday’s anticipation I summoned up a sense of the city that belonged to the person I was twenty years ago or more. Or perhaps it’s London that’s changing. Deserting itself.  I didn’t quite feel like a tourist as I might have done had this been a walk around Paris or Vienna, Rome or Madrid. It was more that I didn’t feel the grip of the city, how it usually casts a strong embrace, makes you feel you’re a part, albeit infinitesimally small, of its buzzing excitement. 

Is it because I’ve withdrawn that I felt I was sliding on the surface, that my feet weren’t sinking in? Have I become doubtful about London, about being deep in an urban environment again? Is it because I held myself back from the city’s embrace, alert only to the possible threats? Cities always harbour threats. Is it partly the emptiness, the hollowness of these quiet streets with their sense of life on hold? Today I couldn’t even find the ghosts. 

It’s not all about the pandemic though that’s an easy hook on which to hang my unease. It would be good to know I could venture ‘up to town’ for a lunch on the South Bank with friends, a morning at a gallery, an evening at the theatre. It would be good to know that all these things will be available again and London will zing like London really can. But honestly, I don’t miss them as much as I miss the possibility of them. The trip made me realise, perhaps the pandemic has made me realise, how much I seem to have withdrawn from the city. Settled on the edge where, mostly, I feel safe.