Between the Imagination and the Reality

Or swapping London for the Atlantic.

I have at least a dozen Londons, collected over many months spanning decades. There I am, on the escalator of the Elizabeth Line at Tottenham Court Road’s Dean Street entrance, praying I’m in time for the last train, dinner’s agenda having overran; or there I am, goosebumped and elated fresh out the ponds on the heath; or there on Highbury Fields, last night’s wine turning my mouth to cotton wool; or there, in Greenwich Park with children lugging sticks too big to carry never mind schlep home on the bus, or in the same park still, in my father’s arms, wind in my baby soft hair. Some things exist as photograph only.

There was a time when I loved the idea of London. Then for a time I thought maybe it was best to stick with the idea only. Most loves are like that. It could remain untarnished, I would not argue over the dishwasher with it or the division of labour or the inequality of income, yes, I could love London forever that way if the distance between the idea and the reality was maintained. But as a child, I caught a wasp smack in the middle of both palms for three consecutive days, just to see if it would still sting. My mother learnt not to warn me to touch the oven, since I needed to check, just to make sure. And just to make sure, I collapsed the distance I should perhaps have maintained between the cinematic ideal and the unedited reality. London came alive to me in the edit, the scraps on the cutting room floor the parts I loved and love the most.

And I loved it and I hated it and I wanted to leave it and I never wanted to sleep for as long as I was in it, which is to say, it runs the risk of having been the greatest love of my life, until it wasn’t.

I began to think it was a trick of a city. More lights than anything else, the centre craftily lit so as to be appealing, even soho was at it, having succumbed much of its scum to the tourist machine, and the periphery, all neon chicken shops, white lit windows, strip light night buses and it was on these buses the bad artistry of it first occurred to me. These thoughts will happen at 3 in the morning, are worse at 4, reinforced at 5 when you realise the bus is mostly full of people going to work, and worse these are good people, uniformed people, people who will clean and scrub and likely tend to the sick, while you will return home, sleep for a couple of hours, before up and out on the school run, always the school run, before home to make up your silly self involved little characters while they are still at their tending, and it is easier to switch from a bus to an Uber, an Uber to a private car. This switch perhaps indicating a certain dereliction of duty, a deciding not to see, not to think of the city as it is, but to keep it was I wanted it to be. The end of love really.

I left it.

I still go back, breathe lungfuls of soho, see the dirt in the air on the northern line in ways I didn’t used to, my snot black for days after, in these times there are dinners, swims, friends, they are good times and there are not night buses. Perhaps the whole problem was simply the night bus. Or the time I took it at. Or perhaps the city was a trick, or turning tricks, a distraction of lights. Or more likely, it was me. What kind of cynic finds chicken shops depressing?

It is more likely, I was hoping to distract myself from myself. Not the fault of the bus. Or the chicken. Or the cyclists jumping red lights, although. Distraction is easier done in the city. I know because I’ve been at it for a long time. I moved to a farm once. Lured I used to say, by Instagram, by all the mothers with the kids with their bowl cut hair and their home grown food and their ruddy healthy cheeks, the wholesomeness of it all, a cult of sorts. I was susceptible to them then, and I like the past tense here. I want to believe it was these images, these imaginings that lured me, and not the idea that I was trying to outrun myself, or that I want to head straight to paradise, having been expelled from my previous one. But the isolation of the deep countryside, coupled with the bone deep exhaustion of two babies in 17 months and all the physicality that entailed, meant all that happened was I ran up against myself, and did not like what I found. I swamped it for the chicken shops, the night bus, the crowded dancefloors, anywhere but me. It’s an old story. We’ve all done it. We’re all at it. But try and think you can swap one life for another and you’re lying; there’s just life, and you’re the constant through it; but what I wanted, there in the dark of the Scottish countryside, finding only desolation in the night sky, stars that clear have been dead for years etc, to be back among my own kind, for a time I worried I couldn’t hold a conversation with other adults and for a time it was true, and it doesn’t matter if London was a trick, in it, I felt as real as I’d ever felt.

Until I stand in the Atlantic facing the waves. Soon, they will break on the shore behind me before forming again, to travel back across the ocean, breaking on the east coast of the USA. Impossible to stand like this and not think of my father, his holiday home on Myrtle Beach, or the time we went to Charleston, or of his father, a child on the Cape, where the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean meet, and of his brother who took himself into that warm ocean one last fatal time; their family having arrived like migratory birds two years before and me as a child, watching the swallows gather on telephone lines at the tail end of every summer, planning their return to a home I’ve never seen, and his father’s father, trading London for a new continent; which one did he believe to be a trick, I do not have time to wonder as the waves come towards me, in the water there is no time to think, your body becomes action only, no suspicions of tricks being played or time being up, just muscles taught and unused for many years finding their own strength, and I am on the board, joining the wave in its final moments as it breaks on the shore.

(I haven’t written here in months. Or maybe I should say I haven’t hit publish in months. My drafts folder is full. I am tired and worn out by the discourse. Most people are. There is so much to say, and so many people are saying it. But there is a fine line between having something to say, and needing to say it. Maybe we’re all in too much of a rush to be heard. Or seen. Maybe this haste means we’re less able to see. Or hear. There are many people worth reading who’re more versed politically, historically and geo-politically than I am, if I add to the noise, I take away from that, contributing only to the cacophony. This action of writing or posting to be heard or seen to align with a side, can be short sighted, with far reaching consequences. I have many thoughts on social media and what it’s doing to us, what it’s robbed us of and its very real and sobering effects. In 20 years time, perhaps we will come to see it as as dangerous as smoking. I hope so. But that’s another story. This is a long way of saying I’ve deliberated long and hard over what I want to say or not say here, and I like Substack as a way of sketching out what I’m feeling each day and that’s what I’m doing with it. Plus it seems a bit less noisy just now, which is how I like it.)