Dean Street, 13.06

If we make it through December.

Stop. Take a photo of The French House. Send it to a friend, got time for a small one. I joke, knowing everyone nearly is home for Christmas. My last time in town before the new year. Walking with my headphones on, a low rent Morvern Callar.

This friend and I often joke we’ll write a memoir late in life. We will both be very old. Everyone else will be dead. The memoir will be called, Now You’re All Dead. I realise two things, if this fictive manuscript were to be published, I’d get sued, and two, most of it would be set here, in Soho.

I want to say I’m not sure what that says about me when really I know exactly what it says about me. Just gone noon and it’s almost dark. Christmas lights on. Carnaby Street was planets and clouds when I walked down it. A giant polar bear outside a hideous spin off of The Ivy. Things to keep tourists entertained. What I like here are the hidden parts, the parts of the city that reveal themselves the wrong side of midnight, which is always the right side. The clubs you only get into by whispering the right word on the door, or an approximation of it, because specifics become taxing around 1 am.

I am saying goodbye to the year, I should be hurrying although I am not. I walk along Old Compton Street, recall a summer evening on a roof terrace, sending an emergency message to a friend asking them to buy a bottle opener, the wine, not screw top; up Greek Street, past a doorway, shiver, someone walking over my grave, know there’s a carpet inside so thick with decades of sweat your feet sink into it as you descend into what must be the seventh circle of hell, the feeling of regret already engulfing you as you order at the bar. Some nights are best unremembered. This street, that street, this place, that place, so many iterations of myself. Breakfast meetings, production meetings, blinking in the bright sunlight the morning after, on the prowl for food after remembering dinner was forgotten, again, large bottles of cider and Ubers never picking up lifts, cocktails and oysters when you’re all vaguely heartbroken or maybe just hangover weepy, rice pudding in the Academy club better than you’ll find anywhere else, backrooms where manuscripts come to life, coffees to plan other projects, day meetings turning to night time drinks; this is a place that knows, that’s seen it all and heard it all before. The blood and guts and filth of the city. Not so much now. But still, sometimes, just enough. The fury of living. The relentless necessity of forwards motion. Everything happens here because anything can happen here. A sense of the essentiality of the veneer. The polish concealing and revealing what’s under. Under, only blood and pulse. Only flesh. Only the filth of the dirt under our nails. I like it here. I like how honest its dishonesty makes it.

I would like to sit in The French House, plan this clandestine will never happen memoir but I have a meeting to go to, a year to say goodbye to.