Do you believe in God?

A cathedral//a cab ride//a poetry reading

At Old Street, I can’t ever get my bearings. Last time I was there was just before Christmas, the night looking like it was about to become one of the sort I’d recently sworn off. I leave the station at the wrong exit, immediately have no idea where I am or how it relates to where I’m trying to go. I’m out of data. My phone map’s no use. Recall trying to explain the AtoZ to a European late last year. The thought of paper maps, grid references, jumping pages to get to the right street, suddenly incongruous. I love a good map. Real things. Tangible things. Live too long with a screen and you forget the handle of everything.

Try to figure out where I’m going from the bus stops, but they don’t help. The only thing that will save me now is a cab. I spent much of my 20s hailing cabs, an aversion to buses, or more accurately, a fear of never knowing where they stopped. Better then to learn to stand in the middle of the road and look assertive. It’s not the same with an Uber. You’re at their mercy. It was the 2am Ubers that made me want to leave London. Standing there with them cancelling one after the other after the other after the other. I just wanted home and they didn’t want to take me and after a certain point you have no night buses left in you. No cabs though this evening, until two, on the other side of the road. Briefly consider giving myself up to the traffic. I am trying to do two things in the one night. I am always trying to do too many things in the one night. One of the cabs rounds the corner and I try to chase after it but the lights are wrong and the road’s busy and although dying could be an awfully big adventure, it’s not one I feel like trying tonight.

The lights finally change, there’s a garage across the road and parked up in it, a taxi. Its light’s off but I know the way with taxis. I have been at this a long time. I walk up, rap on the window. The driver doesn’t bother to look up. Shakes his head. I rap again. He looks up. I ask if he’s for hire, he breathes in to say no and then he looks at me. I wearing a dress that’s likely too short if judgement’s your specific kink. Last year, a round of parties and this was the dress I wore. It’s looser on me now. I’ve been running around, forgetting to eat, all my usual tricks, but it’s good because it’s longer than it was, which is no bad thing with this taxi driver deciding that yes he is indeed for hire. I get in. He tells me if I’d been an ugly old man he’d not have taken me, but you, a nice you thing, he says. The light’s bad, I worry about his eyesight. He does a U-turn right in the middle of the wide road. Death might still be coming.

His accent’s the type of cockney you rarely hear outside a TV. Asks me where my accent’s from. Deep in east in London, I’m the outsider to him. I tell him Scotland but caveat it with my dad’s South African, as if that’s going to explain why I never sound Scottish enough. Ah Glasgow, he says, because Glasgow in the only place in Scotland. He tells me how he was afraid to visit, because of the crime and I try very very hard not to laugh. It doesn’t work. I start to laugh audibly. He swings us around a corner. Didn’t know what anyone was saying to me, he says, but it didn’t matter. And then he tells me about a bar on Hope Street, which makes me think he wasn’t all that concerned for his safety, and how he taught the Scots to drink whisky, because we need help with that, something about warming a glass before you put it in and then he tells me never to mix single malt with coke and ice and I tell him I am not a heathen and then suddenly he’s talking about Anfield and South Africa and I am so lost, but it’s fine because he’s quickly back onto how he’d love to go to the Highlands and he’s heard there aren’t that many people there for all that space, which I confirm is true and then he somehow expects me to find the right number of the street we’re on, although he’s the one with the sat nav and I am tipping him and he’s good, this driver, both of us having got exactly what we want from each other.

Half an hour later and I’m on the bus and I know I’m on the wrong one because I’m never on the right one. It takes ages to get to Liverpool Street and the Northern Line has its silly minor delays which are not minor, and I’m late at Southwark Cathedral. The invite says 7, and I decide that means 7 for 7.30 without checking but when I arrive, that deathly silence of the hallowed space interrupted by the click clack of my stupid boots. I tiptoe. I am in the house of God and I am late.

God has many houses and I have known many of them but I have not known one like this. It stretches to heaven, a testament to the folly and power of belief. The houses of God I used to know where thrown up quickly over the course of a weekend, quick builds they called them, as if that was enough for God. We didn’t think maybe it was a real estate scam, something to flip quickly in a few years. We didn’t think. That’s what a cult does to you. That’s how they get you where they want you. Don’t think.

On the stage and deep in conversation already, the poet Padraig O Tuama. I’m there for the launch of his book, Kitchen Hymns, which is a book questing towards ideas of God and belief, many of the poems titled Do You Believe in God. I’ve been having a lot of conversations about belief recently. Maybe it’s the strangeness of the times, maybe it’s the personal things I’ve been trying to reconcile over the last 18 months or so, maybe it’s just the age we are, and this collection seems to encapsulate a lot of it. I like the not knowing. I like the search more than the answers. I like listening to Padraig speak, he has something of the man of faith about him, and I don’t mean this in either a derogatory way or a denominative way either - just that he is a man who knows how to believe. After you lose your faith, you enter this type of a vacuum, where belief feels impossible. And I don’t mean belief in God, I mean belief in anything. It is a dangerous place to stay. It is somewhere you have to go through but equally must emerge from, otherwise you will spend a life believing in nothing at all, and you cannot survive without belief. Even if it’s only in the next day. The epigraph to The Last Days is from Post Office, in the morning it was morning and I was still alive. For a long time, the only thing I could believe in was the morning, but the fact of morning kept me alive.

He’s talking and I’m taking phone notes and then somehow I manage to press Siri and thankfully the volume’s low but I hear Siri say, would you like to call Moon Zappa, which is incongruous in this space, and I think no one hears but the acoustics are unpredictable. I shove my phone in my bag, deep to the bottom.

Padraig has faith in the thing I find it the most difficult to be faithful to or to keep faith in: art. A made thing, he says, is always naïve because it is new but it is making that might save us. I think about this the following day when I’m struggling with the naivety of my manuscript - this thought that it is how it’s meant to be, helps. Sometimes, you just need to sit in a building made many years ago by many hands, and listen in the attentive sense, where you attend to each carefully weighted and chosen word, because my job is to give attention to language and to use it properly. I worry about the erosion of language, the corruption of meaning, how we substitute one word for another in the belief that synonyms exist, as if every word doesn’t have its own specific weight and history, as if it is not our job to find the correct word and not rely on easy switches, as if one thing is ever really like another thing.

We drink wine in the crypt after. Maybe one of the stranger places I’ve been to a drinks reception. He signs my copy of the book, writes in praise of the kitchens we have lived in, which is apt since I do much of my living in the kitchen, and always end up there at parties. I sit now thinking of the rest of what he said, one of my favourites, and doubts and love dig up the world. It is not enough to be loved, you need to be doubted too. How terrible, he said, it must be to be a world leader, a despot, and to be so unloved that no one will challenge you. I can’t stop thinking of that either.