Diary of an Enthusiast

Snow

2010-12-02T03:28:00.001-08:00

It's the quiet that alerts you, as you wake in the middle of the night. On everyday nights the road outside is never completely silent, no matter what time you wake. But there is an eerie hush as you lie, listening to the muffled air as no cars pass.

The sliver of light on the ceiling is more luminous, paler, hinting at the sudden change. Sliding out of warm sheets, feet feel around on the chilly carpet for slippers. Even the cold has a muffled edge this night.

The dining room window uncurtained reveals a glowing snow scene in the garden. The tiled floor radiates ice up through the soles of your feet, racing through the veins in your legs, placing you out in the whitened grass as you stare, entranced. The first snow of Winter always returns you to a childhood self, mouth watering at the prospect of a familiar world made strange. Adventures call through the glass, the darkness of night no longer frightening, lit up with white crystal illuminations.

Back in bed, you can't sleep, smiling. A cautious car slushes past the window slowly. Solitary explorer in the becalmed forest of a snow-bound city night.

The ghost of David Kelly

2010-08-17T10:28:00.000-07:00

The sad, harmless, bearded face of David Kelly has been staring out of news reports again. Our national obsession with the death of this man follows us around, a lonely spectre dogging our social memory. I'm almost amazed that so many busy professionals and experts have taken up his hopeless case once more - reminding us of the sad, ambiguous story of his death which no amount of spin or apathy could neutralise into background noise.

It reminds me of a question posed by my English teacher when we studied Hamlet at 'A'level. The ghost of Hamlet's father follows him around, like a guilty conscience. Our teacher asked us whether we thought the ghost was real, or just a manifestation of Hamlet's tortured psyche. I didn't know the answer, but it feels as though David Kelly's ghost still haunts us for our collective weakness and reluctance to question the terrible, transparent story we were spun.

We killed him one way or another. Taunted, vilified and scape-goated by Downing Street bullies through the very media who exposed him to their gaze. And we, bystanders, hapless members of the public. We watched on like children in a playground. Now those scenes replay themselves in our collective mind, grown older but perhaps no wiser in the intervening years.

"Do not forget. This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose...."

Empty

2010-08-17T00:31:00.000-07:00

The city groans with unexpected lightness in the Summer months. Streets are quieter than usual and the parks empty of joggers in the morning, picnicking families in the afternoon. An unfamiliar population takes over, with matching backpacks and guides with clipboards flapping at their sides as their ranks pass by.

Trying to sell plants for charity in the park is a thankless task in the hot sun or drizzling rain. In an hour maybe six people pass by - tourists with no space for rosemary or mint in their picnic bags; grey, haunted faces walking alone, bereft of the crowds in which they would usually be lost; stressed parents, feeling the strain of the school holidays as their children crash into them on recumbent bicycles.

Who would have thought this season would be such a barren time? The city's population so unfamiliar, daily routines indiscernible in the chaos of lost feet on the pavement. Unnoticed by its inhabitants on beaches and in villas far away, Autumn's rustling steps can be heard in the distance. The brown edges of the trees, once signifying parched heat, grow slowly towards the centre. In the breaks in hot sunshine, the wind has a chilly edge. Neglected in this August month, I worry that the city will appear strangely changed to its returning inhabitants. But no, after a few short days surely,all will return to those instinctive rhythms that inspire the tunes of my writing?

Sun kissed

2010-07-27T14:35:00.001-07:00

Later, waiting for the bus to take me home, I noticed a splash of brightness in the shadowed street. The golden dancer on top of the Victoria Apollo Theatre was lit up as if by a spotlight, centre stage. Black-winged birds circled around it, as if trying to draw the attention of heedless commuters and confused tourists to an unexpected moment of beauty in the city. It definitely worked for me.

Mirage

2010-07-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

At a boring work event near Victoria I saw this beautiful image. Well it's not this image I first saw, it was the tiled floor so beautifully glossy it looked like a swimming pool. I wanted to open the glass windows separating us and dive straight in. Then I realised there was no water there, and the reflection emerged to replace the mirage. Like a gift presented only to those with the patience to look and notice.

Insomnia

2010-07-21T00:32:00.000-07:00

Irritated, I cede to the persistent tug of night time humidity. Conserved heat from the day mixes with that radiating from my fitfully sleeping body reeling me back from my rest - too soon! Weary, weary feet touch the too warm carpet and flinch.

It's dark outside, but never really black. The streetlights are a sickly sulphur cloud in the sky. Opening the fridge provides some relief from the heat, but the flourescent light scars my retina, leaving glow worms in front of my eyes. An ice cube, sucked miserably, creates a small halo of cool in the back of my mouth, but never reaches the spaces between my toes.

Back to bed, the sheets feel like hot sand on the beach.

It breaks

2010-07-14T14:33:00.000-07:00

Finally the relentless heat of the city is turned down, if only for a short while. Wilted window boxes momentarily recover. Drops fall heavily from above, making extravagant splashes on beer tables and window screens. The summer rain, somehow wetter than in other seasons (as if making up for the parching sun), wrings every drop of moisture from the atmosphere.

Pavements sizzle like hot frying pans under the cold tap. The smell of wet tarmac, blistered paint from windows and doors, of plants released and something muskier and even more primeval, is inhaled in deeply. Where before breaths were short and shallow, conserving energy, voices stifled by the billowing heatwave; now carefree voices carry over the water, like crowds of day trippers in rowing boats.

The break works it's short lived magic. Life is but a dream.

The urban play

2010-07-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

Living in the city, everything is on show and we know it. The car you drive, the clothes you wear, even the book you're reading on your daily commute, are all likely to be scrutinised, noted and catalogued in the semi-conscious of the fellow crowd member. It's a strange incongruity that in a place so often lonely and alienating from fellow man, we are all participants in a pageant whose meaning can be understood but rarely articulated.

The couple having a loud argument in the street know they're watched, the woman's tears perhaps more extravagant because of it. The man on the bus talking loudly about the expensive holiday he's just come back from is well aware that everyone else can hear what he's saying. Street conversations are not overheard, they are broadcast to the passer by.

Even more curious is the habit, particularly marked in the wealthy houses of Chelsea, of opening the front bay window of an expensive house to the walker's view, seemingly insouciant of the danger that burglars will spot an expensive painting or piece of silverware. We are invited to look (not too long) and admire these empty stage-sets, to imagine their occupants, perhaps even glimpse a shaded hand or head in the dim interior. Perhaps people are truly unaware that they may be watched, their houses viewed as part of a slide show of bay windows and fan-lit black front doors, or perhaps they affect to be so. Perhaps they wish to show off their wealth and elegance to the world, as working class houses so carefully hide themselves behind net curtains and thick brocade. Or perhaps it's a truly magnanimous desire to share a moment of personal domesticity with the journeyer through this impersonal city.

The performance becomes more complex, however, when you notice the camera of their expensive security system in the doorway, following your movements. With the advent of CCTV we've all become unconsenting extras in an ever-rolling film of city life, which is only revealed in its strange unreality when a terrible crime is committed and blurry figures are shown on TV walking by, never noticing the camera, never noticing the crime which, it turns out, is the true plot of the play.

Between dreams and reality

2010-06-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

There's a space in my day which is full of possibilities. It comes in the minutes between sleeping and properly waking, when my dreams fill the room and distort my real life like fairground mirrors.

Einstein is teaching me to play the penny whistle on the top of a scaffold. I'm baking not-gingerbread cookies for a not-Christmas fair which is really a car boot sale that will make my fortune. A good friend is secretly getting married in a wooden house in Bavaria.

These all seem completely plausible versions of reality as I lie, half aware that they are fading into nothing. But they leave an open space where they once were, of dreams as yet undreamt and unimagined possibilities that somehow now seem entirely possible too.

Dog days

2010-06-30T15:01:00.000-07:00

After only a week, the heat is beginning to take its toll on the Londoners - famed for their tolerance of everything except the constant vagaries of the English weather.

The itinerant drunks who pepper the high street near my house look more jaded than usual, listlessly nursing extra large cans in paper bags on sun streaked benches. The seemingly hundreds of construction workers supposedly engaged in essential works on erupting pavements and roads laze together in groups of bare arms and high visibility jackets. They idly watch the guts of the city spew out of the holes they have made, perfecting their tans and trying their luck as young women in impossibly short skirts saunter by.

Taxis drive more slowly and traffic piles up on the escape roads from the baking city. Petrol fumed air filling the nostrils of tired mothers pushing limp children in buggies that have gained twenty kilos in the heat.

In the corner shop an old Irish lady, in for her twenty cigarettes and scratch card, laments the weather to the man serving her.
"It's lovely but it's too much", she says, shaking her head.
"It's alright if you're not doing anything" He agrees.
"It's alright if you're at the seaside. That's where I'm going come Thursday, thank goodness"
"Oh, there's rain coming Thursday."
"Oh well that's just typical isn't it. I'll have another scratch card, see if I can't win myself a place in the sun."

Between sleeping and waking

2010-06-21T00:32:00.000-07:00

A thought I took from my dreams this morning:

Asleep, his breathing is the sound of brushes sweeping snow.

Castles in the sky

2010-06-21T00:25:00.001-07:00

The scaffolding has reached the highest point of the bridge and workers walk along its many levels, like characters in an Escher drawing. I am reminded of old engravings of London Bridge before the fire, a city suspended above the water with houses, shops and workshops all piled on top of each other.

The imaginative possibilities of this temporary, towering structure are not lost to the construction workers either, who have fixed flags to the top of each turret. They seem proud as clever children as they look up at the England flag waving our team on in the World Cup. A gesture to put all the car pennants in the city in the shade.

Vauxhall bus station

2010-06-15T13:57:00.001-07:00

A summer's morning. The scent of apricots and gardenias from women wafting by gives the illusion of Mediterranean warmth in the hot diesel fumed air. Pale light glances off brushed metal surfaces and shimmers on the station roof, a brief shoal of mackerel in a blue Mediterranean sea. And then the moment ends. Descending into the damp atmosphere of the undergound station you are back in Britain, a dull urban cityscape with a chill underneath the sun.

On the road

2010-06-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

A stationary position with one foot on the accelerator seems like a modern meditation. But you're moving, vibrations on the steering wheel tell you so. Moving faster than you can really imagine - just a blurred drone if you saw yourself from the side of the road.

Watching the scenery close in and recede past the windscreen is a strangely calming experience. In the early summer all is lush, fresh and idyllic. Nothing is seen in close up, and from a distance no imperfections of daily life are visible.

Stopped, for a moment to pick up a punnet of strawberries in a layby on the road. The woman's arms are brown and ample, her fingernails brown also. Gorging on fruit with one hand not looking as you pop each gritty haired, knobbly ball into your mouth, the smell of childhood briefly fills the warm, plastic air.

Each journey on a well-travelled route is an echo of a previous trip, another motivation, summers long past but still alive in the picture book of your mind.The space in between leaving and arriving is filled with memories and future imaginings, place names pass quicker than time, a single stretched out moment on the road.

The school run

2010-06-11T07:08:00.000-07:00

Walking down the nearly trafficless road to the bridge, school children cross into my path, like flocks of brightly coloured birds.

A mother hen nervously shepherds her four green and yellow charges, wobbling and racing on bicycles down the road. Her red skirt too long and tight for cycling really. The job is not made easier by having two toddlers under her own wing, one before and the other aft on her sensible bike. She shouts fruitlessly as the ducklings chatter along ahead.

Next: a navy uniform, with long bright red legs, like a wading bird. Heard before being seen, her huge backpack is adorned with dozens of ornaments and soft toys on chains that ring and jangle as she runs.

A brother and sister kick a hazelnut down the pavement, scuffing their school shoes. Their father walks ahead, ignoring the time wasting antics, is surprised as they rush him all at once, grabbing his arms and swinging them.

Finally, just before the bridge, the regular sight of a tandem bike, the back seat lower than the front. Parent and child in perfect, silent synergy with crash hats and high visibility jackets.

Sunset over water

2010-06-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

The photograph can't capture it, I don't know why I put it up there really, except as a kind of visual signifier of what I mean. It's something you almost need to paint to truly experience again, once the moment has passed. But a still painting would miss the fact that a sunset isn't a snapshot, it's a movie, a rolling film of colour, expanding and contracting, intensifying and softening over the screen of the sky.

This one was a huge angora blanket. The clouds were the texture of raw lambswool that we plucked from the grass a few hours before. The redness was like the glistening heart of a pomegranate, leaking rich juices over fingers and sleeves, bleeding into the water below. Not the pale imitation from the camera, too sensitive to light, not able to relax its retina in the face of such glorious colour.

The grenadine blanket stretched over the sky, dripped a colour even more intense into the lake, and filled everything, - not just the eyes, but the mind, the mouth, the stomach. A rich meal, satisfying, but always consumed with a tugging fear, the aching knowledge that too soon it would be finished.

The colour finally faded, like a fruit ice sucked out, leaving behind an astringent sweetness and a chill on the arms.

A Lakeland post

2010-06-08T00:21:00.000-07:00

They're an odd couple in the Landrover - bickering over everything in low, gruff voices. A father and son up on the fells moving sheep.
"Keep the gate open then!"
"It is open!"
"Hep, hep. Get out you lazy sods. They usually run."
"I know"
"What's wrong with them?"
Silence. The older man has clearly had enough of idle conversation. He stares out into the distance, where the mountains' outlines are grey and hazy even in this bright sunshine.

The Lakeland Fells feel like the back garden of these old guys - dressed in thick cotton trousers, collared shirts and caps, each clutching their own wooden walking stick. They roam the lower hills, imparting their wisdom to eager walkers, or conspicuously ignoring the steady traffic of holiday makers.

It's not really a wild landscape, parts of it could be mistaken for the work of Capability Brown, except that they were probably his inspiration. Perfect lakes, fringed with oak and beech trees and surrounded by mountains on all sides. At the edge of Grasmere lake two hills meet with a road running through, like the childhood landscapes I used to draw, only missing the sun peeking over the top.

Perhaps the best thing, and maybe what attracts the aged farmers to the fell walks again and again, is the feeling of sitting on top of the world, watching the toy sized trees and houses below. If only those damn sheep would run, you'd be master of all you survey.

Long shadows

2010-06-07T00:32:00.001-07:00

In the early Summer the sun shines hotly and bright, even while most people are still in bed and asleep. Giant shadows of trees and buildings stalk the ground, more reminiscent of the evening light, but with a pure washed colour that only appears at the beginning of the day.

Signs of madness

2010-06-07T00:11:00.000-07:00

It's hard sometimes to distinguish between the mad and the sane in a city environment. There is the man who sings loudly to himself as he walks down the street at six in the morning. If you're lucky enough to be awake at that time of day, you can hear the tunelsss no-word song echoing down the empty morning street.

Then there are the unkempt, seemingly unloved and defiant figures who wave, gesture and shout on corners and in doorways. A small twinge of, what? Guilt, pity or fear for one's own mind - is quickly overtaken by the preservation instinct that tells you to move away, but not so obviously that you draw attention to yourself. The currents and eddies of movement on a city street will often tell you where these unfortunates lie.

But there are some more difficult cases. Take, for example, the people who stand in the park and shout in the air, barking officiously at nothing in particular:

"Arthur, Arthur. No, Arthur no. No, no NO!!!"
"Berkeley... Berkeley..."
"OUT!"

I swerved in an unconscious reaction to one of these frenzied screams on my run this morning, only to realise that it was just another dog owner, trying to retrieve their pet from a rhododendron bush, the corpse of a bird or something even less appealing.

It made me think that if only the crazy people had a mobile phone, pet or child to shout at, they wouldn't seem mad at all. And if the dogs in the park all disappeared, it would just be full of sad, angry, mad people shouting at the air.

Miss Havisham's Ghost

2010-05-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

When running in the park, I recently noticed a strange tree, half hidden on a minor path. It may have once been a hollyoak or maybe a very large lavatera, but it was almost unrecognisable as such. The bark and leaves were dry and dessicated, the colour of cold ashes in the grate. As if a terrible fire had spontaneously immolated this tree and this alone. A burning bush perhaps.

The swinging branches, skeletons of leaves still clinging, were laced with what looked like thick white cobwebs. I imagined a huge green-eyed spider coming out in the night to spin the dead tree's shroud. The tree wore its clinging apparel, fans, feathers and swathes of white, with a macabre majesty. Preserved in the act of dying it seemed to glory in its deathly glow, while all around signs of Spring burgeoned in leaf and bud. A thing apart from the normal cycle of birth, death and recomposition.

I named the tree Miss Havisham, and planned to take a photograph of her this morning for the blog. But when I reached the spot, something was wrong. Miss Havisham had disappeared. All that was left was an empty space in the border, a flattened patch of ground, and a few ash-white leaves strewn on the path, like dessicated butterflies.

Life outside the window

2010-05-24T14:20:00.000-07:00

Sitting in a conference room, confined to an all day meeting on something I know little about and care even less, I stare at the patch of blue outside the window. To make matters worse, the air conditioning is on full blast and I have goose pimples, even though the bricks across the road are baking in the first really hot midday sun this year. Like a child who cannot leave the classroom, I stare wistfully now at the clock, now at the sky, praying for my release.

It's the thinnest of bonds that keeps me there - tying me in to duty and obedience. I feel that one slight tug with my shoulder to the left would free me, to get up, walk out and bathe my feet in the sunlight. The frustration I feel is more towards myself and my own inertia than my captors. A sense of self-thwarted ambition, stifled creativity, some wonderful possibility gnaws at me. I could unleash a chain of events that would lead to ultimate happiness and fulfilment this sunny day - if only I could move my chair back and take my dulled body out of that cold room and into the warmth the other side of the glass.

But still I sit and stare, stare as if staring would do the trick.

And then, miraculously (but no miracle worked by me) the meeting is over and I run from the room, like a schoolchild once the bell has rung.

Outside I feel the heat as a temporary relief. And then, the warmth, coupled with the hours of boredom that preceded it, makes me only want to curl up and sleep. No great conquests today - that window of opportunity has gone in the time I was staring out of it.

Mediterranean Courtyard Garden

2010-05-24T14:01:00.000-07:00

Although the show is supposed to be all about plants and gardens, it mostly seems to me to consist of lorries parked all over my ever greening (except for this) park, and workmen in hard hats eating sausage rolls sitting on dumper trucks. Adding to the many construction projects currently surrounding my area (hey, it's Summer now, the perfect time for dust and drilling), the Chelsea Flower Show is much less glamorous when seen from the Site Entrance.

Having said that, the illusion is maintained once inside this horticultural theme park. The small gardens are always the most charming - more humble and somehow less pretentious than their full-sized brethren, they present an accessible face of green fingered excellence. The hollyhocks stand tall and symmetrical, even the bees are well behaved.

Only the British could turn gardening into a competitive sport, and Chelsea is the decorative but useless garden's Olympics.

But there's something almost eerie about the Provencal cottage garden, the Italian courtyard, the Melbourne hideaway. And then it strikes you - it's the lack of people on these perfect sets. It's not as though the owner could have just popped inside the charming rustic shack for a cup of tea - these are gardens that preclude the presence of human imperfection. A human shadow would be an unwanted prop, complicating the simple lines and spoiling the play of light and shade with their lumbering forms. These are perfect miniatures where only the Borrowers could be truly at ease.

Contrast this with the scene from a true courtyard garden near Gloucester Road. The front of this terraced house is, indeed, a courtyard - little of horticultural note or merit grows in the higgledy piggledy pots, the stone slabs a dull shade of grey and the whole thing protected from prying eyes by an ineffectual and flimsy hedge. But in this garden, since the weak dawning of Spring brought the West light, an elderly Middle Eastern couple sit every evening. They share a white cast iron table, often laid out with a Turkish coffee set, the tall, bulbous stove top coffee pan resting in between them, two small glass cups and a sugar bowl. She wears large black sunglasses and strokes her hennaed hair, while he is nut brown with silver strands atop. The world looks in on them and they look out, seemingly unseeing the passers by. Wrapped up in the moment of tranquillity, that surely has been given them in recompense for long years lived with this earth.

Now that's a courtyard garden I could aspire to have - but not just yet perhaps.

Cab Hut Cafe

2010-05-20T00:36:00.000-07:00

One happy consequence of the closing of my bridge is that an arcane mystery of London life has been revealed to me. I have always been intriuged and frustrated by the green cab huts that nestle darkly on street corners, all wooden boards and closed doors, shut up to the public eye. Tardis-like, they are unremarkable from the outside, but who knows what complexities and delights may be hidden within. Only members of the black cab fraternity have access - they must know the secret combination, the well-concealed open hours. The refreshments allegedly provided within are more closely guarded than any speakeasy.

So it was with surprise, a couple of days after the men in hard hats arrived, that I saw the green hut on the Embankment side of the bridge opened up. Folding chairs and tables spread out and a sign advertising tea, coffee and bacon butties. The hut's windows are opened at a jaunty angle and it welcomes casual passersby in as never before.

But who am I kidding? These doors haven't opened for the curious eyes of the likes of me. The menu is incongruous with its chic location - solid, filling food and strong tea in mugs. It has revealed itself in recognition of a workforce close to its native cabbies in need of nourishment, not the commuters in their polished leather shoes, not the mothers with their brightly uniformed children or the idle ladies walking across the river to exercise their tiny dogs on the square of green on the other side. And therein lies the charm. It's a rebellious act, to sit with a white bread sandwich, dripping bacon fat on your chin and slurping dark, dark tea from a big white mug as the fashionable set clip clop past.

Intensive care

2010-05-17T09:20:00.001-07:00

The lights have gone out over the river.

My bridge is poorly. A poster plastered on the outside of the hoardings, hiding its true state of disrepair, states that it must be closed and repaired or it may die. Ugly blue corrugated iron replaces the sugar candy colours along its span and men in hard hats suck their teeth as they peel back layer upon layer of my bridge's delicate skin, to see how far the infection has spread.

No cars can cross any more and pedestrians are forced to zig-zag hither and thither, channelled down high blue corridors. We peer through judiciously placed windows to see the mortality of that which we have always thought to be permanent, everlasting. Under the tarmac lie wooden planks, below that some steel girders and the open water. That's all that separates our (now less confident) feet from the deep.

The bridge seems to rock and sway under my feet more than before. I look suspiciously at the engineers - what qualifies them for this delicate surgery? How can I be sure that they won't sever an artery or cut off a limb inadvertently? I keep vigil and hope that all will be well.

Somewhere to sit

2010-05-14T00:48:00.001-07:00

There's so much movement in the city - buses rattling down the road, cars accelerating round corners, people pounding with speed and purpose down flattened pavements. Slow down and you risk your life, or at least having your foot trodden on, your back jostled, a muttered curse - the only safe speed to travel in the city is fast.

There are times when you're still - the train held at a red signal, trying not to lean on the sweating person behind you in the tube. Waiting, waiting for that damn bus. It's an enforced immobility, a barrier in the way of the natural movement of urban life, a frustration likely to take you to boiling point.

So it was almost with surprise that I saw this empty bench on the road near my bus stop. I had never even noticed it before, and it clearly wasn't very well used. Passers by swerved to avoid it, so that it acted more as an obstacle than a refuge from the constant kinetic activity surrounding it. But as it sat there, elegant, scrolled, a relic from another age, it became ever more appealing. I wanted to take advantage of the generous curved seat, rest my back on the high wooden slats, allow my calf muscles to relax. It was almost alien - so unlike the narrow, uncomfortable perching posts installed in the modern bus stop where I waited.

I couldn't of course, take such a step out of the normal course of my homeward trail. Too strange, almost a defeat, to allow myself the moment of sweet stillness. A fear, perhaps, that if I allow myself somewhere to sit, I may never again get up.