My London has been a slow accumulation of familiarity;
from the 2003 amorphous mass of unrecognised places, unlearned routes, unknown
people; to, in 2014, a web of memories, interweaving and cross-fertilizing like
synapses in a huge, smoggy brain.
I walk up Edgware Road on a summer's evening, air thick and heavy like warm milk, imbibing the sweetness of shisha and the sound of spoken Arabic. There's a synagogue here at which I used to sing sometimes, very poor fee, gentiles hidden behind a carved screen struggling with patchily transliterated Hebrew; this street was the edge of the known world in my first days staying with a boyfriend in Bayswater, I remember vividly the excitement of venturing here alone, by bus, to go to Woolworth's as one could in those days. Jacques Samuel's showroom is at number 142, I went there once in the streaming rain to try pianos with my boss and the day was very different when a picnic began here with bulk purchase of meze eaten to bursting in sun-drenched Hyde Park, watching the weekend footballers.
It's the road to Hampstead, where I used to spend many
a hair-of-the-dog Sunday afternoon of my halcyon party days, when five o'clock
on a Friday meant not having to be sober at all for 60 hours. These days
I often rent a car near Edgware Road, driven the other week to see one former
partner-in-partying-crimes renounce those ways before God and old friends and
promise to become a wife.
Crossing the city, having run the gauntlet of wanton
ugliness that is the Old Kent Road one pitches up, flushed and sputtering, in
New Cross, home of my university.
It was to dull West Norwood that the 'we' of then were
pushed by the perennial London desire for period, two bedrooms and own front
door, to a grubby aspirant hillside overlooking the sunlit vales of Dulwichian
privilege. Walking home past the salubrious College playing fields I
could wax my daydreams lyrical of flanneled fools and muddied oafs et al. but
the reality of our down-at-heel street always returned me to South-London
ordinariness. That, of course was until the oily marks appeared on the
walls and the crop circles in the carpet began....
Curving round the London Eye like a ribbon, a
pronounced bend in the river produces, off the Southbank, a peninsular, a kind
of 'Isle of Southwark', bounded, like a fortified house, by bridges; Tower to
the Northeast and Vauxhall to the Southwest.
How to leave a city so saturated with a decade's
living? With a million moments, sacred and profane; forgotten in
mundanity and crystal-sharp profound?
So long ago do days here feel that this seems now my infancy, a London babyhood of 19-year-old opinions and obsessions; new-minted grownups, soft and impressionable as fresh-dug clay, let loose on this scruffy, unremarkable corner.
Tea, by the gallon, was our intoxicant of choice in
those days I'm afraid, and conversation was of the self-important student - and
music student to boot! - type. The leafy, left-wing streets of nearby
Brockley were home for long after the letters appeared after my name; the
area's chicken-shop realness slowly evaporating in the rising heat of delicatessens
and boutique cafes, as the possibility of settling here as a homeowner drifted
away too, like so much Le Creuset slow-cooker steam.
Here, the river seems everywhere, every view ending in an iconic building, every journey criss-crossing the water, every gust of wind carrying the tang of the sea and, on November evenings, the fog that lies, damp and brooding, over the silent gloom of midweek Borough Market. How many nights have ended up happily dancing to the desultory live band at St Christopher's on Borough High Street? How many weekends wrung out their last hours of freedom in the auditory embrace of a folk band at the warm womb of a venue that is Sunday at The Glad? The glittering summer of 2012 was spent, wholesale, on the Southbank at the National Theatre Prop Bar; the winter of 2013-14, drinking espresso at Scooter cafe on Lower Marsh. Passing the tidal beach on Bankside means my weekly jog home is nearly complete and there is a spot next to the river there, under the blue-lit trees where we, the we of now, first kissed.
How to begin again in unfamiliarity, to reset the dial and start anew the long, slow accumulation of familiarity, of belonging, of home?
