Story Twenty
That week I spent in London.
There are things in life that you come to independently. You love them because of the way you experienced them, because of what they meant to you in exactly the moment you found them when you were exactly the person you were in that particular time. Sharing them with anyone then becomes risky, because the act of sharing somehow changes the nature of your love for the thing; it is not wholly yours anymore. The thing you love becomes subjective — what if that person you’re sharing with isn’t exactly who you were and so they see it differently? What if it doesn’t hold up, or worse what if now that you’re seeing it critically you realize it was never that good to begin with?
I have always shared my cities with people, but they were the people I have met in them. None of the cities are mine, of course, I am definitionally a visitor, but they are places that I have discovered by myself. I travel alone, or at least I have done historically. I write best surrounded by whimsy, with nobody’s schedule to account for. I find magic in the kind of solitude one can only find amongst crowds.
Monday morning, sometime between when my body thought it was 0300 and when it turned out to be 1100 local time, I descended from clouds and I saw smoky rooftops and I felt my soul relax in the way I always do when I come to London. This also happens in Sydney, or New York, or a particularly nice bit of wilderness near a small town in the US that you’ve never heard of; each of these places is home to a different bit of my soul. But today, for the first time, I wasn’t alone. And it seemed a bit shabby, a bit worn, a bit expensive. One struggles to share magic when one’s companion isn’t given to flights of fancy.
But oh, it is still my London. The buildings are uniform and the people are anything but; people say that the US is a melting pot and that one can’t be more multicultural than New York but in NYC the multis of cultures are all still siloed; one knows where to go to find anything but here you can pick any neighborhood and sit outside a tube station and see people from all walks of life, dressed in all kinds of ways and speaking all kinds of languages. I once saw a man in a top hat outside a members’ club in Soho try to bum a smoke from a homeless guy and when it turned out the homeless guy had nothing to spare for the millionaire, the top hat guy sat in the gutter and borrowed a couple drags while having a perfectly civil conversation about football (which is the great equalizer here.) I assume that the next day, they returned to trying to existentially kill each other, but outside of Las Vegas I’ve never seen that kind of thing in the States. That is, of course, the same night that a man wrote sonnets for passing women, hoping for a few quid from the accompanying men; his sonnets were a bit rude and largely centered on how pleasurable an evening with the gentleman in question would be, and it was a fantastic business model. Who wouldn’t pay a few bucks to get laid, even outside how clever his rhymes were?
If you have ever wanted to visit London, I can tell you that you will find your own city. I have spent four days here, walking far more than is advisable given that my back tends to give out after half a mile. But I can’t help it, everything here is worth seeing, and besides that I have a camera now. Last time I was here, I didn’t have a way to capture the city as I saw it, and I was determined not to waste a minute here.
This is also the first time that I’ve really traveled more than an hour from home with a walker and an eyepatch, and it’s been phenomenal. People either make an extra effort for me or they act as though my existence was a personal affront to them. I have come to the conclusion that I remind people somehow that they, too, might age before they’re ready, that accidents and illnesses happen. I am not yet forty and I have arthritis in my hip; that alone would be odd but when you top it off with an eyepatch people get a bit weird.
A couple of nights ago, I went to meet some friends at a particular pub. London isn’t known for its wide doorways and spacious alleys, so getting a walker through the door was an adventure in spacial reasoning. Perhaps twenty Englishmen (all dressed, of course, in the requisite navy blue suits and red ties) watched me struggling with bemused looks. Women with dyed hair and walkers and eyepatches don’t often invade the after-work drinking establishments of mostly Tory men. Me being me, I made friends out front because I wanted to smoke but didn’t want to fight with my walker, so I just hobbled outside and asked some random dudes if I could lean on the barrel they were using as a table. They, being English, had to say yes, and then they asked if I was quite sure I was in the right pub which here can be translated as “please explain yourself.” My accent did the work for me, Americans are given a certain social pass here in that nobody expects an American to understand how to be polite. One of the men was called Edward (because of course he was) and he told me to publish that he thinks Donald Trump will win the next election. I told him in turn that if that happened, I would blame him personally.
It manifests in other ways as well. Here’s a note I made a few days ago: I wake up and go outside to smoke. A cab driver is outside, waiting on a fare to Gatwick. He is perhaps in his late forties, and in a thick accent he asks me what happened to my eye. I tell him that I am a journalist and I was shot. He asks me where, and when I tell him America, he makes dissenting sounds. I explain to him that American police are known to be violent; his English is minimal and largely based around his job as a driver, in the same way that I speak fluent Spanish but only in the kitchen. He tells me that he is having trouble understanding this, because it is known that small developing countries are violent and corrupt but it is also known that large countries are good to their own people. His name is Aasif, and he is Pakistani, so he knows what he is talking about. He considers England a large country too, and he is treated well here, so what he knows is true because he has seen it for himself. We talk some then about geopolitics, about how sometimes America sends food and sometimes they send bombs. He considers this, then tells me that it is true that the Americans paid money for an opposition candidate in Pakistan not long ago - regime change. We agree that large countries have the capacity for large good and large evil. I finish my cigarette and shake his hand and consider that now I have made a friend, though I’ll likely never see him again.
I went to Brighton, which is on the seashore, and I was wandering around the alleys looking for likely photos. Brighton is an incredibly queer-friendly artistic kind of place, or at least it sells itself as such. During a wander, I found a camera shop and not long afterwards I ran into a young photographer who wanted to know how to be professional. From my notes: I pop into a handy camera shop to get a lens cap, and the nice man asks me if my camera is secure. He warns me that I’m not in the nicest section of Brighton, so I show him how I’ve secured the body to the walker seat and looped the strap around the sides so that nobody could hope to slip it off. He looks impressed and asks what kind of walker I’m using, because he knows some disabled photographers. He charges me three quid for the cap and off I go, into the wild.
Two blocks later I find an alley with impressive graffiti and start taking photos. A girl is sitting on nearby stairs and finds the courage to ask me about my camera. She has an Olympus hung around her neck with string, and she tells me she can’t get her photos to come out right. I fix her ISO and explain depth of field, and she asks if she can take my picture. She says she wants to be a for-real photographer one day, and I tell her that if she’s out there on film doing work, she’s definitionally a photographer already. And an artist at that, most people left film for digital a decade ago so she’s working in a hell of a niche.
The day before I left London, I spent some time with a mate at the Chelsea Physic Garden. I won’t name her here because it would be churlish of me to tell you that she has access to this incredibly posh walled garden as a result of her post-rehab therapy if I did. But I think it’s worth noting that it’s nearly twenty dollars admission normally, and she has a lifetime pass because for all the ways that the UK fucks up public health, they have things like “post-rehab community engagement” where you can enroll in craft classes or get a garden pass or whatever will keep you healthy. The gardens were absolutely gorgeous, and I managed to get there on one of the few sunny beautiful spring days you’d want to go to a garden on. I love flowers, at the worst of times, and I took perhaps more photos than I had to.
The physic garden has been there for more than three hundred years, and it’s brimful of plants that can help heal people, not only by their beauty but because of their medicinal properties. And I do have to say it was lovely walking around a place that was spilling over with lush greens and delicate blooms with someone who also has limitations, someone who understands why someone might turn to this or that chemical to survive. Just the day before I’d walked into a pharmacy asking for heavier drugs than the ibuprofen I’d brought with me, because I haven’t walked this much in years but certainly not since I’ve had the walker. There’s only so much pain one can tolerate, but the chemist had simply given me a very inadvisable amount of ibuprofen like that would help in any way. But the gardens helped, and so did the beer I enjoyed while I walked around finding beautiful photos to take.
After that, I went to one of my favorite places in London, which is Borough Market. I like it because you can buy any kind of food you like; fruits we’ve never heard of in America which will stain your fingers a deep bright scarlet and taste of salt, or cheese aged in different wines. There are fishmongers and butcher shops and spice stores and in between it all is an invitation to buy a plate of this or that cooked in giant cast irons. You could burst your liver just tasting things, which all the stalls invite you to do. I have always loved the place, because the first time I visited I’d never been to a place where the produce spilled over, where you couldn’t possibly even know how to cook everything you see. I have never seen abundance like it, and while it intimidates me, I have always wanted to live a life where that kind of food just…existed, where I could access it. Usually when I go to places with that kind of food available I’m looking for guards because people like me don’t belong there, but this is a place where tourists wander and locals buy tomatoes and courgettes and people on dates pick up some meat and cheese and bread and wine to go eat near the Thames. Nobody chases you out.
I leave London happy that I came here, because I have missed the place. It is rough and dirty in some places, and uncomfortably clean and quiet in others, and no matter where you go you can’t help but run into green space. It isn’t all the way home, but I’d forgotten how much of my brain melts into the place and it’s something like a miracle to find that this, at least, has not changed since 2020.
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