WHY HAS HE BROUGHT THIS PIG INTO OUR BOOKSHOP?
Reflections On Walking In London By A London-Avoiding Bumpkin
I had been living in London for five minutes, maybe less, before I got robbed by a Londoner for the first time. While I was unloading the van, a junior estate agent - a short rhinestone-eyed youth of 19ish who fit the description “wide boy” to a such an extent it verged on the cartoonish - “counted” and surreptitiously pocketed a chunk of the deposit for the flat my then girlfriend and I were renting: the same deposit that I had checked, checked, then checked again on the 130 mile journey down from Nottinghamshire. What could I have done? It was the opportunist property gangster’s word versus mine. I should have known better. People back home had warned me about the capital: everyone was horrible there. It was full of thieves, capitalists and politicians. Nobody ever smiled. In fact, this last part wasn’t true. The young estate agent treated me to several of the biggest smiles I’d ever seen as he relieved me of a significant portion of my meagre life savings. It’s rare that you only meet someone for fourteen minutes and get to know each of their teeth quite that well.
That summer, the ferociously hot London summer of 1999, I walked hundreds of miles through the city. I walked many miles home from sticky gigs and clubs. I walked to and from newspaper offices and recording studios. I walked home from drinking Jack Daniels with Lemmy in Kensington and Volvic in Old Street with Slash. When I remember my brief time living in the UK’s biggest city it’s easy to remember the crime and the music and the dancing and the beer and the weirdly large number of encounters with living legends and the easy-to-shake 20something hangovers and the insanely tight newspaper deadlines, but I sometimes forget the walking. I did so, so much of it, especially that first summer. Sometimes I didn’t intend to walk but ended up walking anyway. I walked in the kind of trainers you don’t see any more, even in the vintage shops, and in shoes you wear at a point in your life when you haven’t yet worked out what kind of shoes suit you. Sometimes, unwisely, I walked in no footwear at all.
Last weekend, a weekend of hot sticky weather so thick you could probably eat it if you wanted to, which you definitely wouldn’t - a weekend of weather just like the weather I remember from my debut summer there as a resident - I visited London for the first time in almost six years and walked again. I walked about as much as I could while still leaving time to sleep about half as much as a person should sleep and do the socialising we’d planned to and go to the gigs that we’d booked tickets for. I believe it was about 27 miles in total, over the course of 48 hours. As I walked, I saw more ghosts than I expected: ghosts of myself at 24 and 25, ghosts of people I used to know, weathered by a quarter century of urban life, ghosts that made me feel like time had stood still and ghosts that slapped me around the face and reminded me it hadn’t, ghosts of the kind of people I knew, frozen in time at the same age with the same hair and posture and air of invincibility they had in 1999, ghosts of different versions of myself who didn’t run away back to the countryside at 26, some of whom I wouldn’t have even been able to stomach five minutes in a room with. I looked at the ghosts more than they looked at me because nobody who lives in London - including ghosts - really looks at anyone when they walk through London. I felt dizzy, acutely conscious of the relentless steamroller of history, but more excited and enthusiastic and free than I’d expected to feel.
Once upon a time, I came within a whisker of falling in love with London. I had an intoxicating job there that made people go “ooh” when I told them about it and a funny, supportive, charming bunch of friends and I liked dancing (and one thing London is never short of is opportunities to dance). But, when I left, London never missed me - my suspicion is that it’s so much of an icy emotionless mofo, it’s never missed anyone - and I never missed it. I revisited frequently for work, and some socialising, for a number of years after I left. But then the place started to grow teeth in my mind: teeth like that junior estate agent’s teeth. Too many for just one mouth. When people asked me to go there to do something that would further my writing career, I looked harder and harder for excuses not to. In my mind London was huge and small: it simultaneously contained an unimaginably vast number of people and only the handful of people who live there that I didn’t want to run into. Then, one day recently, it hit me that I hadn’t been to London for an entire half decade. I then realised, to my surprise, it had in fact been a year more than that, presumably because London is always so busy racing ahead that it’s constantly 12 months beyond the rest of us. But I never stopped being interested in London. Why should I stop being interested in things just for the boringly petty and childish reason that I don’t like them?
I wanted to visit London on the antithesis of the basis I most frequently used to visit London, as a writer from the provinces: I wanted to do something in London utterly unlike coming to London to talk for an hour with a TV producer about a show which would never happen that they wanted you to come up with ideas for, or meeting up with a publisher to talk about a book that would be “good for your career” that you didn’t really want to write, or even going to a bookshop to talk in front of a small crowd about work you were genuinely proud of. I wanted to stay in an unremarkable budget hotel and walk through London quietly and anonymously, with no goal, other than looking at it more closely than I once did. I wanted to gaze at the careful and confident and sympathetic ways it had been put together by builders in centuries past. I wanted to look at neighbourhoods of London that, back when I lived there and hung around with cool people, you weren’t supposed to talk about because those neighbourhoods were wealthy and uncool, but which, like most wealthy neighbourhoods, had, a long time ago, in fact had been extremely cool. I wanted to reach junctions of footpaths and roads and be able to proceed in whatever the fuck direction I chose to because it wasn’t 2005 and I didn’t have an interview at 1pm with a TV actor with a piercing laugh and a sneering sidekick followed by meeting at 4.30pm with a man from one of Random House’s mass market imprints who would tacitly and somewhat patronisingly hint at publishing my work but only if I altered my writing style until it repetitively fit the mould of an author I didn’t enjoy who had recently sold a vast number of books. I didn’t want to be set up on a date with London. I wanted to have an unlikely encounter with it, with no end goal, apart from briefly knowing it a little better, before pissing off, in the politest way, back to the godforsaken boggy rural outpost I’d crawled from.
28 miles doesn’t give you the opportunity to cover much of London if you’re knitting your route together in little improvised loops, taking time to stare down into all the deep pockets. What 28 miles did mean is that I had a good, thorough look at the Highgate, Belsize Park and Hampstead postcodes. But even that didn’t quite give me chance to explore Highgate Cemetery, where, famously, Karl Marx is buried (£10 to get in - that Karl is just like all the others: he’s really changed since he moved to the Big Smoke). Did anybody ordinary, non-talented or non-visionary live in or around the fringes of Hampstead and Highgate during the 19th and 20th Centuries? I walked past the former homes of the sculptor Henry Moore, Muppets creator Jim Henson - “holy crap, Gonzo and Animal were actually in this building at one point” I almost said out loud - and Alan Bennett, amongst many others. I marvelled at the seamless way the midcentury modern architecture of Erno Goldfinger, Ted Levy and Michael and Charlotte Bunney rubbed shoulders with the haughty rows of Queen Anne, Georgian and Victorian buildings on either side of them. It felt like a place that had been laid out for the important and the wealthy since time immemorial. People who go about their lives assured of their place in the history books and don’t do their own washing up or gardening.
But it’s not quite that simple. In 1934, when Wells Coates designed the stunning Isokon Building on Lawn Road in Belsize Park, it was intended as an experiment in minimalist affordable living, with residents only needing to bring “a book, a rug and a vase” and getting everything else provided for them, including food and laundry services. It is this North West London I wanted to travel to in my mind: the not yet insanely expensive one Bohemians and artists flocked to, the one whose architects thought deep visionary thoughts about the ingredients of a pleasant home life. I felt, the more I walked, that I could almost see that place beneath the layers of paint. Every corner I turned, my saucer eyes stuck out further on their sticks. If I’d been walking around a small city in the provinces with eyes on sticks, someone would have surely made a remark, but not here. They probably assumed it was performance art, or that somebody was making a film.
Near an impressive 1970s house resembling a shipping container, an angular man with a similarly angular grey beard, wearing one of those suits that look like pyjamas that famous people can somehow pull off wearing, brushed past me on the pavement.
“He’s famous,” I thought. “I guarantee it.”
They say to properly get over a relationship you need a time period roughly equivalent to half the length of the relationship concerned. Similarly, it can take about half the time you lived in London to get properly out of your London Head. When I think of myself arriving in London, just after my 24th birthday, I see a kitten still in that early stage of development before it is properly able to open its eyes. When I think of myself two years and four months later, leaving the city, I see a cat walking with its head down. The kind of cat who wouldn’t bat an eyelid if a famous man in pyjamas walked past him on the street. The cat is known for purring a lot and being a generally affable and obedient cat, but he’s more arrogant, in some ways, than he thinks, mostly as a result of how his recent environment has rubbed off on him.
It takes a while after leaving London to learn to fully lift your head again. The great unfortunate paradox of London is that it fosters a protective lack of curiosity in people yet contains so endlessly much to be curious about. I must have walked past Gospel Oak tube station 40 times between June 1999 and October 2000 and never once wondered, “Why is it called Gospel Oak?” Last weekend I walked past it once and instantly wanted to write a multilayered 600 page timeslip novel around the long gone tree it was named for, which John Wesley preached from to the local farming community during the 1700s while in the process of founding Methodism. I would probably also somehow find a way of working the huge adjacent Parliament Hill Lido, designed by Harry Rowbotham and TL Smithson in 1938, into the narrative.
At the end of both days, Ellie and I met up to watch a band called The Magnetic Fields play the two halves of their fabulously eclectic album ‘69 Love Songs’ at The Barbican, a vast, controversial brutalist residential complex built in the 1960s and 70s. The first time I saw a gig here - although not by the Magnetic Fields - was at this exact time in 1999, the year ‘69 Love Songs’ was released. It had been the first time my mum had come down from Nottinghamshire to visit me in London. She had just turned 49 at the time: the age I am now. What did she think of me, in my new fancy metropolitan prat persona? I find, troublingly, that I can’t imagine quite what either of us would have talked about that day. Probably not the majestic vision of a lost, hopeful future that the Barbican represented. I doubt I would have noticed such a thing, through my half-closed kitten eyes. But I noticed it last weekend. I noticed it so much it made me lightheaded. I also noticed this: young people in London speak in much posher accents than they did in 1999 and young men are significantly taller. In Devon, I generally feel on the cusp of official tallness, as a man in the unremarkable hinterland between five eleven and six foot. In London, I felt like somebody had sneakily nipped in and sliced me off at the knees while I was rummaging for my pink tube ticket. Or would have done, if I had still needed a pink tube ticket to travel.
Some of the rest still came as a shock, even though I’d prepared myself for it. Not so much the extortionate price of food and drinks, startling scarcity of good record shops, nor the extra subterranean wi-fi or newfangled ways of paying for public transport. But definitely the people who thundered directly through me without apology as I gazed up at flat roofs and Edwardian crittall windows, and the reaction - or non reaction - I prompted in shops when I smiled at people and tried to engage them in conversation. When Ellie said “Thank you, my love” in her Wiltshire accent to a couple of strangers, they looked no less concerned than they might have done if she’d just invited them to her birthday party. It was less that, as I entered shops, I felt like I was standing there with a piece of straw hanging out my mouth and more that I felt like I was standing there with a piece of straw hanging out of my mouth and a struggling live pig under my arm. “Why has he brought this enormous pig into our place of business and why does he not appear to notice how loudly it is squealing?” the eyes of salespeople seemed to say, as I complimented them of some aspect of their shops. “It clearly doesn’t belong here. It should be somewhere several miles west of Swindon, in a farm, where individuals of significance and social repute don’t have to see it.” The knock-on effect of this is when you finally meet somebody who appears genuinely up for a chat - and I discovered they definitely were out there - it becomes quite unnerving, leaving you not sure whether to take their enthusiasm as sarcasm, or just marry them, right there, on the spot.
Sometimes, I felt, in this green part of North London, at this green time of year, as if I was standing inside the most English of paintings. Perhaps more so than on any other walk I’ve taken, anywhere else in England, in recent months. My walk up towards Highgate along the east side of Hampstead Heath, with the church spire in the background, and every breed of dog and dog walker on every side of me, was a prime example. But what made the painting richer and more attractive was the diversity beneath that Englishness. A Chinese woman fed somewhere close to a hundred jackdaws something mysterious and tasty from a polythene bag. A posh middle-age lady reprimanded someone called Tim for throwing a tennis ball too far into a lake for a Labradoodle to retrieve - “TOO FAR, Tim, TOO FAR” - although, in this heat, the Labradoodle clearly had no complaints. “She obviously needs to work through her resentments but it’s not your job to work through her resentments for her,” said a young Indian woman on a bench to her friend. “Callum is a good person but she needs a less good person who’s more right for her,” said someone else I didn’t have chance to see, walking swiftly past. Three artfully thin pretty boy American students discussed ways they’d been starving themselves in order to feed their minds with great 19th Century literature. Away from London, with London growing fangs in my mind, I view London as a deadening place. But, on a sunny day, witnessing this busy diversity all around you, how can you not feel a little more alive? I enjoyed blending in, down deep amidst the folds of it all. It even thrilled me a little. I walked further, to a private road of spiked gates and electronic keypads where a bowls club announced that new members were welcome. “Come and bowl with us, by all means, as we have been low on numbers lately,” appeared to be the subtext. “But be sure to keep a safe fucking distance from our pristine nine million pound houses.”
I wonder if that estate agent who robbed me lives in one of those houses now.
No. He wouldn’t. They’re much too tasteful.
Some of them also contain books, which would probably further rule it out.
Besides, he’s probably in prison by now.
“He’s not a proper person” a working class man from rural England once reported to me, after meeting the horrific TV presenter and celebrity mouthhorn Jeremy Clarkson. I feel not unlike that about London. ‘The Jeremy Clarkson Of Cities’ is the oversimplified appraisal of London that I tend to slip towards when I haven’t seen it in person for a long time. That it’s just some guy with a big face, driving fast expensive cars and making loads of money, then saying offensive things because he knows saying them will make him yet more money and enable him to drive even faster, even more expensive cars and get to say even more offensive things with even fewer repercussions that would negatively impact his lifestyle. The adjustment I have to make, when I go to London, is remembering people live lives inside Jeremy Clarkson. Despite not being a proper person, Jeremy Clarkson still has proper blood cells, trying to get on and just be blood cells.
Even here, in this part of London where neither I nor anybody I knew could afford to live when I was a London resident, back before it got what people call “properly expensive”, the lives lived today are viewed as normality by those who live them. Just because what you call a “village” has none of the central characteristics of a village, just because your weekly rent is what your monthly rent would be if you lived in a lot of perfectly nice places elsewhere in the country, just because you haven’t seen a tractor or a pig or a sheep recently… Does that make what you are doing on a daily basis any less real? Not to you. Go down several income levels, to the people squeezed out by the widening gap between rich and poor: people who live on top of one another in urban cupboards and barely scrape by, but feel it’s worth it, just to be here, worth it for their future, and what they can make of the present. For a short period, around the turn of The Millennium, I was of a similar mindset: I defended London to the anti-London crowd. I said it was a place - perhaps the one place - where you could truly find your people, however eccentric or weird your hobbies and passions. I said it was the place with the best gigs, the best food, the best used clothes. The place where you could never be bored. That was before I decided it was unme, before I decided it was cold and unkind, before I decided it dried out my skin, before I decided it was going to change me into something I didn’t want to be, before I decided it made me ill, before seeing a person comatose on the street and seeing other people step casually over that person like the comatose person wasn’t a person started to be something I noticed more and became more troubled by, before I decided that London was the powerful suction device the dentist switches on when she asks you to spit and money was a combination of mouthwash and saliva. Now, after our reunion - the one I put off, the one that made me so nervous - how do I feel about London? More negatively? No. More positively? Not quite. I am merely even more aware that most of the main things I’ve ever thought about London, while out of or nearly in love with it, remain true. Including the most enduring London fact of all, which is that, for as long as we both live, London will never stoop so low as to give a shit what I think.
My latest books are 1983, Villager, Notebook, Ring The Hill, Help The Witch and 21st Century Yokel. They are all available with free international delivery from Blackwells.
I’ll be chatting to
tomorrow via Zoom about my writing in case you’d like to join us.
This is all so real. For me, like some others, it was NYC. But there's the same sense of revisiting a massive charming asshole lover from whom you have recovered at length. I lived in NY for a long time and it took me at least two years straight on an Irish peninsula to stop being scared when people said hello. After eight years it's like, if I pass someone and they don't at least give the nod I think, who is this barbarian. The lack of eye contact in American shops is what scares me now, when I'm back for a rare visit. Amazing how we can adapt. Fuck living in big cities though.
I live in London, round the edges, although I would never describe myself as a Londoner. Had to come years ago to study at Bar School in Chancery Lane and never left. I’m one of those people who looks up, with a stupid grin on my face. In fact, I’ve only just remembered that I was walking and grinning during a lunch break, when I realised I had been surrounded by about 7 threatening black youths. The ring leader demanded to know why I was grinning, and without breaking my stride I replied “Dunno, just simple I guess” and carried on my way. When I looked back, they were all laughing and calling back to me that I was ok. Well, that was indeed good to know and I was free to stroll back to the office and carry on with my day. During another lunch break (and this will teach me not to stay put), I was in my car and a car travelling behind me carried out a dangerous manoeuvre by speeding past me. So I beeped. Just a friendly beep. The car screeched to a halt and 4 huge black blokes got out, brandishing baseball bats. As they ran towards my car, I locked the doors and reversed back up Muswell Hill. Unfortunately, they all returned to their car and chased me, backwards. Here we all were, in a car chase, but not like the ones in the movies. This was quite a slow one, reversing uphill. I did manage to shake them off eventually and went back to court to prosecute a trial. These memories have only just come back to me now. I was only going to reply by saying I’ve been to Goldfinger’s house. It was lovely seeing the old TV. But I still look up and grin at people, often engaging them in needless conversation. Sometimes I feel a bit like Crocodile Dundee.