Twenty Four
May. 3rd, 2009 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningI wrote this back in 1991, as a letter to a friend; I recently came across it and enjoyed reading it again, so I thought I’d post it here, too. I recently moved back into the area, and I have been making the same journey. The sights are the same, twenty years on, though the buses have changed…
The everyday thing - this happens everyday - every working day, anyhow, and a few times at weekends too. Going to work - a simple process, but fascinating: watching the world go by. It interests me, this process - partly because I see motion and movement as crucial to my character - one reason perhaps I will never truly settle (until, perhaps, I find someone with whom I want to settle?) - and I define myself in part by movement, by walking, and by watching things change as I move. (They move too, of course, in their own speed, in their way; sometime watching me change as I pass by.)
There are two ways to get to work, and each of those has two alternative routes. I prefer the bus, but when if I am busy at work, I will take the tube; it gets me there about half an hour earlier, and is more hurried, more intense, so I think I may arrive at my desk slightly more flustered, but more ready to do battle with the phones and computers.
The bus: the bus down to the office leaves from South End Green, five minutes away. I walk passed nurses coming off their night shift, looking tired, almost hostile, as if the world has just been too painful for the last twelve hours that the one thing they can't bear to see are the trees in the sunshine. I walk passed the smell of freshly baked bread - always tempted to go in and buy a donut - and across the zebra crossing; I cross the road arrogantly, daring the cars not to stop - though they always do - and I barely look at them.
They only ever contain one or two people unless it is a car doing the school run, when there will be four or five kids in the back, and a hassled looking woman, thirty-five or fortyish, in the front. These cars always seem to be BMW, Mercedes, or Volvo estates. Presumably the parents - always mothers (they wouldn't let the an-pair drive the BMW) - share this chore; I would hate to think that one woman could have four fourteen year old boys in one family. I can't quite understand why the kids aren't forced to walk to school - especially in the rain... But this walk is always sunny, anyway: if it is raining, it is easier to take the tube.
There is usually a loosely defined queue at the bus stop, and several empty, parked buses. I tend to get to the stop at roughly the same time - just gone 8.15 - unless I have somehow managed to get everything done more quickly - the half hour bath, maybe ironing a shirt (if I haven't been bothered to do it all in one, two-weekly supply, go), breakfast of strong coffee and muesli.
(Last week, after the curtains went up on this new scene, I was an hour and a half late in getting up - I had a shower instead, skipped breakfast and dashed to the tube - but I was in work at the same time; though too hung over, too tired, and far too excited to get much done. Sixteen again; a teenage nightmare.)
I tend to see the same people on the bus, especially those who get on at South End Green: there is the tall blonde (she gets off at Leicester Square; she always seems to be at the stop before me); a handful of civil servants (they carry OHMS standard issue brief cases, and all get off in Whitehall or, more commonly, the top of Victoria Street; there a couple of large ministry departments around there - the DTI, the MoD, the DOE and the DSS - full of minor people, whilst the figureheads sit in Whitehall). A couple of stops down the line, there is a dark germen girl who gets on: she is slightly dumpy, but friendly - she smiles as she sits down, and we look to see what book the other is reading (I assume she is German; the letters she receives are, but she reads Penguin classics, mainly); she is a curious contrast to the blonde, who is very good looking (great legs...) but never smiles or glances out of the window, engrossed instead in the Independent which she holds over her crossed legs.
There is a black woman, her hair done up in multicolour braids, who exudes self confidence guaranteed by her stylish looks and tight clothes. She fiddles with her fingers at her mouth - waiting for the bus, she smokes - and she too reads.
At Mornington Crescent, there is a black kid of about ten who gets on. and always sits at the front even if there are spaces somewhere else (only kids can do that; an adult would get dirty looks if they sat next to someone when there was plenty of space); he energetically watches out of the window, sitting sideways on the seat, and he gets off at Warren Street.
Sometimes, there is a guy of forty or so with his young kid; the kid is bright - always asking questions - and the man answers, clearly, trying to explain what is going on - what a particular poster is advertising (the kid was particularly taken by a series of ads which showed animals made out of wool - all bright colours - a snake, a whale, a lion, a tiger - to prove how clean Whisk! would get woollens. The kid would shout out the name of the animal as we drove passed - whale! snake!). The boy has an American accent, the father an English one. I get the feeling - why, I don't know - that he is a single parent - divorced? widowed? - and that he only sometimes does the job of taking his son to school, maybe if his regular ride can't make the trip. There is something warming about the fact that the father doesn't drive a car. They get out at the top of Gower Street, outside University College.
There are a couple of couples, too; one young, another older - slightly - but so much more pleasant. The younger couple are ill matched - he is about 6'6'' and he talks; she is about 5'4'' and she doesn't. They are a couple, but they hardly seem to know each other: he lectures her, holding forth about this and that in an irritatingly loud voice (much more annoying than the treble hiss of a hundred walkmen), and the other passengers have no choice but to listen. They once met another friend on the bus, an American lawyer, and spent 25 minutes discussing all the different food shops they knew, and what was best where; it was the most nauseating conversation I had heard in a long time - full of food pretensions and irritating attitudes - let them eat petit fois - and darling. if you haven't had bagels from the Rosslyn Deli you haven't lived. It was in total quite awful; I seriously thought I was going to throw up. The guy is, to my shame, an accountant; he now works in the City - possibly a merchant banker - and he wears barbour jackets and suede hats. I think she is also an accountant; and I have the feeling that they have been going out with each other since they were at university, and throughout their training; jeez! Has she had to put up with that for five years? Why on earth does she do it? The other couple I see are older - thirty five I'd say - and much nicer; maybe they just make me feel romantic - they seem so in love! They must be having an affair, or maybe they are both divorced or something - even the way they hold hands seems to have an illicit quality about it. They smile and whisper, and brighten the bus up.
I see all these people because we all sit at the front of the bus, on the top deck. I have retained a childlike obsession for the top deck and the front.
From down stairs, there is no view, no spectacle - no entertainment value.
From the top, the journey is full of events and things to look at - people, buildings, the sky; and it is easier to read than on the bottom deck, which gets crowded with standing passengers cramming on.
We all get seats - the bus starts in Hampstead - except maybe the black kid (perhaps when there are no seats on top, he has to stand downstairs, saddened that he can't watch the traffic go by on the Hampstead Road, or watch the trains leaving Euston station as the tracks go into the tunnel beneath the road). The blonde and I have the same favoured seat - the front left, where you can watch the pavement, and catch the sun in you face; since she is at the stop when I get there, she gets the seat - I take the right hand, and the German girl seems to sit beside me, if it is free (it usually is).
I read; I look out of the window; I look around at the other passengers (inventing their stories; asking questions of them, silently, to salve my curiosity). I watch the cars and vans in the morning traffic, jostling for space.
The bus journey follows the same pattern a bit like the traffic: it gets crowded quickly, only people getting on to start with, paying the driver or flashing their passes as they stagger on.
(I am now onto Bruckner - everything I listen to has to have a strong rhythm - and this is really powerful stuff - ba-dah de dab! - lots of brass and tympani (bum bom bom BOM) taken the theme with the strings relegated to keeping the chords in the background going. Wow.)
There is always a big crowd waiting to get on at the two stops in Malden Road, an amorphous queue of unhealthy and ill-dressed people. Just a mile from Hampstead, and the charade is totally changed; the people here look like they don't enjoy life. Although I see the same people waiting to get on each day, I have no real thoughts on them - the seats on the top are all taken now, so they are forced to stand downstairs (almost a comment on the class structure, that!): I never hear their conversations; I never see which papers they are reading. (And I have long ago learnt not to generalise about what papers people read: you see site labourers reading the Guardian avidly, teachers reading the Sun and bankers reading the Sport. Me, I hardly ever buy a daily paper - once a week - and then it is the Independent (especially if some jazz player has just died, like Miles last week; fascinating obit by Ian Carr in the independent) or the FT.)
Opposite the second stop in Malden Road - at the junction with Prince of Wales Road - there is a pub. This is called the Fiddler's Elbow; but it used to be called the Old Mother Shipton. I have seen this name on pubs elsewhere, but I have no idea who - or what - Mother Shipton was; and I don't now why the name was changed. Perhaps Shipton was a slave, and the name was changed because of a decision to lessen racial tension; or maybe she was a witch, and wary of the women's lobby, the brewers decided to act first. Maybe it just had a change of style, a new name for a new decade; but I have never been inside the building, so I cannot say whether the style really has changed, or it is just the facade that is new.
The bus carries on south, down Ferdinand Street; a curious latin touch in the grey of Chalk Farm. There is a large building site across the Chalk Farm Road; the bulldozers and JCBs play like children in a sandpit, moving piles of brown earth around. I don't know what they are building; some kind of road, maybe to feed a new office development or a supermarket. The railway - part of the mainline to Euston, or a branch of the line that travels across north London - goes through here, on a viaduct, and they are building a bridge to hold it up (maybe the viaduct wasn't sufficiently hi-tech). The bridge grew day by day, the lines being supported by joists and scaffolding, looking all the more like a Hornby trainset.
The next busy stop is Camden Town; here the buildings start to get interesting; and here the first people start to get off - the load lightens, and the journey becomes quicker. But the changeover takes time, as people struggle for a place on the bus, and others push their way off. It is chaos, with several different buses picking up from several stops, and cars trying to edge around the stacked buses. On the corner is a very high tech barbers shop, all steel and chrome, with mirrors on the two inner wails and windows on the two outer walls. I would hate to have my hair cut there, with the world passing by, inquisitive.
Then the bus turns down Bayham Street; we pass the backs of the buildings on Camden High Street - there is a glimpse of a fascinating curved roof, which is on some building in Albert Street I think, seen through the canyon of Pratt Street; I once looked for it, on the other side of the High Street, but I think the roof is set back from the facade, so that it can't be seen from street level; I couldn't find it, anyhow.
The back of the Camden Palace is painted green, and is a tangle of fire escapes and pipes. On the roof there is a large cupola, like an observatory housing; the building started life as a BBC studio, and I think the dome must have something to do with that. It sits on the roof like a cupric breast (it is even nippled), as if the building was trying to recall the passion of renaissance Florence. The Palace used to be called the Music Machine, and we all used to go down there to see bands play - once or twice a week, when we were teenagers. I saw the Clash play there a couple of times, and the Stranglers, and lots of other bands. Almost yesterday. Opposite the Palace, on Eversholt Street, in the Crowndale Health Centre; this is community health, not some unmarked gym 'n' sauna bazaar. But it too has a beautiful curved glass roof, elegant and shining - it catches light from the rising sun - and makes the building look a bit like a toy model from the sixties, of a nineteen eighties building. (Across the road, behind the tube station is a real low-market sauna. I am intrigued: it seems an odd locale. The sign, sauna, flashes on and off in red neon. There are no windows; and it keeps odd hours. The sordid world of Mornington Crescent.)
Then we have the race down Hampstead Road! The start line is just past three tall blocks of flats (they were redone a year or so ago; now one is red, one is blue, and one is yellow. They have coloured piping on their roofs, strips down the sheer walls; they are wholly colour co-ordinated, and I have wondered whether this extends to the inside of the flats, and maybe their occupants too). The race has lots of contestants, but mainly buses, pest-vans, and cyclists. The buses drive in the cycles-only lane, of course, and from the top deck you can feel the cyclists fear as they feel the bus come up behind them, and see the look on their faces as they quickly glance over their shoulder, into the bullying eyes of the driver. Bus drivers just do not like cyclists; I can't quite tell why - cyclists are much easier to pass, and they drive better than taxi drivers. And they don't scratch the bus when you hit them.
But most of all, the buses vie for position, trying not to stop unless the bell is run - ignoring passengers waiting on the pavement - trying to cross the finish line outside Capital Radio first.
A lot of schoolkids get off outside the Royal Temperance Hospital (besides which is a citizens’ help organisation which has been closed for a couple of years; the windows are grimy, and still show off the same posters that were relevant when the organization closed down). Just opposite are some converted flats, in proud yellow brick. But these are strange: they are heavily protected by spikes and barbed wire, and the windows are securely barred; trendy red bars, perhaps, but bars nonetheless. It gives the street an odd tone, as if one would have to be made to live there. Lower down, there is a large birdcage enclosing a second floor balcony; but I have never noticed any birds in it. Perhaps the bird-owner left, the new owner didn't know what to do with his legacy; or maybe it is another, more far-fetched example of urban paranoia in Euston, designed to keep out burglars rather than to keep in budgerigars.
Warren Street, and the finish line: the traffic lights and the tight curve of the road into the west end mean that the traffic has to slow down. The bus passes an air-vent for the Euston Road underpass. It is covered with graffiti which says, Perry Buckland is innocent. I went to primary school with Perry - his brother Terry was in my year, we used to play together (there was also a sister, Cherry, and another rhyming brother); they used to live in the flats up the road. At school, Perry was a bully, a vicious thug who happily hit anything that moved, especially - and that seems to be a word I have used far too many times today - especially if they were enjoying themselves. He was probably hyperactive too. I can remember being forced by Perry to climb a tree on the Heath which I had no wish to climb at all... Years later, Perry was a bouncer at a Kentish Town club, where he killed someone trying to get in; he was jailed for murder. I don't know if he was guilty: but Perry Buckland was certainly not innocent, not even when he was seven years old.
(I like graffiti: trying to decipher the words and the intention. There is an odd bit of scrawl on a wall in Belsize Park. It says: Vote Tory - Get a Blow Job. I can never quite make up my mind just what this insight into Belsize Park politics is implying - Tories suck? Voting Tory boosts your sex life? It makes me smile every time I read it - two or three times a week. There is another splash of paint on a wall beneath the rail ices at Camden Road; it says, the story of my life. What, I want to know - the blank wall but for a streak of dirt-grey paint? Is it a band - I know that it is book, but no one is going to publicist a second rate book about yuppie life in New York on the grubby walls of Camden. Curiosity; the story of my life.)
Unlike Hampstead Road, Gower Street traffic goes at a snails pace. There are always road works - the London cable service has been busily connecting people along Gower Street, and their staff have put little signs beside their pneumatic drills, Cable London and Murphy - Working for London! - Apologise for any delay. Like fuck. It actually sounds like Cable London are standing for election.
The bus passes Bedford Square - which is circular. It is a beautiful Georgian square, complete on all sides. As the bus leaves the square, it passes the offices of Thames and Hudson. Their steps have a mosaic design; at the main door you can hardly make out the pattern, the tiles worn until the colour and shape has faded; but two doors down is a bricked up door, and on the steps leading to nowhere the picture is clear: two careening dolphins, the firm's emblem, in blue and red.
Down into the shadow of Centre Point - actually its scaffolding at the moment - and the bus starts to empty out in earnest. Charing Cross Road is a mess - old theatres and homeless people in doorways (I feel guilty and angry, both at once) - but at the end of Charing Cross Road, we leave the shadows and enter the sun again. The spire and facade of St Martin’s in the Field are brightly lit, the white stone radiating warmth. The columns of the National Gallery are set back, falling away in perspective. The new building on the south east corner is also bright-white, new sandstone. I don't know whether this is a new building designed to look Georgian (?), or whether they have just put a new facia of stone on an original building; the site was under scaffolding for a long time, and I cannot remember what was there before.
For a while, just when the new Sainsbury Gallery opened (which I really like - it is a superb gallery, and I think the architects who have pooh-poohed it are being pretty elitist) - Aaargh! Now I can't explain the simplicity, the purity of sound, the nature of my favourite piano solo on any jazz record - though I think maybe, several years ago, I taped it for you. It is Monk's solo on Miles' version of Bags Groove, and the notes are just ringing, hypnotically. It is pure musical beauty, enough to make you cry. (Unbearably, now that Miles is dead.)
- for a while, Trafalgar Square was complete on all sides. Maybe for a week or so, perhaps two. Then they put up some scaffolding on Admiralty Arch (I love the view down the Mall to Buck House), and on a building on the corner of Whitehall, and whammy! No more complete square.
Some days, if I am early and the weather is fine, my bus journey finishes here, outside South Africa House. I go down into the tube station, emerging across the square, and walk along the Mall - through the Arch - and across into St James Park. During the summer - when I did this daily - I'd see the same people here, too: there was always an exec talking into his portable phone as he power-strolled along; there was a secretary in jeans and blonde hair moving out into the Mall; there was the madman throwing stones at the pigeons in the plane trees. (The first time I saw him, he scared me: he shouted, I'm gonna get you! I'm gonna get you! - and I thought he meant me.
Then he started throwing his stones into the tree - he almost did get me as they came down through the leaves - and the pigeons rose into the air.)
Across thy park, and sometimes in it, I watched the guards training: marching up and down their parade ground, or running in full kit across the park. The railings to the parade ground sift the light, throwing interesting shadows onto the pavement. A quick stroll past the Queen's little home gets me to my office, opposite Victoria Station.
So here I am - here I am - on my way to work... But I have just got back, and it has been a hard day! Now the music has changed - my anger (I am angry still: but this is different; another kind of energy, now I need pumping up, I need that beat - and the music is changing too) - my anger part fear and part annoyance from looking at the damn computer screen too long (I won't even try to tell what wasn't going right - but it involved long calls from the States - and calls from the States always means more work, cos we can do what they can't - so if they want it done, they call us. Me. But lets face it - if this scene is off, there ain't no way they're gonna offer me that job in Washington..) The music: well, I have dumped the ol' cd, and I put the needle down on the vinyl for some pent up aggression - I got the Clash on now, I've even got the Bunnymen set up for later - and a glass of Grouse beside the keys (old habits) - I could get into this trip, you know...
But I am nearly there - this travelling, wandering mind of mine - just a short way to go; but maybe the most stylish part: we've got Whitehall first - skirting the Whitehall Theatre (where just now they are showing the Blues Brothers - why? for god's sake! what a waste of stage space. So much for art) and down past the first of the Ministries. You can see the River to the left, and across into the City, due to the curves and quirks of the Thames - and lets face it, even her curves have curves - - and past the Offices. They are strange: non places. The Welsh Office, the Scottish Office - they have formal names which I can't remember, as if they are offices of the Offices, not the Office itself; but I doubt that the real power lies in St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh: it hides in the corridors of Whitehall. They are too scared of the Scots - they never could trust foreigners - hell, they can't fail! The buildings are clean - like the market - but what I need, they curse - maybe too clean, part of Westminster's clean up operation (they drench the streets and pavements, so the homeless and the tramps stay in Camden or Lambeth or Hammersmith; the West End is spotless. Can't fail). The Guards march across Horse Guards', or sit, blood red, on their meek horses.
NOW! Glance left - quick - and the dome of St Paul's moves swiftly through the view, eclipsing tile NatWest Tower and the other skyscrapers (god the planners screwed up after the war: in their rush to rebuild the ruins of the City - and all the other cities - they left their style at home. They should have had zoning, they should have taken down the tallest buildings, they should have had some foresight) - and it is inspiring, a beautiful warming sight. I hate to admit it, but maybe even Charlie-baby is right! Forget the modernism - the post- deconstructionist self referential image makers (marble is money, at least in the City: you want influence, get Italian pink marble), their own tune, they don't illuminate. Maybe in 50 years - 100 years - they'll love the buildings that simply amuse me - maybe the public are behind their own time. Or maybe a smile is all they can give me - like a half remembered in-joke (hell! do they know why they put all those circular windows there?).
I recently took a river trip from the City Airport down passed Greenwich, passed Canary Wharf, down by Jacobs Island (buildings I know well - I used to do their audit, three weeks south of the river on Jamaica Wharf and Butlers Wharf; and there are some great building, some fascinating design - the curves, waves, angles and lines - but there it fits. Set it against St Paul's and its pissing in the river; the skyscrapers are like moths around a candle, and in the morning they are dead. Part of me loves... part of me loves Canary Wharf, the whole mad-cap idea of it, the arrogance, the hubris, the very ostentation - because it is there! What I hate, is the way you can see it from all over London - seen from Primrose Hill or Denmark Park, it looks wrong; from the river, from London Bridge at sunset when the windows light up pink against the fading sky and the steel grey of Belfast's guns - it is beautiful.
(Maybe I am thankful: big ideas spring from big buildings. Maybe I am just not sure if I like those ideas.)
Downing Street - and on the way home, I saw Mr Major talking into a microphone as the bus crawled home (the American tourists were in heaven - oh! gosh) - in these days of evil presidents, lately one or two... waiting to be melted down. I'll give away no secrets: no Scotland Yard here. Oh no. Past the old town houses, we drift into Parliament Square; and I check the time by Big Ben - a nervous reaction, I can't help it, my neck just flicks to the left, I glance at the clock face, I smile at the gold, and my hand reaches into my own pocket and pulls out my watch, I glance down - but hell, I already know the time - nearly at the office now - going up! (going down) I watch the policemen letting the cars into the Houses of Parliament carpark, tipping their hats; I can never see who is in the car (but what hurts is, I care!). I look at the fresh-cleaned stone of the Abbey, and - crying hold me - on the Presbytery beside, I look at the sundial, never able to tell the time from it - means nothing! - in the service of the king - your lover will not be around anymore - and, how I wish I believed - in anything: just to feel that force of belief! That wall of sound - the certainty that one is right... Trouble is, even with my cynical view, I usually am!
(A couple of weeks ago, unconnected, I came across two religious events. They were both odd - one was deliberately on public view, a march through Camden Town. I was in my barber's on Pratt Street, and I watched it pass by in the mirror, without my glasses. Everyone there smiled, laughed even, as the floats went by. But I envied those people their faith, even as I laughed: it gave them the energy, the passion, to stand up and be laughed at. Later that evening, on my way to meet Ms Perfect in a tapas bar down on Kensington Park Road, I walked by a private religious ceremony in a flat on the Groove; I watched through the curtains, and again I was envious. Live could be so simple! They are lucky; to be rid of all that guilt, to deny self action so much.
What do I believe in? I even doubt reality - it really doesn't exist. I know what I see, but I know someone sees something else - I know what I feel - do I not bleed? - but no one else feels that too. When Sartre died, I wore black; when Miles died, I sat up playing 'Prayer (Oh Dr Jesus)' over and over again.
Jeez, I believe in those chords - bah-da - do dah-da do daah - play it - instant tears, that tone. I believe!) But I 'm not a holy man: I'm not ready for that. Why take a chance? And I'm not down! Everythin' gonna be alright.
Victoria Street - there is little there - we go by Westminster School and then the DOE - German gets out, there are no more civil servants; by Army and Navy, the top deck is empty, just me and one or two others. I get off after that, and fight my way against the tide of people coming from the station. I walk through the bus station; the same tramps are there each day, sitting in their doorways with their station trolleys (bongo jazz a speciality); content.
And that too I don't want - never content! Never stationary - and there is only one thing I can say - no way - I need new clothes - somewhere to stay - but she don't understand my point of view; and there is nothing I can do - And across the road - skipping the traffic like some wild child - fuck those red lights and the tourists waiting for the green man (they missed that a long time ago) - and if I said I had lost my way - across the street, under the scaffolding (jumbled up) through the rotating door - miss the lift, always on the eighth floor - running up the stairs, punch the code - things are wrong...
Is this the blues I am singing? First I want a kiss - then I want it all...
The everyday thing - this happens everyday - every working day, anyhow, and a few times at weekends too. Going to work - a simple process, but fascinating: watching the world go by. It interests me, this process - partly because I see motion and movement as crucial to my character - one reason perhaps I will never truly settle (until, perhaps, I find someone with whom I want to settle?) - and I define myself in part by movement, by walking, and by watching things change as I move. (They move too, of course, in their own speed, in their way; sometime watching me change as I pass by.)
There are two ways to get to work, and each of those has two alternative routes. I prefer the bus, but when if I am busy at work, I will take the tube; it gets me there about half an hour earlier, and is more hurried, more intense, so I think I may arrive at my desk slightly more flustered, but more ready to do battle with the phones and computers.
The bus: the bus down to the office leaves from South End Green, five minutes away. I walk passed nurses coming off their night shift, looking tired, almost hostile, as if the world has just been too painful for the last twelve hours that the one thing they can't bear to see are the trees in the sunshine. I walk passed the smell of freshly baked bread - always tempted to go in and buy a donut - and across the zebra crossing; I cross the road arrogantly, daring the cars not to stop - though they always do - and I barely look at them.
They only ever contain one or two people unless it is a car doing the school run, when there will be four or five kids in the back, and a hassled looking woman, thirty-five or fortyish, in the front. These cars always seem to be BMW, Mercedes, or Volvo estates. Presumably the parents - always mothers (they wouldn't let the an-pair drive the BMW) - share this chore; I would hate to think that one woman could have four fourteen year old boys in one family. I can't quite understand why the kids aren't forced to walk to school - especially in the rain... But this walk is always sunny, anyway: if it is raining, it is easier to take the tube.
There is usually a loosely defined queue at the bus stop, and several empty, parked buses. I tend to get to the stop at roughly the same time - just gone 8.15 - unless I have somehow managed to get everything done more quickly - the half hour bath, maybe ironing a shirt (if I haven't been bothered to do it all in one, two-weekly supply, go), breakfast of strong coffee and muesli.
(Last week, after the curtains went up on this new scene, I was an hour and a half late in getting up - I had a shower instead, skipped breakfast and dashed to the tube - but I was in work at the same time; though too hung over, too tired, and far too excited to get much done. Sixteen again; a teenage nightmare.)
I tend to see the same people on the bus, especially those who get on at South End Green: there is the tall blonde (she gets off at Leicester Square; she always seems to be at the stop before me); a handful of civil servants (they carry OHMS standard issue brief cases, and all get off in Whitehall or, more commonly, the top of Victoria Street; there a couple of large ministry departments around there - the DTI, the MoD, the DOE and the DSS - full of minor people, whilst the figureheads sit in Whitehall). A couple of stops down the line, there is a dark germen girl who gets on: she is slightly dumpy, but friendly - she smiles as she sits down, and we look to see what book the other is reading (I assume she is German; the letters she receives are, but she reads Penguin classics, mainly); she is a curious contrast to the blonde, who is very good looking (great legs...) but never smiles or glances out of the window, engrossed instead in the Independent which she holds over her crossed legs.
There is a black woman, her hair done up in multicolour braids, who exudes self confidence guaranteed by her stylish looks and tight clothes. She fiddles with her fingers at her mouth - waiting for the bus, she smokes - and she too reads.
At Mornington Crescent, there is a black kid of about ten who gets on. and always sits at the front even if there are spaces somewhere else (only kids can do that; an adult would get dirty looks if they sat next to someone when there was plenty of space); he energetically watches out of the window, sitting sideways on the seat, and he gets off at Warren Street.
Sometimes, there is a guy of forty or so with his young kid; the kid is bright - always asking questions - and the man answers, clearly, trying to explain what is going on - what a particular poster is advertising (the kid was particularly taken by a series of ads which showed animals made out of wool - all bright colours - a snake, a whale, a lion, a tiger - to prove how clean Whisk! would get woollens. The kid would shout out the name of the animal as we drove passed - whale! snake!). The boy has an American accent, the father an English one. I get the feeling - why, I don't know - that he is a single parent - divorced? widowed? - and that he only sometimes does the job of taking his son to school, maybe if his regular ride can't make the trip. There is something warming about the fact that the father doesn't drive a car. They get out at the top of Gower Street, outside University College.
There are a couple of couples, too; one young, another older - slightly - but so much more pleasant. The younger couple are ill matched - he is about 6'6'' and he talks; she is about 5'4'' and she doesn't. They are a couple, but they hardly seem to know each other: he lectures her, holding forth about this and that in an irritatingly loud voice (much more annoying than the treble hiss of a hundred walkmen), and the other passengers have no choice but to listen. They once met another friend on the bus, an American lawyer, and spent 25 minutes discussing all the different food shops they knew, and what was best where; it was the most nauseating conversation I had heard in a long time - full of food pretensions and irritating attitudes - let them eat petit fois - and darling. if you haven't had bagels from the Rosslyn Deli you haven't lived. It was in total quite awful; I seriously thought I was going to throw up. The guy is, to my shame, an accountant; he now works in the City - possibly a merchant banker - and he wears barbour jackets and suede hats. I think she is also an accountant; and I have the feeling that they have been going out with each other since they were at university, and throughout their training; jeez! Has she had to put up with that for five years? Why on earth does she do it? The other couple I see are older - thirty five I'd say - and much nicer; maybe they just make me feel romantic - they seem so in love! They must be having an affair, or maybe they are both divorced or something - even the way they hold hands seems to have an illicit quality about it. They smile and whisper, and brighten the bus up.
I see all these people because we all sit at the front of the bus, on the top deck. I have retained a childlike obsession for the top deck and the front.
From down stairs, there is no view, no spectacle - no entertainment value.
From the top, the journey is full of events and things to look at - people, buildings, the sky; and it is easier to read than on the bottom deck, which gets crowded with standing passengers cramming on.
We all get seats - the bus starts in Hampstead - except maybe the black kid (perhaps when there are no seats on top, he has to stand downstairs, saddened that he can't watch the traffic go by on the Hampstead Road, or watch the trains leaving Euston station as the tracks go into the tunnel beneath the road). The blonde and I have the same favoured seat - the front left, where you can watch the pavement, and catch the sun in you face; since she is at the stop when I get there, she gets the seat - I take the right hand, and the German girl seems to sit beside me, if it is free (it usually is).
I read; I look out of the window; I look around at the other passengers (inventing their stories; asking questions of them, silently, to salve my curiosity). I watch the cars and vans in the morning traffic, jostling for space.
The bus journey follows the same pattern a bit like the traffic: it gets crowded quickly, only people getting on to start with, paying the driver or flashing their passes as they stagger on.
(I am now onto Bruckner - everything I listen to has to have a strong rhythm - and this is really powerful stuff - ba-dah de dab! - lots of brass and tympani (bum bom bom BOM) taken the theme with the strings relegated to keeping the chords in the background going. Wow.)
There is always a big crowd waiting to get on at the two stops in Malden Road, an amorphous queue of unhealthy and ill-dressed people. Just a mile from Hampstead, and the charade is totally changed; the people here look like they don't enjoy life. Although I see the same people waiting to get on each day, I have no real thoughts on them - the seats on the top are all taken now, so they are forced to stand downstairs (almost a comment on the class structure, that!): I never hear their conversations; I never see which papers they are reading. (And I have long ago learnt not to generalise about what papers people read: you see site labourers reading the Guardian avidly, teachers reading the Sun and bankers reading the Sport. Me, I hardly ever buy a daily paper - once a week - and then it is the Independent (especially if some jazz player has just died, like Miles last week; fascinating obit by Ian Carr in the independent) or the FT.)
Opposite the second stop in Malden Road - at the junction with Prince of Wales Road - there is a pub. This is called the Fiddler's Elbow; but it used to be called the Old Mother Shipton. I have seen this name on pubs elsewhere, but I have no idea who - or what - Mother Shipton was; and I don't now why the name was changed. Perhaps Shipton was a slave, and the name was changed because of a decision to lessen racial tension; or maybe she was a witch, and wary of the women's lobby, the brewers decided to act first. Maybe it just had a change of style, a new name for a new decade; but I have never been inside the building, so I cannot say whether the style really has changed, or it is just the facade that is new.
The bus carries on south, down Ferdinand Street; a curious latin touch in the grey of Chalk Farm. There is a large building site across the Chalk Farm Road; the bulldozers and JCBs play like children in a sandpit, moving piles of brown earth around. I don't know what they are building; some kind of road, maybe to feed a new office development or a supermarket. The railway - part of the mainline to Euston, or a branch of the line that travels across north London - goes through here, on a viaduct, and they are building a bridge to hold it up (maybe the viaduct wasn't sufficiently hi-tech). The bridge grew day by day, the lines being supported by joists and scaffolding, looking all the more like a Hornby trainset.
The next busy stop is Camden Town; here the buildings start to get interesting; and here the first people start to get off - the load lightens, and the journey becomes quicker. But the changeover takes time, as people struggle for a place on the bus, and others push their way off. It is chaos, with several different buses picking up from several stops, and cars trying to edge around the stacked buses. On the corner is a very high tech barbers shop, all steel and chrome, with mirrors on the two inner wails and windows on the two outer walls. I would hate to have my hair cut there, with the world passing by, inquisitive.
Then the bus turns down Bayham Street; we pass the backs of the buildings on Camden High Street - there is a glimpse of a fascinating curved roof, which is on some building in Albert Street I think, seen through the canyon of Pratt Street; I once looked for it, on the other side of the High Street, but I think the roof is set back from the facade, so that it can't be seen from street level; I couldn't find it, anyhow.
The back of the Camden Palace is painted green, and is a tangle of fire escapes and pipes. On the roof there is a large cupola, like an observatory housing; the building started life as a BBC studio, and I think the dome must have something to do with that. It sits on the roof like a cupric breast (it is even nippled), as if the building was trying to recall the passion of renaissance Florence. The Palace used to be called the Music Machine, and we all used to go down there to see bands play - once or twice a week, when we were teenagers. I saw the Clash play there a couple of times, and the Stranglers, and lots of other bands. Almost yesterday. Opposite the Palace, on Eversholt Street, in the Crowndale Health Centre; this is community health, not some unmarked gym 'n' sauna bazaar. But it too has a beautiful curved glass roof, elegant and shining - it catches light from the rising sun - and makes the building look a bit like a toy model from the sixties, of a nineteen eighties building. (Across the road, behind the tube station is a real low-market sauna. I am intrigued: it seems an odd locale. The sign, sauna, flashes on and off in red neon. There are no windows; and it keeps odd hours. The sordid world of Mornington Crescent.)
Then we have the race down Hampstead Road! The start line is just past three tall blocks of flats (they were redone a year or so ago; now one is red, one is blue, and one is yellow. They have coloured piping on their roofs, strips down the sheer walls; they are wholly colour co-ordinated, and I have wondered whether this extends to the inside of the flats, and maybe their occupants too). The race has lots of contestants, but mainly buses, pest-vans, and cyclists. The buses drive in the cycles-only lane, of course, and from the top deck you can feel the cyclists fear as they feel the bus come up behind them, and see the look on their faces as they quickly glance over their shoulder, into the bullying eyes of the driver. Bus drivers just do not like cyclists; I can't quite tell why - cyclists are much easier to pass, and they drive better than taxi drivers. And they don't scratch the bus when you hit them.
But most of all, the buses vie for position, trying not to stop unless the bell is run - ignoring passengers waiting on the pavement - trying to cross the finish line outside Capital Radio first.
A lot of schoolkids get off outside the Royal Temperance Hospital (besides which is a citizens’ help organisation which has been closed for a couple of years; the windows are grimy, and still show off the same posters that were relevant when the organization closed down). Just opposite are some converted flats, in proud yellow brick. But these are strange: they are heavily protected by spikes and barbed wire, and the windows are securely barred; trendy red bars, perhaps, but bars nonetheless. It gives the street an odd tone, as if one would have to be made to live there. Lower down, there is a large birdcage enclosing a second floor balcony; but I have never noticed any birds in it. Perhaps the bird-owner left, the new owner didn't know what to do with his legacy; or maybe it is another, more far-fetched example of urban paranoia in Euston, designed to keep out burglars rather than to keep in budgerigars.
Warren Street, and the finish line: the traffic lights and the tight curve of the road into the west end mean that the traffic has to slow down. The bus passes an air-vent for the Euston Road underpass. It is covered with graffiti which says, Perry Buckland is innocent. I went to primary school with Perry - his brother Terry was in my year, we used to play together (there was also a sister, Cherry, and another rhyming brother); they used to live in the flats up the road. At school, Perry was a bully, a vicious thug who happily hit anything that moved, especially - and that seems to be a word I have used far too many times today - especially if they were enjoying themselves. He was probably hyperactive too. I can remember being forced by Perry to climb a tree on the Heath which I had no wish to climb at all... Years later, Perry was a bouncer at a Kentish Town club, where he killed someone trying to get in; he was jailed for murder. I don't know if he was guilty: but Perry Buckland was certainly not innocent, not even when he was seven years old.
(I like graffiti: trying to decipher the words and the intention. There is an odd bit of scrawl on a wall in Belsize Park. It says: Vote Tory - Get a Blow Job. I can never quite make up my mind just what this insight into Belsize Park politics is implying - Tories suck? Voting Tory boosts your sex life? It makes me smile every time I read it - two or three times a week. There is another splash of paint on a wall beneath the rail ices at Camden Road; it says, the story of my life. What, I want to know - the blank wall but for a streak of dirt-grey paint? Is it a band - I know that it is book, but no one is going to publicist a second rate book about yuppie life in New York on the grubby walls of Camden. Curiosity; the story of my life.)
Unlike Hampstead Road, Gower Street traffic goes at a snails pace. There are always road works - the London cable service has been busily connecting people along Gower Street, and their staff have put little signs beside their pneumatic drills, Cable London and Murphy - Working for London! - Apologise for any delay. Like fuck. It actually sounds like Cable London are standing for election.
The bus passes Bedford Square - which is circular. It is a beautiful Georgian square, complete on all sides. As the bus leaves the square, it passes the offices of Thames and Hudson. Their steps have a mosaic design; at the main door you can hardly make out the pattern, the tiles worn until the colour and shape has faded; but two doors down is a bricked up door, and on the steps leading to nowhere the picture is clear: two careening dolphins, the firm's emblem, in blue and red.
Down into the shadow of Centre Point - actually its scaffolding at the moment - and the bus starts to empty out in earnest. Charing Cross Road is a mess - old theatres and homeless people in doorways (I feel guilty and angry, both at once) - but at the end of Charing Cross Road, we leave the shadows and enter the sun again. The spire and facade of St Martin’s in the Field are brightly lit, the white stone radiating warmth. The columns of the National Gallery are set back, falling away in perspective. The new building on the south east corner is also bright-white, new sandstone. I don't know whether this is a new building designed to look Georgian (?), or whether they have just put a new facia of stone on an original building; the site was under scaffolding for a long time, and I cannot remember what was there before.
For a while, just when the new Sainsbury Gallery opened (which I really like - it is a superb gallery, and I think the architects who have pooh-poohed it are being pretty elitist) - Aaargh! Now I can't explain the simplicity, the purity of sound, the nature of my favourite piano solo on any jazz record - though I think maybe, several years ago, I taped it for you. It is Monk's solo on Miles' version of Bags Groove, and the notes are just ringing, hypnotically. It is pure musical beauty, enough to make you cry. (Unbearably, now that Miles is dead.)
- for a while, Trafalgar Square was complete on all sides. Maybe for a week or so, perhaps two. Then they put up some scaffolding on Admiralty Arch (I love the view down the Mall to Buck House), and on a building on the corner of Whitehall, and whammy! No more complete square.
Some days, if I am early and the weather is fine, my bus journey finishes here, outside South Africa House. I go down into the tube station, emerging across the square, and walk along the Mall - through the Arch - and across into St James Park. During the summer - when I did this daily - I'd see the same people here, too: there was always an exec talking into his portable phone as he power-strolled along; there was a secretary in jeans and blonde hair moving out into the Mall; there was the madman throwing stones at the pigeons in the plane trees. (The first time I saw him, he scared me: he shouted, I'm gonna get you! I'm gonna get you! - and I thought he meant me.
Then he started throwing his stones into the tree - he almost did get me as they came down through the leaves - and the pigeons rose into the air.)
Across thy park, and sometimes in it, I watched the guards training: marching up and down their parade ground, or running in full kit across the park. The railings to the parade ground sift the light, throwing interesting shadows onto the pavement. A quick stroll past the Queen's little home gets me to my office, opposite Victoria Station.
So here I am - here I am - on my way to work... But I have just got back, and it has been a hard day! Now the music has changed - my anger (I am angry still: but this is different; another kind of energy, now I need pumping up, I need that beat - and the music is changing too) - my anger part fear and part annoyance from looking at the damn computer screen too long (I won't even try to tell what wasn't going right - but it involved long calls from the States - and calls from the States always means more work, cos we can do what they can't - so if they want it done, they call us. Me. But lets face it - if this scene is off, there ain't no way they're gonna offer me that job in Washington..) The music: well, I have dumped the ol' cd, and I put the needle down on the vinyl for some pent up aggression - I got the Clash on now, I've even got the Bunnymen set up for later - and a glass of Grouse beside the keys (old habits) - I could get into this trip, you know...
But I am nearly there - this travelling, wandering mind of mine - just a short way to go; but maybe the most stylish part: we've got Whitehall first - skirting the Whitehall Theatre (where just now they are showing the Blues Brothers - why? for god's sake! what a waste of stage space. So much for art) and down past the first of the Ministries. You can see the River to the left, and across into the City, due to the curves and quirks of the Thames - and lets face it, even her curves have curves - - and past the Offices. They are strange: non places. The Welsh Office, the Scottish Office - they have formal names which I can't remember, as if they are offices of the Offices, not the Office itself; but I doubt that the real power lies in St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh: it hides in the corridors of Whitehall. They are too scared of the Scots - they never could trust foreigners - hell, they can't fail! The buildings are clean - like the market - but what I need, they curse - maybe too clean, part of Westminster's clean up operation (they drench the streets and pavements, so the homeless and the tramps stay in Camden or Lambeth or Hammersmith; the West End is spotless. Can't fail). The Guards march across Horse Guards', or sit, blood red, on their meek horses.
NOW! Glance left - quick - and the dome of St Paul's moves swiftly through the view, eclipsing tile NatWest Tower and the other skyscrapers (god the planners screwed up after the war: in their rush to rebuild the ruins of the City - and all the other cities - they left their style at home. They should have had zoning, they should have taken down the tallest buildings, they should have had some foresight) - and it is inspiring, a beautiful warming sight. I hate to admit it, but maybe even Charlie-baby is right! Forget the modernism - the post- deconstructionist self referential image makers (marble is money, at least in the City: you want influence, get Italian pink marble), their own tune, they don't illuminate. Maybe in 50 years - 100 years - they'll love the buildings that simply amuse me - maybe the public are behind their own time. Or maybe a smile is all they can give me - like a half remembered in-joke (hell! do they know why they put all those circular windows there?).
I recently took a river trip from the City Airport down passed Greenwich, passed Canary Wharf, down by Jacobs Island (buildings I know well - I used to do their audit, three weeks south of the river on Jamaica Wharf and Butlers Wharf; and there are some great building, some fascinating design - the curves, waves, angles and lines - but there it fits. Set it against St Paul's and its pissing in the river; the skyscrapers are like moths around a candle, and in the morning they are dead. Part of me loves... part of me loves Canary Wharf, the whole mad-cap idea of it, the arrogance, the hubris, the very ostentation - because it is there! What I hate, is the way you can see it from all over London - seen from Primrose Hill or Denmark Park, it looks wrong; from the river, from London Bridge at sunset when the windows light up pink against the fading sky and the steel grey of Belfast's guns - it is beautiful.
(Maybe I am thankful: big ideas spring from big buildings. Maybe I am just not sure if I like those ideas.)
Downing Street - and on the way home, I saw Mr Major talking into a microphone as the bus crawled home (the American tourists were in heaven - oh! gosh) - in these days of evil presidents, lately one or two... waiting to be melted down. I'll give away no secrets: no Scotland Yard here. Oh no. Past the old town houses, we drift into Parliament Square; and I check the time by Big Ben - a nervous reaction, I can't help it, my neck just flicks to the left, I glance at the clock face, I smile at the gold, and my hand reaches into my own pocket and pulls out my watch, I glance down - but hell, I already know the time - nearly at the office now - going up! (going down) I watch the policemen letting the cars into the Houses of Parliament carpark, tipping their hats; I can never see who is in the car (but what hurts is, I care!). I look at the fresh-cleaned stone of the Abbey, and - crying hold me - on the Presbytery beside, I look at the sundial, never able to tell the time from it - means nothing! - in the service of the king - your lover will not be around anymore - and, how I wish I believed - in anything: just to feel that force of belief! That wall of sound - the certainty that one is right... Trouble is, even with my cynical view, I usually am!
(A couple of weeks ago, unconnected, I came across two religious events. They were both odd - one was deliberately on public view, a march through Camden Town. I was in my barber's on Pratt Street, and I watched it pass by in the mirror, without my glasses. Everyone there smiled, laughed even, as the floats went by. But I envied those people their faith, even as I laughed: it gave them the energy, the passion, to stand up and be laughed at. Later that evening, on my way to meet Ms Perfect in a tapas bar down on Kensington Park Road, I walked by a private religious ceremony in a flat on the Groove; I watched through the curtains, and again I was envious. Live could be so simple! They are lucky; to be rid of all that guilt, to deny self action so much.
What do I believe in? I even doubt reality - it really doesn't exist. I know what I see, but I know someone sees something else - I know what I feel - do I not bleed? - but no one else feels that too. When Sartre died, I wore black; when Miles died, I sat up playing 'Prayer (Oh Dr Jesus)' over and over again.
Jeez, I believe in those chords - bah-da - do dah-da do daah - play it - instant tears, that tone. I believe!) But I 'm not a holy man: I'm not ready for that. Why take a chance? And I'm not down! Everythin' gonna be alright.
Victoria Street - there is little there - we go by Westminster School and then the DOE - German gets out, there are no more civil servants; by Army and Navy, the top deck is empty, just me and one or two others. I get off after that, and fight my way against the tide of people coming from the station. I walk through the bus station; the same tramps are there each day, sitting in their doorways with their station trolleys (bongo jazz a speciality); content.
And that too I don't want - never content! Never stationary - and there is only one thing I can say - no way - I need new clothes - somewhere to stay - but she don't understand my point of view; and there is nothing I can do - And across the road - skipping the traffic like some wild child - fuck those red lights and the tourists waiting for the green man (they missed that a long time ago) - and if I said I had lost my way - across the street, under the scaffolding (jumbled up) through the rotating door - miss the lift, always on the eighth floor - running up the stairs, punch the code - things are wrong...
Is this the blues I am singing? First I want a kiss - then I want it all...
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Date: 2009-05-03 12:42 pm (UTC)