London: Saturday - "speeding around underneath the yellow lights"

[rhythmaning]

I found myself back in Notting Hill Gate; in a pub.

Not by chance and not out of luck

A familiar pub – the Uxbridge. I was there with J; we were meant to be in Holland Park, which made a little – but not a lot – more sense, but our clever plans were overthrown by the joys of London Underground Limited. Limited indeed. Because on this morning, the Central line extended only as far as Marble Arch due to “planned engineering works”. Every time they told us that in fact the tube was curtailed and if you thought they would take you where you were going, think again - planned engineering works. I wondered whether the rest of the time they did unplanned engineering works. I think they kept telling us that it was planned engineering works so that we felt it was our fault that the bloody tube wasn’t working properly: the implication being that they had been warning us of this for weeks.

They may have been. But I had travelled on the Central on each of the three preceding days (see, I told you it was important), and not one time did I see anything to say that actually, they weren’t even going to try to take me to where I wanted to go on Saturday. Nada. I was very aware that the Northern line wasn’t going past Hampstead – there were posters and announcements and everything, loads of stuff – and I knew the Metropolitan line was screwed too – all those planned engineering works: I think they felt if they were going to piss people off, they would piss as many people off as possible – let’s get all the pain over at once, f*ck ‘em – because I think there were four different lines which were screwed.

I got off at Marble Arch, got on a bus heading west, and called J; I would have been on time had they actually taken me to Holland Park, but now I would be late. We agreed to meet at Notting Hill Gate. The bus edged slowly around Marble Arch and down Bayswater Road: the traffic was incredibly bad (this is why I never drove in London; that, and the fact that I tended to meet people in pubs). By the time we got to Queensway, I realized that I could walk faster than the bus could drive, so I got off and hurried west.

I met J outside a video shop, and he went in to select a DVD for him and his wife to watch later. There was something familiar about the music they had playing in the background: I asked the girl behind the counter if it was Ben Taylor, who I saw supporting Lloyd Cole in October; she looked at me like I was crazy, and told me it was Jack Johnson. This put me in a quandary, because it sounded rather good, and yet I have vowed to hate Jack Johnson, if only because whenever someone says “Jack Johnson”, I immediately think of the radical jazz-rock of Miles’ tribute to Jack Johnson, the first black heavy weight champion.

And then we went to the Uxbridge. We had a pint, and chatted. It was two and a half years since I had seen J&A, and that was at a party in Bristol where I was very, very drunk (with very good reason, which sometime I may explain); so the real last time I saw them would have been when I had probably the worst hangover that I have ever had, the following morning.

J&A have lived around Holland Park for years; they used to live in Princedale Rd, where I once stayed for a weekend, but now they had moved north a bit, north of the Westway, into a small house (as opposed to a flat) – hey! Stairs! – and J drove us there from Notting Hill Gate. I am not too sure why we drove; I mean, I don’t think I needed driving – hadn’t spent part of the two days preceding this one in the area, I could have found my own way; I guess a pre-lunch pint seemed like a good idea. (Well, it worked for me.)

It was a lovely house; it was covered in scaffolding – they were having the loft made into a bedroom for one of their kids – and the joiners were there, building the banisters: they used a large, powerful and somewhat scary nail gun to secure the rods to the banister. It sounded like someone was being shot.

Their two kids wandered in and out – there seemed to be a loose organization with a bunch of neighbouring children, climbing over the garden walls and climbing on the scaffolding.

It was really good to catch up with J&A; they are the only people left in London that I know, really – everyone else has left (Bristol; New Zealand) or is forgotten.

So we sat and talked – a fair bit of reminiscing, I suppose – right back to when J and I first met (one evening in the bar of Robinson College, in Cambridge, where I had run away to escape) – as far as I recall, most of that weekend was spent drunk, listening to Joy Division and the Bunnymen with G, R and J.

Our conversation roamed across all sorts of subjects for a few hours, whilst we ate soup and cheese and drank red wine (me more than J or A; I wasn’t driving!); it was a really good afternoon. We talked a lot about mutual friends, and where they are now ( I dream of you: I wonder where you are now) – how all our lives had changed (the passing of time).

We talked about the internet – and LJ, too: J had been warned by G that I would probably write about meeting up (yeah, you should see the uncensored version!); indeed, when G had told me that he was leaving his job - and I had checked that he was OK for me to write a post about it, he suddenly realised he hadn’t told J, and had to phone him up to let him know, before I started blabbering about it. Yeah, we talked about that too – and what both G and I would be doing, and how we might go about doing it.

It was a good conversation; I like catching up with old friends – that easy familiarity, all the shared experience. I really should do it more often.

J dropped me back at Notting Hill Gate, and I caught the first train south, which took me to Earl’s Court, where I took the first train east. It was full of people just out of Stamford Bridge; there were kids with their hair dyed blue, and lots of Chelsea shirts; they had just beaten Watford 4-0, so they were happy.

I spent the evening at the South Bank again, watching Zoe Rahman.

The tube back was crowded; it was uncomfortable. I don’t really like the tube – it was one of the main reasons I left London (why spend an hour and a half each day half a mile underground if you don’t need to?); a large man sat next to me, his bulk invading my seat. There were drunks on their way to clubs, larking about. It felt claustrophobic.

Sunday was Remembrance Sunday. I had breakfast at Carluccio’s; they didn’t open until 9am – I was early – so I went for a walk: down Downshire Hill, past Keat’s House, where he wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” and, more emotionally for me, past the library next door: I was glad to see it was still: I spent a lot of time in that library as a child – I used to love going to the library, and I used to do my homework there, sometime.

I then walked up East heath Road – past Hampstead Ponds (which I used to walk past on the way to school in Kentish Town) and the Freemason’s Arms, a large pub where we used to spend summer evenings in the garden as teenagers – and back up Downshire Hill.

I sat in Carluccio’s, eating toast and croissant, drinking cappuccino (not as good as I had expected – it was weak) and listening to the Archers on my walkman.

The journey back to Edinburgh was uneventful. I sat reading or writing (I have a rather fun PDA for when I travel; and I have taken to sitting in cafes in Edinburgh, drinking coffee and writing – why do you think my posts are so long?), listening to music (it was jazz on the way back – Tomasz Stanko, EST – and an arrangement of a Shostakovich string quartet for chamber orchestra). For most of the journey, there was a screaming baby right behind me; I turned the music up.

As the train sped north, it rained; and then the sun came out below the storm clouds, low in the sky, and lit up the trees and buildings of the waterlands: the flat ground of Lincolnshire was thrown into relief, the tall spires shining red; even Ferrybridge looked beautiful in the sunset.