JOIN USAll good things come to an end, and they did on June 24. On what was the last day of our London holiday, my husband and I walked out of the Baker Street tube station and picked up the London Evening Standard. ‘We’re out’, the headline screamed above a picture of former prime minister David Cameron. The UK had favoured Brexit, and Cameron was out. “And so are we, David,” we said out loud. It was our own Brexit, and the holiday had ended.
However, I knew that I could leave London, but London would never really leave me. The moment I was out of London, I began to miss being there. But what was I missing about the city? It surely was not Buckingham Palace or ‘Changing the Guard’. It was not Big Ben or the Tower of London. I missed the more urgent, everyday stuff. I missed rushing into a tube station, ready with the Oyster, and then rushing down a flight of stairs seemingly effortlessly, but in reality, trying hard to pull off that devil-may-care London look, before figuring out if I had to take the Westbound or the Eastbound.
Mind the gap...
Even though I was in London for a fortnight, once back home, I missed the practised nonchalance with which I’d board the tube and open the London Evening Standard during that short stay. I missed people-watching on the tube. That man in the long overcoat holding the Economist, underlining quotes from a company’s CFO... must have been working in the city, I’d guess. That woman in the green trench coat. “How could she concentrate on her book while people were jostling around on the tube during rush hour?” I wondered as I stared at a row of shoes and sandals in various colours and styles. The focus on shoes was because the unspoken rule on the tube was to never make any eye contact. And if you did, even by mistake, the Londoner always looked away, horrified. And then, the now-familiar ‘Mind the gap’ announcement would have me waiting by the door, and step out.
Back home in Bengaluru, I realised I was missing reading out the names of stations on the Tube app — Queensway, Marble Arch, Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Circus and so on. Missing London was about realising how all these words so easily rolled off your tongue when you were there, and how distant yet close to you they were when you went back to your own city. Some things started off seeming unfamiliar, then you made them your own, only to become unfamiliar again.
To miss the city was to miss the buskers, snatches of the 80s music in a random cafe or in a historic pub, and the instrumental music of Ami Chini Go Chini Tomare in a Bangla restaurant in Marylebone!
The streets, they have stories to tell.
Missing London was to miss walking. Like, we walked one evening from Oxford Circus to Marble Arch, and then rested our weary feet in Hyde Park. Missing London was crisscrossing the labyrinthine streets. Charing Cross Road, Piccadilly Circus, Soho. Missing London was missing the hours spent at bookstores or eavesdropping on random conversations sitting on a park bench. On a typical working day, a group of office girls sat on a park bench in Paddington Garden, and I heard one of them complaining, “I have only 20 pounds in my bank account, you know...” in an Eastern-European accent. She had gone on to discuss her fears around Brexit, and whether there would be jobs left in the city.
Back home in Bengaluru, I continued to hear a “to be honest...” in just the typical manner you would expect a Londoner to say. Of course, it was all in my head. And I was no longer walking the streets of London.
Bleeding London
It was after the London holiday that I discovered Geoff Nicholson’s novel, Bleeding London, and was I glad! The book is an unabashed ode to the great city, and one of the characters, Stuart London, who conducts city walks, writes in his diary: ‘I listened too to the plots and rhythms of place names. What was in them? I heard the cracked narratives of the clothed city: the Mozart estate, not famed for its prodigies or genius; the unsnake-like Serpentine; King’s Cross, Queen’s Park, Prince of Wales Road — places not much frequented by royalty. I saw the slew of history, of kings and pretenders, developers and reformers, visionaries and bureaucrats, martyrs and wide boys...’
Eventually, Stuart decides to walk down every street of London, and has an A-Z map full of crossed-out street names. At some point, he realises that his mission is over, and states, ‘When a man is tired of London, he’s ready for a bullet.’
That day will never come to be for yours truly.