Bleibenblurb II

Over the weekend I watched a Dr Who episode where the Doctor and his assistant are living in 2 worlds, both of which feel very real. They have to choose which one is real and which is the dream. If they die in the dream, they wake up in the real world, but if they die in the real world then they just "die, stupid."
Basically, their lives are at stake.

This episode got me thinking about the nature of travelling and the life narrative. Normally, when tourists travel to another country, they stitch their journey-chapter into their narrative; when they return, there will be others who remember the holiday and what was seen and done. Thus the holiday, though in another place, is easily recogniseable as part of the tourist's narrative.

Yet when I travel, to Berlin, to Paris, I do not travel with others from home, who will remember. When I return to London, there are none there who know my life in those other cities, no collective memory of that time, and so it feels as though I am switching lives, walking between worlds. There will be hardly any evidence, save perhaps the inches of dust rolling up in my room, to show that I have been anywhere else at all. I have built up new lives in these other places; made new friends; told new jokes and anecdotes; stocked new kitchen cupboards; formed new favourites; frequented new cafes, bakeries, clubs, cinemas, bookshops.

When Proust wrote of selves proliferating, he was referring to one individual whose various selves were divided by time and age: an older Marcel was able to write down younger Marcel's impressions. Yet for modern travellers, who can reach half way around the world in a number of hours, the multiplicity of selves results from a dislocation, not in time, but in space.
So my sejourn here in Europe is not just a continuation of the narrative; it is a fragment. It is a different life in a different world. I have barely aged between being in Paris and Berlin, yet these are two existences in which I, the "I", is a very different being, in which my worlds are galaxies apart. Even the plane journey felt like a Tardis trip. Viewed through the telescope of time, in hindsight, these two worlds will once again be fragments; anomalies; dreams. They feel so real now but will seem light years away when I go back* - sleepsung, sandy-eyed, awaking from that familiarly elusive Proustian dream - when I return to the milky, familiar cosmos of life in London.


* back in space but forwards in time.

sainsberries and bustivals

The sweet-sweating physicality of it, the way the words run their way around your head without stopping for breath, the way their imprint leaves its inky footprint on your thought-tracks like print from a newspaper, the trace of which will just not leave your fingers.
~~
She would not leave my mind. The bus was heaving with shopping, earphones rollicking as the back of the bus bumps and grinds with modernity. I see streetwise kids spitting music like it’s white fire or fruitstones - the heavy beat of R&B on their phones is a pallid imitation of the real thing: women kids men rapping on the street at Carnival, colours swaying and rubbing, exploding. She got on the bus quickly, heaved her Guantanamo orange Sainsbury’s bags on top of mine on the luggage rack and sat down.

“I’m so sorry, would you like me to move my bags?”

She smiles, her nose gem sparkles at me in the electric light. She has a soft voice that reminds me of sundried apricots, and her skin is the warm brown of light muscovado sugar caramelized. “Nah, darlin’, don’t worry, it’s fine. I just wanna keep my guitar next to me.”

Curious, I sneak a peek at her Sainsbury’s bag. Gluten-free Fairtrade chocolate stars and organic muesli. Her handbag is made of gold-sprayed Coke can ringpulls. I always thought that recycling ringpulls, one of the brash symbols of consumerism, would result in tackiness. Not so: her handbag looks pretty damn fine. She has fashion-friendly sandals and full makeup on, but when she picks up her designer phone it’s to tell someone that she’s been, “In India. Yeah. What’ve I been doin’? You know me, darlin’, pretty much huggin’ trees the whole time. Yeah. Just been to the Southbank actually. Hmm? I was busking. Yeah, thought I might catch some inspiration.”

She is a paradoxical mix of urban and nature-loving, of eco-friendly and consumerist. Here she is, looking like the hottest woman around for miles, on the latest mobile phone with her non-reusable Sainsbury’s bags, yet she is also a tree-hugging busker with a tendency for ethical eating. I love her, because her environmentalism is a positive part of her life, intertwined with having fun and making clothes and music. I love her, because her love of life radiates through her. Her urban and eco, her fashion and ethics, are not conflicting spheres ( I realize): here is someone who loves life, and who also wants to protect it. Who seeks harmony in every sense of the word.

A mother gets on, hauling a baby in one arm and a pushchair in the other. The young woman and I shift our stuff quickly, so she can get on.

Behind me, a South African woman chuckles: “Ladies,” she giggles, “would you ever see men carrying such baggage? Never! Never! We always do the shopping, we always pick up the clothes from the launderette! We always carry the load! Men never carry anything!”

The young sugarbrown woman winks at me. “I don’t do nobody’s laundry, babe!” she exclaims, and we all giggle. I feel sorry for the man hunched up behind us, reading the Telegraph. He is pretty defenceless against our sexism. He is carrying nothing.

London Underground II

She glanced at the man who got on at Goodge Street. City type shoes and handsome face cast into a bored over-boiled sort of mask, mouth turned down, humbug-sucking. He looked heart-stopped, or else had pulled out the stops from his heart & drizzled it dry, draining it away for the six-figure sum he earned at work, the funds he ‘managed’. Yep. He was definitely one of those cityslick sinners who sunk whole companies with their sneaky share trading. She already had the measure of him. He'd snatched the pearl from the purse of his own oyster heart, and sold it for stocks and shares a long time ago.

Of course, within a few seconds he had pulled out the Times. His predictability sickened her, sank in the pit of her stomach. Businessmen will always look like this, and the world will go round and they thrive on money and society showers them with status, though their morals rise and fall with the share price.

Those bigshot Merchant Wankers, Rachel thought, viciously twisting her tongue around a cherry stem. She had taken to knotting cherry stalks in her mouth, as a distraction from her perennial chewing gum habit. A stem snapped in her mouth. She dropped it into her hot cupped palm and stashed it in her pocket. She kept the successfully knotted stalks in her left pocket, and the disappointments in her right. She liked the the unevenly blunt jangle of the pockets against her thighs; she liked the idea that beneath the boring denim exterior she carried unpredictable hand-delves of colour.

The doors slid open like a sleek dress, revealing London's shimmering skin. Rachel hurried down the platform, suffused with desire for the shining world around her. She marched along the dirty yellow line at the edge of the platform, using it to navigate past flumes of saris, badly fitting pink shirts , a man’s skinny bottom wiggling unconvincingly in cream denim, women bedecked with gold jewellery and jangling hipsways.

Rachel kept moving – yet the sudden sneaking suspicion of a voice, of a complication, made her turn back. The train doors slammed shut and a swift surprise in the form of an almost- broken nose hit her, hard.

“Oh, shit, I'm so – so – “ Her brown eyes flashed and swelled indignantly, golden flashes of fury like sparks bursting from the brown earth.The bespoke suited man soothed his shoulder where she had collided with it. He smiled and held out a stroke of luck in the palm of his hands.

“You left this on the train, I thought you might want it.” The knotted cherry stem glimmered on his fingers.

43 bus journey

Naath Laaandaan. Get the '43 winding around Tavistock Terrace, Alexandra Road - the automated lady voice seduces me with the sound of memory itself, smoothing the bus short and stopping before a tube station - a park with exercise bikes - a church fete dubbed 'feel good festival' - a shrubless scrubland ironically bearing the words 'Islington was in finals for Britain in Bloom'. The sign shines in earnest, seemingly unaware of its own self-ridicule, and I realise that this concrete cornucopia is the place that I call home.

Hakkasan, London

The chatter of conversation travels up dark mahogany trellises, latticeworks through which light interweaves in Chinese patterns. A woman stands feet apart, stony-faced, freeze-framed and heavily made up. Behind her is what looks like a panel, which she occasionally beats back with her palm like a gong, to reveal a passageway to the bathrooms.

The tables are dark like the latticework, divided by darkness. The diners see and are recognised by waves of light that come from unobtrusive ceiling spotlights above each table, creating a pool of intimacy, enclosing each group's table with dark space, so that they feel they are the only diners being waited on. Diners are encircled in dishes of light as waiters place dishes of food between them.

Alan and I have a marvellous time here. This restaurant is popular and time is tightly kept, each diner only allowed a limited slot in this enchanted space of dark wood and stylish lighting. Mysterious glimmers of smiles and snippets of conversation flit like fireflies across the lake of marble floor. After being served small dishes of food as potent as potions and as bewitching, we are asked to move to the bar. Here the last of our white wine tingles in our glasses as we talk of literature, Proust, cubism, whether Braques beats Picasso, the purpose of words...

I step into the cab, utterly bewitched, and gabble words into my mobile phone as though under a spell. Entranced.

Guardian review, Hakkasan's

Salsa bar, London

Shapes move to a music that sways through the men and women, bouncing the men’s arms and the women’s breasts, flinging feet in an untraceable pattern of steps which, like the trail of kisses across a woman’s body, is led by the men.

This is salsa, only the music is pounding from speakers in a bar in London and the dancers are posers with cowboy hats and bootylicious bodices. This dance is theatre and music combined; the couples entwined enact a courting ritual, a seduction, which the music moves them into, sizzling and swirling around them until the dancer’s identities are sacrificed unto the music, until the dancers are the music ...they move closer into each other’s arms, press up against slick sexy sweaty torsos. Their bodies become curvaceous shimmering shadows in the strange strobe lighting. The music climbs higher; the dancers sway and shimmy more and more...

Men ask us to dance, by way of a possessive hand around our waists and a powerful tug that sends our hearts thudding and our salsa steps landing in a flurry of footprints across the dance floor. Later, sitting in a booth drinking tap water, we get given two raspberry vodka concoctions with three ripe raspberries strung on a cocktail stick across the glass – a strangely rich symbol of desire.

portrait on the tube

Her eyes were silver and slow-moving, orbiting around their sockets, observing all corners of the room. Her cheekbones held rings of fatigue under her eyes, tiredness pooled there in circles like moonlight. These dark lunar rings betrayed her late nights; the moonlight that had kept her company through the wee hours had left traces around her eyes.

They were rimmed with turquoise eye-makeup, meant to disguise the shadows. Her lips were sugary with the fake mint of chewing gum. She was a creature of the rainforest, this luminous woman with her inner strength and tribal loyalty. In the inhuman jungle of the London underground she did not bat an eyelid.

the couple at Waterloo station

He took her hand and they strode onto the escalators, so confident and sure - so in love, so hopelessly in love. On the escalators they held hands and their burning fingers intertwined like interlacing stories, hands crumpled together like the discarded pages of lost books.

He swooped a printed kiss onto her open face, like a word of tenderness scribbled on the page of a notebook. Here. Now. They were writing their own histories, unfolding them in the damp grey morning at Waterloo station, London. There had been lovers before them, and there would be lovers after them, and in some ways they were no different. They were simply another couple on the platform stage, acting out their roles.

And yet: there would be no two people who kissed like this ever again, who looked like this ever again, who felt the same rush of love and pain. On the surface, they were the same as any young couple have ever been; yet they were also two lovers unlike any others, experiencing emotions so new, the world had no words to describe them. For all the critics and their cynicism, for all the linguists and their poems, the English language cannot adequately express love. It cannot reflect feelings in the way that lovers' faces do – in the way that his face did in that moment to hers, in the way that it shone.

don't blink on the tube

“Before buses, railroads and streetcars became fully established during the nineteenth century, people were never put in the position of having to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without exchanging a word.” Georg Simmel.

So I got on the London underground, took a train which sank into the darkness of the tunnel. It was decked with businessmen, prawn faces poking from their crusted suits, swaying as the train swayed. Sitting were women of various sizes and ages, all variations on the same theme: cropped City shorts, blond highlights and tiny handbags. Sitting in rows opposite each other they looked like a baking tray of tarts plumped in the oven.

It suddenly struck me that this was it.
This was the epitome of civilisation: humans jostling in the jaws of this monstrous train, decomposing slowly, trapped in their own technology. Desperate to leave and yet resigned to this dystopia.

No-one moved or smiled. All we acknowledged was the slow grey crank of the escalator, moving us slowly towards the light; all we knew was the hopeless grind of the train. Don't smile, don't catch someone's eye, look away, be ashamed to exist. Remember we live in a bubble of personal space. Burst it and you break the silent code of this cruel city.