It is strange to be in
London again. The gracious old
buildings are the same but marble white instead of the post war black I
remember as a child, thanks to the London clean air policy which prohibits the
coal that used to keep us warm.
Some things are exactly the same and stir up memories of for me. The way the traffic lights have amber
between green and red both ways as if to say as we do “Careful now you’re going
to have to stop’ but also “Wake up now you are going to have to move.” It’s nice. It’s gentle.
The millions of steps to get to platforms on the Tube. I realise how safe everyone must
have felt sheltering down there during the blitz. It’s so deep “You have to be a fit old lady to live in
London” says Sarah, my sister complacently as she watches me puff. Despite these odd bits of effort, life
in London is so bright and easy and as tractionless as a dream. Shops have everything in them and cars
meticulously stop at traffic lights, (unlike in Sydney).
We are staying on
Blackstock Road in Finsbury Park, a Muslim area where even the Subway chain
uses Halal meat. It’s fun. The shopping street is lively and groups of people
hang about talking as well as doing their errands. The greengrocer has an
enormous breadfruit for sale as well as other exotica. It’s good to be here and yet there is a
disturbance in my heart too. It is
perhaps the weird pain of nostalgia – a sadness that the shabby London of my
childhood has developed into this fine place while my back has been turned and
I have been living another life on the other side of the world. I could have belonged to all this but
didn’t, and never will now.
Sarah takes me up a
funny little staircase near the tube station and suddenly we seem to be in the
countryside. It is the beginning
of summer and the wasteland around the train tracks has been allowed to turn
into a meadow. To call it a park
would be a misnomer. It is just
wild flowers allowed to grow amongst the feathers of seeding grass. Sarah and I ritually name them –
“Foxglove, herb robert, love in the mist, teasel, sorrel, hollyhock, blackberry…” We follow the path to the old millpond
near Arsenal Stadium and I am calmed by all the flowers which come up year
after year just as they always used to.
They haven’t modernised and they don’t seem to care about my defection
to Australia. They are just being
themselves.
Despite my anxiety, meeting
my people again isn’t momentous or disturbing . It is lovely and absurdly easy, partly because they’ve all
been reading this blog and I don’t have to do travellers’ tales. The time apart
seems to dissolve and we just slip
into talking about what we are going to do and the puzzles of Brexit which
nobody really seems to understand.
Julia offers me her washing machine for our grubby clothes and Frank says
we are all going out for a Greek meal tomorrow night and Jake and Lizzie will
be there too. Sarah and I lollop
on the bed in our flat and I hear all about her grandchildren and tell her
about mine and we conjur up photos
from our I books. Still lying down we take selfies, covering our double
chins as best we can.
We go out and have a
beer in the Ten Pins where everyone is watching football on a television the
size of a small cinema screen. I
am sleepy afterwards but Sarah, disciplinarian that she is, won’t abandon our
plan to go to a book launch party of a new Sherlock Holmes sequel. Apparently it is all the rage to update
Sherlock Holmes and an editor friend of hers has midwifed this particular one. She
wants to see what such an event is like so she can have one for her books in
time. We go to Truckles, a sort of café bar and take our wine down to the
cellar where everyone is seated in front of the slightly bashful author, along with an actor in a
deerstalker hat holding a violin and Sarah’s friend Kevin who is MC and an actor
too. We are all rather
surprisingly given raffle tickets.
Mine is blue 321. The
prizes are varied, including the Chinese edition of a biography of Benedict
Cumberbatch. "A collector's item" says Kevin.
There is a reading of the
beginning of one of the stories, stopping at a tantalising point and then a
performance by a “Mentalist”, someone who uses the deductive techniques of
Holmes himself to fathom the answers to puzzles. He says it’s a “Soft science”. Various audience members are co-opted to lie or tell the
truth and he sorts them out.
People are given pieces of paper with the name of medical conditions on
them and asked to imagine themselves suffering from them while he scrutinises
their faces. A man has
pregnancy. He guesses right.
Another has an STD. He guesses it.
He holds up the paper for us to read as there are children present. It all goes on slightly long and the
methodology is so complicated that Sarah and I become bewildered. We decide afterwards he needs more
showmanship skills. Then there’s
the raffle and yes my Blue 321 wins a set of four CDs written by four different modern Conan
Doyles. I look forward especially
to “Sherlock Holmes and the Whitechapel Vampire by Dean P. Turnbloom.
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