Summer is great. Warm, bright, your brain buzzes with an energy that seems to be from a vast lake of potential and joy. But it can’t last and in the great symphony of elements the earth dries and dust begins to crack the skin. And that’s okay because the rains come soon enough and if you’re lucky to be alive for long enough you begin to see the rains as the blessing that they truly are. The seasons roll on and solve the problems from the last one.
The best place to watch the season turn is the beach, the second, a bar. I’m writing this from my favorite bar on the beach and I know I haven’t written in a hot minute. Yeah, yeah, “writers write” but honestly I’ve not had much to say. I’m from a generation that blogged every random inane thought that drifted across our mtv altered brains. And, honestly, the most brutal comment you could make on a blog post was “so what?” because it was true. Inconsequential thoughts broadcast just to reach out, make contact, feel part of the global web we were told now spanned the world. Ambient intimacy for a culture we were building from broken networks on shitty machines all held together with gaffer tape, spit, and spite.
So I’ve not been writing because I’ve not been doing anything. As some of you know I switched careers at the beginning of last year and I’ve been working since to catch up.
But the seasons are turning and I feel the words in my brain again, so let me tell you about London.
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“I’m up to London so I won’t see you for a couple of three days … are you there?…Are you there?… shes gone”
The lady behind me is speaking loudly into her mobile phone in a way that’s only ever done by people older than me and pricks. But I do love ‘a couple of three days’ and plan to use this riddle of a phrase the first chance I get.
I’m on a train to London for what the Situationists called the Derive, or what my Nan used to call a “mooch”. I suppose I would call this an adventure, not because there is any inherent danger. But because any place is an adventure if you don’t have the safety net of your default places. I’ve often thought the trick to living places isn’t to find the best…whatever, just yours. Not the best balti house, just the one where you know the staff, not the best barbers, but the one your mom’s friend works at so you can get in with no notice. A network of defaults. It cuts bigger places in bite size chunks and gives you a psychogeography of comfort.
London is still an adventure, I have a few haunts but I go so little that I never know if these places will be open when I get there. And the physical geography is impossible to fit into my head. Spending most of the time underground on the tube I have the same grasp of place as how a dog must think an elevator is a magical ‘the world is now different’ box.
The robot voice of the woman announces we’ll soon be at The Shard, but to my midland ears it sounds like she elongates the “a” the “shaaard” like a Terry Thomas insult.
I get off at Thameslink, for no good reason. There’s a vending machine for Huel meal replacement drinks with a giant LCD screen and a giant spinning display bottle on the top. It feels like a piece of street furniture from a dystopian video game. But it’s just Slimfast for gym bro’s.
I spin around for a landmark, in the distance is a building, huge steel and glass thing, but its edges rounded off, Like all tech was designed in the nineties, objects rounded like beach pebbles, mp3 players you could probably swallow with a big enough glass of water. The building sits on the horizon like an apology. My own bit of tech tells me St Brides is close by.
St Brides is known as the “journalist church” located next to Fleet street and often enjoy the healthy contributions from the old white power base. It’s fitting, I’m trying to write more, so I decide to light a couple of three candles in the old charnel house. Nipping through an alley I spot the workmen before I see the church, it’s only eleven but the small church yard is strewn with middle aged men in work clothes chatting and eating sandwiches. Some are looking at their phones, and one even has headphones on staring up at the tall white layered spire, now dwarfed by the building surrounding it. In its day the tallest church spire for miles. It is said (by the promotional literature inside the church) that modern wedding cakes are inspired by the steeple.
Inside it’s bright, so definitely not catholic, the altar piece is dark and I walk up to it to get a better look. My flip-flops slapping against the pristine black and white tiled floor. Suddenly it feels obscene and a little bit vulnerable to be wearing beachwear to the Big City.
The altar piece depicts the crucifixion, moody with chiaroscuro and not fitting with the mood of an otherwise serene calm space. Above that is a back-lit stained glass image of Jesus in a mandorla, which is the vaguely vaginal almond shape framing you sometimes see behind religious icons. This Mandorla is rainbow coloured, the image of Jesus has a thick outline, highlighting the muscles of his torso. It’s, frankly, very gay. And “Twink Christ In a Gay Fanny” is a thought that is almost as sacrilegious as the way my sandals are squeaking across the floor.
They reckon there’s been some sort of church on the site since the seventh century, with it needing to be rebuilt after the Great Fire, The Luftwaffe and various calamities befell it. Some would say in defiance of god. Well , me, I would say that. But it only makes me like the place more. Downstairs you can visit the Roman ruins and the Middle Ages ruins and marvel at other types of ruins that honestly look all the same because when you’ve seen bricks not bricking as well as they used to, that’s pretty much it. At the end of the two rooms are two different worship areas. One that looks like the euthanasia suite on a kind spaceship, the other looks like it could be used for a cult that worships rocks.
As I leave I take one last look, to the left is an altar to all the journalists killed in the Iraq war. There are far too many pictures on it. And, because there is nowhere to light a candle, as I walk past, the plaques on the pews either side of the centre. “Press director” “crusading journalist” and “friend of India”. I make a small dedication to them and myself, to a part of me ive been missing. In a defiant church that manages to be a bright space in the shadow of a city that grew around it. Truth can be hope and hope? Hope is unbreakable no matter how many times you knock it down.
I need boots, I have autism and I’ve been wearing the same type of boots since I was 15, Unfortunately the British Army stopped making them and now they are rare and expensive. I am down to what I fear to be my last pair and although I’ve tried other boots, they become some sort of sensory hell whenever I try them. I’m telling you this to justify why after leaving St Brides I jumped on the tube to Mile End to the nearest Ex Army and Navy store that I found on the internet that was open.
Getting off the tube at Mile End I feel better, I relax in a way that makes me realise I was stressed. I see some, kfc knock off fried chicken places, scrawled none corporate graffiti and corner shops. I never know what to call these shops. Sometimes ‘corner shops’, sometimes ‘newsagents’ — though they’re rarely on the corner, and almost never sell newspapers. It’s a cultural awkwardness, because those that lived through the hateful eighties know what our parents called them. But the eighties was an era of dogshit, decay, and Combat 18 posters — so I’ll take awkward over racist any fucking day.
It feels like people live here. Central London feels like a slick machine designed for extracting value out of human cogs built over a theme park based on a museum.
Following my pocket go-machine I flip and flop up the road to the store.
“Boots? “ I ask pathetically. The woman behind the counter points to a display room with pristine boots on the wall, they’re new. I pick up a boot similar to my usual boot. The label reads “£325” and I nearly drop it in shock.
The sun is shining and with my type of brain it’s hard to call any journey ‘wasted’. At a loss for what else to do I head to Camden for one of three clearly fleshed out reasons in my head
- I’m, at heart, a basic bitch.
- There’s a pizza joint I’ve been wanting to try since I started following them on Instagram
- Maybe boots?
Off the tube at Camden and I look over at Underworld, charmingly there are a group of young people sitting under the scaffolding. What you call these kids says more about you and your age than them, ‘Goths’ ‘emo’ ‘scene kids’ all kinda fit, but they’re the same kids whatever decade you encountered them. Theres the First Love couple, literally all over each other, rolling around and gearing up to the inevitable cycle of tears and apologises that will follow every couple of hours, the heavier friend showing everyone the posters he bought earlier, and the public loner who is desperate for everyone to notice how aloof and disconnected he is. I’ve been all of these people.
I head towards the pizza place and stop at the Hawley Arms, which is quite a bland pub during the day, like most of Camden it only hints at the mecca of cool it has the potential to be once the last tourist train has gone. The skinny bartender with the just so shaggy mullet and the tight black shirt buttoned to the navel is serving the Aryan group of women, all generations of blond clones, like the Midwich cuckoos but with shopping. I want to hate the place, but with the reputation and the memorabilia on the wall, it takes its history seriously but wears it lightly. Behind it there’s a giant mural of Amy Whitehouse that is kinda stunning and sad and good. I think there’s a sadness sometimes to the rock scene, like we failed her, and others, especially when they were struggling so publicly. We find it hard to understand that we managed to save ourselves and that’s not nothing.
The Camden Punk is on the bridge selling photos for beer and change in the way that the punks and goths have been doing since the eighties. But where there was a gang, a movement, there is now one person. A brand in himself, with an instagram and other social media presence. It exemplifies Camden’s journey, the microcosm being the macrocosm. Camden attracts the weirdos that are repelled by the mainstream, the mainstream needs to feel cool so invades the subculture space, brand infests it like a parasite sucking everything that makes it different from the mainstream and shitting out bland corporate approved porridge. The public eat this gruel and with no appetite for real difference the alt crowd move elsewhere. Camden Punk will spray paint the anarchy sign on your denim for change. Thirty years ago he would have done it for free against your will. So it goes.
Checking my portable lie box I realise the pizza place is totally the other direction, it also tells its twenty minutes walk away. Which normally would be ten for me, but in flip-flops it’s going to be closer to thirty. Camden the other way gets realer and realer, the brand virus is still strong but it becomes more mundane and sedate the further away from the station you get. Thirty minutes later I get to the pizza shop, it’s tiny from the outside and not open for another two and a half hours. Bugger.
Later on the tube I notice no one is making eye contact, but it feels comfortable, reverent even. I got on the first train heading south and almost instantly fall asleep. I wake up in a daze. I get off into a sea of navy jackets, white shirts. The tube station is called Bank, and I’m surrounded by sandstone and steel, new sandstone aged to seem old, old sandstone sand blasted to seem new. The streets are devoid of difference. The people however still have glimpses of a human, a not quite covered tattoo, a haircut combed to be more ‘normal’ but with more undercut than is usual. Corporate Culture isn’t a sub-culture it’s the omni culture and it’s everywhere so no one has to come to gawk. I pass a shop called ‘the Salad Project’ and decide my day is done. I’m tempted for one last drink, but every pub is occupied by the enemy’s colours: white shirts, navy and black jackets swarm every one. So I slink out of London, nursing a prehangover.
My feet are sore and dirty. Flip-flops aren’t the right shoes for London, but that’s okay — I’ve found my places, my defaults. London will always be an adventure. Sometimes the best part of summer is the rain, and sometimes the best part of an adventure is making it home.
***
FREE BOOK – I’m trying to get reviews of my latest book Staring Death in the Face: Searching for The Reaper Across Mexico to a nice round number. So I’m giving copies away for free. Just chuck us a message on FB or insta or even email at dan@dirtybristow and I’ll send you one on the promise you say nice things about me on the internet.
or you could y’know buy one anyway. Up to you.
Fab. Made me simultaneously yearn for a trip to the smoke and shudder at the thought of it. x