Tubegerm

Tags

optimism, tube journeys

Optimism only gets you so far. The grit of reality has a way of eroding away positive thoughts until it leaves gullies where gloom settles like water. London can be vibrant, exciting, stimulating and cool in unimaginable ways. It can also be hard.

I seem particularly susceptible to the Tubegerm as I like to call it. The Tubegerm is like an alien creature. It can take many forms, seen and unseen, and can attack when you least expect it. The Tubegerm burrows into your soul when you stand wedged on the Northern Line platform at Bank feeling the crowds pouring down the stairs behind you push your toes closer than you’d like towards the edge of the platform and squeaking mice running before the train below. It is that tiny thought which wonders if it would just be a whole lot less exhausting to stop resisting the momentum behind you.

The Tubegerm is a literal germ. It is the coughs and sneezes of millions of people breathing into the heat and humidity of the underground and which you cannot escape as you must breathe, must hold on where they have held. It is the germs you carry with you to work when the Tubegerm has burrowed into your immune system and taken root.

The Tubegerm is the ugly side of human nature which leaves the pregnant woman standing, a thin trickle of sweat dripping onto her ‘baby on board’ badge as she struggles to unbotton her straining coat. It’s the blind person knocked against a wall, stick in hand, by hurried commuters who do not see despite their sight. Its the elderly man with a walking stick and arthritis staggering against a sudden shift in speed as he stands while fitter, younger, stronger people sprawl.

The Tubegerm can infect us all and I am afraid of it wearing me down until I forget about hedgerows and sunsets over hayfields and raindrops beating gently on windscreens.

Coming Home to London

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Home

I think when you move to a new place you only really feel like it is home once you have been away and come home. Although we were away for Christmas, we still had boxes looming at us when we walked through the front door – a depressing sight for anyone! I’ve just been on the Continent for a while for work and I have to say that there was a certain satisfaction in coming home to our London flat. I was tired and grubby and very definitely footsore, but when I got off the DLR and walked around the corner and saw the dock stretching out in front of me, I felt a lifting of my spirits.

The water was as smooth as glass and the lights of Canary Wharf were reflected almost without ripple. A couple of moorhen were making their friendly squeaks to one another, but otherwise it was very quiet – one of the things I love about living where we do in the middle of London. It was freezing outside but walking into our lovely warm home felt welcoming and cosy.

Ultimately, what is home after all? It’s the place where you feel safe and secure, where you can draw the curtains to protect yourself from the outside world or the place where you can throw the drapes open and gaze upon your neighbourhood, your world.

Now that our boxes are unpacked and we (sort of) know where to find things in cupboards and drawers, our flat has become home to me. I might miss the wide open spaces of Africa, the starkness of the Karoo or the sculptured beauty of piles of granite rocks balancing against the Zimbabwean skyline – I might even miss the Chiltern Hills and the swooping flight of the Red Wing Kites, or the vibrate fields of golden rapeseed in the English Midlands, but for now at least home is the fluorescent lights reflecting pink and blue in the water of the dock, and the cry of a single moorhen.

South Bank

Tags

optimism

Today was one of those perfect London days where you suddenly realise what Samuel Johnson meant when he said “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” The Sockwearingenglishman and I had an appointment at London Bridge this morning and so we were up and about and at London Bridge by mid-morning. After our appointment we had a bit of time to spare before I was meeting up with a friend and went wandering about through Borough Market and onto the South Bank.

I believe there is a bit of a thing in London about whether one lives north or south of the river (personally I think living on the Isle of Dogs puts one in a nifty liminal zone, both physically north of the river, but also sneakily south of the city…) But whether one is from the North or the South of London, the South Bank seems to be a place of vibrancy where people of all types can mingle.

We went up and onto London Bridge and I saw through my lovely husband’s eyes that moment when you piece together the London puzzle as he oriented himself against St Pauls, the Gherkin and Canary Wharf and then ambled down under the bridge and along towards the Golden Hinde – a reconstruction of Drake’s famous ship – which honestly fills one with utter respect for anyone who could circumnavigate the world in such a tiny ship. We had a coffee sitting on a bench on the river’s edge, the tide was high and the wind was whipping my hair across my eyes and we were both pink-cheeked with the cold. There is something very sensuous about freezing hands nestled around hot cups of coffee.

SWE had to pootle off home but I met my lovely friend – newly back from Africa and looking tanned and healthy – and we walked along the river towards the Globe. We had lunch near there – overlooking the water – and it reminded me what a powerful force the Thames is in the history of this city. There were speed boats and ferries, touristy boats and police boats. People walking along the South Bank kept stopping to lean over the railings to stare into the water, it holding the same fascination for them as for me. The river was a defensive line, a trade route, a highway and that all-important dividing line between rule and mis-rule many centuries ago.

Although the day dulled from bright wintery blueness to a steel-cold grey, the South Bank only seemed to warm up, that vibrancy and warmth which would have attracted Shakespeare over 400 years ago as keen today.

Back to Work

Tags

commuting, optimism, Working

Yesterday was my first day back at work after the Christmas break and I went to bed full of Positive Thoughts and Good Intentions. Yes, I was going to embrace London, embrace my job, while still finding time for the real me.

I awoke to howling wind (literally at 5 floors up as it whistled around the windows) and smatterings of rain. No worries! I cried, it shall be an invigorating walk to the station!

And so it would have been. I was certainly keeping my chin up on my way to the station, watching the waves on the usually glass-still waters of the dock and enjoying the coziness of my new duffle coat (why did nobody tell me how wonderful and necessary a duffle coat is to life in England?). I watched the birds wheeling against gusts of air or crouching on the jetty with feathers ruffled and was really enjoying myself until nearly fifteen minutes later when I was almost at the station and I realised that I had left my work laptop at home and would have to go back and fetch it. After trudging back home, up the stairs and back down, and then along the dock (head bowed into the wind this time), I found myself 45 minutes later sweating, struggling with my heavy backpack, leaning at an odd angle on a train which had paused for thought for some unknown reason….

In all my optimism I had forgotten one thing – the commute to work!

Blue Sky Day

Tags

happiness, New Year's Resolution, writing

Christmas and New Year are now over and the reality of 2012 is here. It may be mid-Winter and rather chilly outside, but the sky is blue, blue, blue and I can’t help but feel cheerful and bright myself.

So what does this mean for New Year’s Resolutions? I have the usual vague ideas about eating more healthily and getting fit, and all those things that really don’t matter that much. One of the things my parents said to me all the time while I was growing up, was “We just want you to be happy”. And so I think I am going to try to make this rather amorphous statement my New Year’s Resolution – to be happy. Part of this resolution began when I started this blog – for to write is what I have always wanted to do and always done, in a very scared, fragile, private sort of way. So I thought that writing about my move to London would force me into committing to my writing regularly – as well as diarise this life, so far from what I know in my deepest self. So here I am, being happy, fingers tapping the keys and gazing out at two swans floating gently in reflected sky and families walking dogs around the water’s edge.

Perhaps I am not so far from home, right here.