EPISODE 931: LONDON CALLING
Sketches from Time Away
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
I was in London much of the last few weeks for some vacation. Today, a few little sketches of my time over there.
“I can’t believe I’m here.”
— Armistead Maupin to a British journalist upon moving to the U.K.
It’s the sounds of London that get my heart racing, and the glimpses of the lives being lived, the existences that I know nothing about. The two women sitting in a nearby booth, one in a pretty knit winter hat, green and red and yellow with a blue tassel, the other in a crimson jumper, both intent on a strange game of cards covered in lines and shapes and blocks of different colors and numbers.
I think this is why I came to London, to remember that there is a rest of the world, and to try and see myself in it, small and happy.
Outside the café, little pops of peach-orange hang down from flower pots, like fireworks that have been given some milk and come home with you.
Paddington Station is madness, a game of Asteroids in a ship with no missiles.
Nothing can compare to the joy inspired by even a brief encounter with a scarce and beautiful wild animal in its natural element. It is not about what I have seen, it’s about forging a momentary connection with the wild, and finding a place in the world for my own wild heart.
—Neil Ansell, The Last Wilderness
What is it about the British and nature writing? They live in a relatively small area, and yet they write of the natural world with a level of observation and curiosity others apply to whole continents, eras of history, or the structure of the universe.
Microscopic in their detail and extravagant in their affection, they uncover the whole of salvation history in a solitary creature, a patch of land.
The pelicans in St. James Park, their beaks like a child’s construction, too long and heavy for an actual neck and head to carry. And how they move through the water—pedaling fast and then simply gliding.
A stone-faced woman in a black top walks to the pond, kneels and pulls out a container full of seed. When she offers a handful of black and white mallard with a handsome brown in its wings goes for it, driving off all others and then digging in, endless pecks. She brings out another handful for him, and another to offer behind her back when he starts to move away.
Her container empty, she looks around, but just with her eyes, like a spy trying to making sure she’s gone unnoticed, then packs up the container, and leaves without a second glance.
“Bit by Liliputian bit it all comes back to him, the lost world of then.”
—Paul Austen, Baumgartner
Traveling to a place you’ve been reveals time capsules you forgot you buried before you left. In mine I find a single word: “Go.”
I imagine some might compare the Tube trains to caterpillar or earthworms, trundling away in the dark. But I like the idea of a long strange hallway in motion, some sad misbegotten cousin of the devices of Harry Potter, its magic so banal and lame no one in the family dares to speak of it.
I’ve spent the last hour wandering through this bookstore, looking for titles to buy. I do this every time I travel, and I never read any of them while I’m there. They’re meant for later, I’ve realized, when I return home. I’m like a squirrel, searching for the nuts I’ll need to survive the winter.
“Pelagic”—a wanderer of the open ocean.
The sounds of men swimming at the men’s pond on Hampstead Heath—the quiet throp throp throp of their strokes, their chuckles that ripple quietly over the water, with none of the harsh and braying qualities we produce elsewhere. Whether because the English are naturally more reticent, or the environment absorbs their volume, their words emerge warm, gentle, happy.
When I jumped into the pond, I was certain I was about to die, the water as cold as I imagined Titanic’s Jack as he tried clinging to Rose’s floating door. Afterward I learn it was 21 degrees Celsius—almost 70 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the lifeguards tells me in winter the ponds freeze, and they cut a path through the ice for the swimmers.
At the pond, I watch a heavyset man in blue trunks dive in, somehow in slow motion, his leap a playful wink at the powers of gravity. “I am free.”
Watching an adult man dive into a pond—arms up like he learned as a boy, then bending and leaping out, is somehow as weird and charming as seeing an elephant or kangaroo for the first time. And once you see it you can’t wait to see it again.
I spend a lot of my swim on my back, simply looking up at the clouds. When I turn over and drop back down into the pond, the cold water on my head feels like a blessing.
Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience.
—James Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
All these happy people at a cafe on a Sunday morning, their conversations overlapping, like a tree at dawn full of birds, all of them keeping me company.
Why is that leaving behind the hotel room of a week’s vacation is such a sadness? We spend so little time actually there over the week, and yet somehow it encapsulates the vacation as a whole, the sense of escape and freedom. “You are where I hid out from the awfulness of the world for a time, and tried to recover.”
Mine had a pretty terrace looking out on broad lefty trees that made the sunlight dance.
As soon as I return home, a thousand practicalities crowd in, pound away their mordant drumbeat. I quickly flee to a bench in central Park, where it is cool and clear. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m still in London, but a part of that same world.
That is the challenge of traveling—to enjoy what you are given, and find a bridge that allows it to be not simply a fairy tale you dreamed for a while, but alive and breathing all around me, like the tiny boy I saw clinging to the head of his father at a café, peering out from around his neck like a happy monkey.
Beautiful observing and writing….
Stunning, Jim! So glad you had the chance
Love u