London, Backward and Forward

Revisiting London with pen in hand

I just returned from the UK, a work trip consisting of a short stint in London for an event and four days in Oxford for a conference. I’d lived in London during college, working on a student visa and sharing a basement flat in Pimlico. Last week, before my professional obligations began, I had some time to stroll around and reflect. Here’s my diary from that day.

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The Brunswick Center, Camden, morning

Breakfast at a café, chicken and leek turnover, cappuccino. It’s 10:00 a.m. and my room at the hotel around the corner won’t be ready for three hours. So I wait and I write. My time until tomorrow’s lunch is unscheduled. Except for sleep.

I’m back in London solo this time. It feels like I was just here, riding the Piccadilly line from Heathrow into Zone 1, so familiar even seven months since last time. Forty years since the time before that.

Time accordions into itself, collapsing into its own gravity, pulling us all along.

The British Museum is right around the corner. I may go but need more coffee. I need to write. Contemporaneous notes are inestimably valuable but I rarely get the time to make them. Press trips especially (ironically) leave no space for thinking and writing, two things that are a writer’s currency.

I’m seated at a small black table on a slatted wooden chair. No padded chairs available, all taken, the café version of haves and have-nots. Some people are working, some tending smiling children. There are a few attractive young professionals, urbane and relaxed even on Monday morning. I slept perhaps one hour on the plane, so would not call myself relaxed. I’ve never been urbane.

I just ordered a second coffee and switched to a padded chair, still warm. My feet are swollen and sore, ankles puffy from the plane. Cramped, no exercise, just the huff from dragging my case and carcass through airport to underground.

At Heathrow a family got onto the Piccadilly car with me and sat opposite, crowding knees against luggage, trying to make themselves small. Americans; a bag tag said home was Nebraska. Mom and dad in their 40s, two sons, maybe 15 and 11. Mom with wavy red hair, not graying yet, tired face. Overnight flight and weight of world. Dad, tall, mysteriously unfatigued. Three big checked bags, one with a Disney World tag, all with tattered ribbons that make them easier to claim on a baggage wheel, ribbons that reveal the family travels sometimes, not just this once. The older boy’s a redhead with freckles and a sweet, pure face, green eyes like his mom. The younger boy, hair almost red, with glasses that make him look older, erudite, striped white and black with red accents. I think he doesn’t enjoy being younger. Both boys seem fresh and sweet and smart. Dad dad-like, staring at his phone, mom closing her eyes, weary, boys with wide faces watching the suburbs of London slide by. I looked at her and him and him and him and thought, that could have been me, been us, in another reality, another dimension, a different life. We could have had two sweet, smart, red-haired boys that we took places, taught things to, showed things to, talked to, raised. I got misty looking into this mirror seeing myself and my husband and the two sweet humans we did not have, did not give birth to and love.

The British Museum is booked all day and also tomorrow morning. Of course. So I must meander the streets, stupefied, before rest.

Neal’s Yard, Seven Dials, late afternoon

I used to eat a hotpot here on my 30-minute break from the Natural Shoe Store around the corner. The yard’s different now, bougie, little metal tables outside the natural wine bar where I was lucky to get a seat on Monday afternoon at 5 p.m. I ordered a glass of Crozes Hermitage Blanc and it’s now arrived, golden-hued, smelling like lemon and oak and salt. It’s the perfect temperature, cool-not-cold, silken, satiny, expansive, expanding. A wine that shakes out its hair, brushes it in the sunlight while I watch.

When I was here as a 20-year-old, I knew nothing about wine. Nothing about anything.