For a long while I’ve been disinclined to write about anything at all. But all of a sudden - just recently – I’ve felt the creativity bubbling up inside me again. (No, it isn’t indigestion, dear.) I feel a renewed sense of mischief; a regained sense of being alive and aware and immersed in the foreign life of a foreign city. It feels wonderful.
The catalyst that brought it home to me so vividly came yesterday, when our Building Manager led us through the dark Victorian basements and tunnels under our office building, out into the light near the Savoy Hotel, as part of our Bomb Evacuation Drill. Yes, London is on the Alert again, and it makes all the sap rise; the juicy part of life, thrills, adventures, scares and excitement that lighten the everyday mundanity. Underneath our offices, there are dark dungeons dripping with flood waters, spooky corners and lifesize metal cages in alcoves and niches. The brickwork is beautiful - stark, ugly, old and elegant. I loved it, and of course, my twisty brain couldn’t help wondering in all sorts of weirding ways.
Imagine the games you could play down there!
And of course, the floodwaters remind me of the rain; the rain; the raining rain that sweeps across the island and has been for days and weeks, and months. When Guy and I spent the day in Oxford last Saturday, it turned out to be a last-gasp glorious partly-sunny day; perfect for viewing the spires and college quadrangles, stunning to view the honey coloured towers from the top of the steeple of St Mary the Virgin Church, breathless after a near-vertical climb up a steep whirling stairway, hauling ourselves up by thick rope hammered into the stone as a handrail.
We found ourselves in Chippenham that night, after a gloriously tipsy meandering drive through the countryside, stopping at pub after pub seeking accomodation, and finding only friendly locals, samples of local apple cider in the most vivid of organic orange colours, and a late night riotous stop-over at the Jolly Huntsman, where a Robby Williams-lookalike barman showed us how to swallow Flaming Sambuccas nasally rather than orally (no, we didn’t try it!). An education, I swear, that even Oxford could not provide.
And in the morning we woke, warm and snug, to drifting rain outside, a long leisurely drive home in his leather-seated twenty year old “wide-boy gangster” Mercedes, and movies on the couch wrapped together under a duvet. No finer thing on a Sunday afternoon, except perhaps the deliciously hot Indian takeaway dinner, as only the English can provide.
Today I am reading Pygmalion on my screen, hidden by layers of other work. Eliza Doolittle is entertaining Pickering and Higgins, and I give myself away by smiling too often at my computer. On Friday night, we head off for Brighton, where my friend Jane puts on a ‘Stand-Up Comedy night with a Twist’. I’m praying for the sun, a little sunshine on the sea, so I can sit like a cat on the shingle beach and wa
tch the waves and enjoy a day in the few short weeks of the glorious English country summer, before heading home again, to London and “The Big Smoke”.
Although, that too, has been a fabulous new thread in the story; how the smoking in pubs has been stopped. Will we all, like the Irish, decamp to outside the bar and continue to stand and chat inside the clouds of tobacco smoke? I suspect we will …
Never mind. After all, where else would you want to be – on a summer’s day in London on the weekend?
Tis the winter that worries me, folks ;) What will we do then, I ask you, what then!?
More, as always, to follow.
The catalyst that brought it home to me so vividly came yesterday, when our Building Manager led us through the dark Victorian basements and tunnels under our office building, out into the light near the Savoy Hotel, as part of our Bomb Evacuation Drill. Yes, London is on the Alert again, and it makes all the sap rise; the juicy part of life, thrills, adventures, scares and excitement that lighten the everyday mundanity. Underneath our offices, there are dark dungeons dripping with flood waters, spooky corners and lifesize metal cages in alcoves and niches. The brickwork is beautiful - stark, ugly, old and elegant. I loved it, and of course, my twisty brain couldn’t help wondering in all sorts of weirding ways.
Imagine the games you could play down there!
And of course, the floodwaters remind me of the rain; the rain; the raining rain that sweeps across the island and has been for days and weeks, and months. When Guy and I spent the day in Oxford last Saturday, it turned out to be a last-gasp glorious partly-sunny day; perfect for viewing the spires and college quadrangles, stunning to view the honey coloured towers from the top of the steeple of St Mary the Virgin Church, breathless after a near-vertical climb up a steep whirling stairway, hauling ourselves up by thick rope hammered into the stone as a handrail.
We found ourselves in Chippenham that night, after a gloriously tipsy meandering drive through the countryside, stopping at pub after pub seeking accomodation, and finding only friendly locals, samples of local apple cider in the most vivid of organic orange colours, and a late night riotous stop-over at the Jolly Huntsman, where a Robby Williams-lookalike barman showed us how to swallow Flaming Sambuccas nasally rather than orally (no, we didn’t try it!). An education, I swear, that even Oxford could not provide.
And in the morning we woke, warm and snug, to drifting rain outside, a long leisurely drive home in his leather-seated twenty year old “wide-boy gangster” Mercedes, and movies on the couch wrapped together under a duvet. No finer thing on a Sunday afternoon, except perhaps the deliciously hot Indian takeaway dinner, as only the English can provide.
Today I am reading Pygmalion on my screen, hidden by layers of other work. Eliza Doolittle is entertaining Pickering and Higgins, and I give myself away by smiling too often at my computer. On Friday night, we head off for Brighton, where my friend Jane puts on a ‘Stand-Up Comedy night with a Twist’. I’m praying for the sun, a little sunshine on the sea, so I can sit like a cat on the shingle beach and wa
tch the waves and enjoy a day in the few short weeks of the glorious English country summer, before heading home again, to London and “The Big Smoke”.Although, that too, has been a fabulous new thread in the story; how the smoking in pubs has been stopped. Will we all, like the Irish, decamp to outside the bar and continue to stand and chat inside the clouds of tobacco smoke? I suspect we will …
Never mind. After all, where else would you want to be – on a summer’s day in London on the weekend?
Tis the winter that worries me, folks ;) What will we do then, I ask you, what then!?
More, as always, to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment