Saturday
We head to Camden with our guest. Once a place of exotic delights for alt teens, the market is too busy and too trashy now to be fun. I stretch out my hand and she grabs it and holds tight as we navigate around people shopping, eating, drinking, dawdling, chatting, shoving and shouting. We bail earlier than planned, recombobulate with a walk to Euston and get a tube into town. Yesterday we went to Brighton, which I used to describe as Camden by the sea but the shops there are better now, and on a Friday it’s much calmer, besides.
In the National Portrait Gallery we push through modern portraits and somehow each of us becomes dulled by the noise. We’re all looking but none of us are seeing, so I pull us up to the Tudor galleries for the hushed whispers and the reverence. Everyone here understands where the boundaries are. We walk round in companionable silence gazing up at giant paintings of stern monarchs pressed into heavy gilt frames. All the walls are deep red, green or blue.
Later, after seeing his portrait in the gallery, we see the play Richard III, at the Globe. It’s a gamble (standing, Shakespeare, teenager, controversy) but it pays off and we arrive home happy, sleepy and satisfied, with aching feet. A good end to the day.
Monday
I tested negative for covid yesterday but I still feel rough with some lurgy. Last night I messaged to say I’d start work late today, but as I was awake with the rain, I got up at 6am to edit the message and say I needed a sick day. It was that or be a martyr and I’m not sure anyone could bear it. I had two video calls I couldn’t miss so I smiled stupidly into the camera before I joined each one to trick my face into looking alive.
Tuesday
I walked around the garden before work to inspect the seedlings: so far so good. I feel so lucky to have this space. I’m a rubbish gardener actually, I have no idea what I’m doing, but I like watching it do its thing in spite of me (and rarely because of me). The blackcurrants are getting darker, and I picked and ate a gooseberry. The foxglove is now titling to an alarming degree. The rain hasn’t helped. Its little side shoots are hanging on though, the bell-shaped gloves enticing more bees in. It’s been packed with bees in that part of the garden recently – the Ceanothus tree has been so good this year, and so blue! I worried about it last year but it returned triumphant. Everything underneath is scattered with its tiny fallen flowers – you too, if you so much as pause there.
At work I edit a ChatGPT experiment and add the word ‘care’ to a sentence. I move it from the end to the middle and wonder if it really adds anything at all. There’s definitely a metaphor in this somewhere.
Wednesday
Awake at dawn again, warm now. Last night was so cold I wondered about wearing socks in bed – but I don’t even like wearing them outside it, and it was too much hassle to get up again. I listen to a blackbird sing, turn away from the light and try not to make a noise as the world violently spins again.
At work we go back to the ChatGPT copy and rip it up together. Someone I work with thinks he’s a poor writer. I don’t think so – or at least his ‘yes but who cares?’ filter is working perfectly.
Thursday
The wren is singing at the station. As I wait on the train, the windows and doors are closed but the bird is loud enough that the app still works when I use it for confirmation. I Google to check if it’s more likely to be male or female and this is such a nice description:
Males sing remarkable songs—loud, frenetic bursts of sound that switch effortlessly between clear notes and rapid trills. Females sing a whisper song, reminiscent of distant Barn Swallow song, when incubating or caring for young.
At the side of the train tracks the brambles are in flower from here to London Bridge. If we get any sun there’ll be a good blackberry crop this year – although you’ll risk your life (and commuter wrath) if you try to pick these. I’m 42nd in the queue for the bus, and I help a man catch a runaway suitcase on wheels.
Later.
“God! Shit! Are you ok?”
She reaches out.
I say sure, thank you and scuttle ahead.
A woman waiting to cross the road stops me and says “Are you sure you’re ok?” And I say yes all fine, thank you and I smile. She only half smiles back. I walk round the corner to the office, climb the stairs to the bathroom and close the door. There’s a hole in my coat, and at my elbow a cut, a burn and an egg-sized lump slowly turning blue. This is awkward: I was hit by a bus.
The first woman had accidentally pushed me in its path as we walked around a badly parked van. Later I’ll realise the whole thing was quite lucky. A few inches further to the right and it would’ve hit my back, not my arm, and the force would’ve knocked me down.
I walk into the office and say “Morning!” brightly and then “Oh, I was hit by a bus” and the British desire not to make a scene is overcome by the intense pain and the shock. I burst into tears. Some ice, a few rounds of paracetamol and the kindness of others calms the swelling and the tears.
A few hours later, instead of the pain in my arm, I feel like someone has tried to break my neck.
I cancel my plans and go home on time for an early night.
Friday
Awake before the birds. The silence is too big and my ears ring with it. A tentative solo starts ahead of the dawn chorus and I strain to hear it through windows closed against last night’s wind and rain.
3:58am. Let’s try all this again, shall we? I close my eyes and the world spins on its axis.
Other things
From a sign next to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s portrait:
Coleridge was also the greatest talker of his age. The range of his conversation was legendary. He championed hundreds of words that are still in use today. Including ‘bisexual’, ‘soulmate’ and ‘realism’.
Imagine that – imagine being remembered for among other things, the range of your conversation. We should’ve used that in the Interesting book, although then the concern is that the answer to how to be interesting is ‘Opium’.
Walknotes 