No.204

This weekend I was in London: three nights, three exceedingly dry, hot days, twelve and a half hours sitting down across four different trains. While there I scribbled furiously, furious thoughts in a small lime-yellow notebook, namely trying to analyse what it meant to temporarily move my body from a quiet Scottish river valley to a capital city during the middle of the month of June.

Until quite recently I would not have been able to take this trip, not for complex reasons but just because anxiety was in place as a kind of be all and end all. So it was pleasant to discover that I did not in fact feel riddled with franticness while there amongst the heat and youth and determination. I didn’t feel frantic but I felt baffled at how that many people could simultaneously be going to so many places, doing so many things in all of the directions during all the seconds of all the days. There were swifts screaming through the sky, and sparrows in the fractional bits of green, and trash all over the pavements.

There were cream-pink roses falling over themselves to descend down walls and men constructing scaffolding and more men hanging outside of windows in order to sand the frames smooth, and people leaving their houses in shiny expensive cars, leaving in ways that demand they be noticed, although only a few minutes later down another residential street an old car left to rust with its roof held together entirely with duct tape. There was a woman wearing a violin case on her back who stopped to look into a tiny library perched on top of a wall. I thought: she must be getting very warm, wearing this violin case in the sun. They charge people for ice in their water while all the grass dies.

The more people I watched and witnessed the more convinced I became of my own strangeness. It feels like a place where there is not one collective reality or truth but millions of individual ones. I suspect this is part of what becomes tempting about this sort of existence—the ability to maintain your own, often isolated reality amongst millions of others, washing over but never concretely touching. Is this perhaps a direct result of being provided with an excess of the things which we need or crave, a sleepless but structured commitment to consumption? Does the degree of certainty and purpose emanating from so many persons come only from existing in a city, and which comes first: the city or the certainty?

I was frequently looked at very hard as I went about my errands, in a way that made me feel as though I was both alien and unseen. I washed my hair twice in as many days. I exercised myself in a land of strangers containing all of the things I naturally find to be most uncomfortable.

It appeared as though people arrived themselves at occasions or locations without actually getting there. I began to suspect that they did not actually exist in the in between bits—a deception, a conjuring trick. It was difficult to combine these two scenarios: the infinite flood of bodies on public transport with the arrival of people in places looking thoroughly composed. I did not feel composed but rather deconstructed, a woman of parts which she could then select from.

I selected the parts of the woman that wished to sit inside at a cold cafe while every other individual or grouping sat outside in sun, or shade, or halfway in or out of either. We are worried, I suppose, that it will always be the last of the warmth. There was an arrangement of dried flowers and grasses attached to the front of the bathroom door and on my way in my hair was caught by a very browned sprig of eucalyptus. Sometimes inanimate things want to keep you held in place; sometimes alive things want to keep you held in place too.

The world is burning up before our eyes and yet I ordered a carrot-apple-ginger juice, which was the colour of a forest fire. While I sat thinking about forest fires I was pretty certain that I’d never loved you more than I did at that moment. It may be that I would love you more in the next moment, or the one after that, but I could not be sure of that quite yet. In all likelihood.

There was a man walking through Kings Cross station carrying a tuba as a sort of backpack—by this I mean that the tuba, in its case, was also inside a tuba-shaped backpack—and this sight had something incredibly reassuring about it. Where I live, I have never seen someone carrying a tuba, which is the lowest-pitched musical instrument in the brass family.

A little later, sitting on the train in the minutes before it left the platform—the 1300 to Edinburgh Waverley—I look across and see two fluorescent men fixing an escalator. One of the men is more than waist deep into the ground, and up to his elbows in something that looks like a combination of grease, dirt, and patience. I wonder how often escalators get tired and give up, whether they break often enough that ‘escalator-repair-person’ can in itself be a full time occupation.

Meanwhile, inside the carriage, I am amazed at how immediately and brazenly some people occupy room, splaying themselves like a oozing substance into aisles and footwells and time and space. A few seats down from me, facing in the opposite direction, is an older woman in small, clear round glasses and a cobalt blue shirt covered entirely in a pattern of small white sailboats. We pull out of the station, the fluorescent man still half-disappeared beside the escalator.

The train goes too fast for me to read the signs at smaller stations along the route; I suppose that I could be anywhere at all. Ox-eye daisies grow on the banks next to the rail lines but not only this—huge purple and white foxgloves apologise to no one for their insistence on soft, velvety trumpet shapes that will not last long in this sort of sun.

What sort of method do birds use when deciding which branch to land on? We are in the month of June, but the onboard announcement says people must change at the next station for trains going to March. I do not wish to go backwards.

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

I have flipped to and fro like a distressed, landed fish about whether or not to include the option of paid subscriptions to this newsletter. I have flipped to and fro about it for almost as long as it has been a newsletter, which is now over seven years. Seven years, as it turns out, is a long time to pour hours and thoughts into something, and I think that it has become time to include an option to support the newsletter in a paid way.

From Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe (2019)

This won’t dissolve the option of reading this newsletter at no cost, but only introduce the option of supporting it monetarily. It felt right to me that any change wouldn’t prevent anyone from reading if they could not choose to support in a paid way, or if they felt they would rather be supportive in other ways, like purchasing one of my books for someone, or buying original painted works.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

New work by Lucy Roleff, whose paintings are a source of long-time love, and can also be found in newsletters No.190, No.176, No.156, No.148 and No.136.

“In the evening, go down to the water

and wait for no one.

Let your life rest

on what is already good.”

— Kate Baer, from “Invitation”, And Yet