An expedition into town
Yesterday I went on my first trip to central London in about five months for a lunch. Courtesy of my old age pensioners’ free whatever-it’s-called travel card I travelled by rail to Waterloo and thence by the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road, scene of one of my former working haunts.
The first thing I noticed upon emerging into the daylight was that the area had changed immeasurably, so much so that I was totally discombobulated. The station had been redeveloped to such an extent that initially I set off, intending to go northwards, by going in the opposite direction. The junction with Oxford Street was unrecognisable – whole blocks of the surrounding buildings had been razed to the ground and surrounded by building site boards. It took two crossings of the road and a period of puzzlement before I finally got my bearings and could set off on my intended hike by foot.
The second was that many of the surroundings shops and establishments had changed. I guess this had happened by gradual evolution, as it does everywhere, but for someone like me who last knew the area as a happy hunting ground some twelve or thirteen years ago it was akin to landing suddenly upon an alien planet.
What had once been a familiar landscape was now a strange land about 40% occupied by coffee shops, sushi and health food bars, ‘café society’ emporia and God-knows-what modern shops.
To kill some time – I had arrived erroneously some 90 minutes early for my engagement albeit about a quarter of a mile from my destination – I dropped into a French coffee shop across the road for a pain au chocolat and an Americano coffee whilst flicking through the monthly car magazine I’d bought with which to occupy my journey.
The table on my left was initially occupied by a solo brunette in her twenties as I sat down next door and subsequently by a guy about my age and a younger (bald but bearded) gent in a pork-pie hat who began unburdening himself about the West End theatre production rehearsal that he’d endured the previous day.
He and two other actors had pitched up only to discover that both the leads had failed to appear. One wasn’t feeling too well and had missed her flight from Italy anyway and the other had just gone missing. The director therefore decided to get our speaker and his counterparts to act out some scenes from their parts – by which he meant really act them … including leaving pauses for the (not present) other actors’ lines … a format that our speaker had found nigh impossible to do at all, let alone well. I tried to visualise what the experience must have been like – the best image I could come up with was that of someone acting out a telephone call of which the audience was privy only to his end of the conversation; quite awkward for the speaker and exponentially boring/annoying for his listeners (I speak from experience here because I seem to do a lot of this in real life).
I would have been able to give my readers further details on the vexed day in question, but for the fact that it was about this point that I decided I was intruding upon private grief and rose to leave.
Outside on the pavement I crossed the road again and, with still more than an hour to ‘occupy’, I disappeared into a Waterstone’s bookshop. Either the entire chain has had a makeover – or at least this particular shop had – for it had become three-floors’ worth of entirely open plan (again minimalist) décor and not at all like any equivalent I had previously visited. Towards the end of my ramble around the basement (art, photography, biography and history) I was pleased – though not quite relieved in both senses – to notice a sign leading to the toilets, which reminded me that I was in some need of one, only to discover a sign on the door indicating “Out of Order”.
The third thing that struck on my outing was the sheer number and diversity of people out and about, presumably every day, in the metropolis.
Down where I come from the high street foot-fall (as I think retailers call it), whilst not light, is perfectly manageable. Yesterday on Tottenham Court Road, adjacent to Fitzrovia, was – to me at least – almost daunting. I was constantly weaving in and out of pedestrians going both in my direction and the opposite. The average punter needed to remain focused just to avoid collisions of one kind or another. Mine became a tiring expedition.
Plus, in all capital cities you get the weirdest range of humanity of all ages, shapes and sizes floating about.
Obesity seems to be a new fad, often clad in clothes that do the opposite to flatter. You know how it goes. If the latest fashion happens to be skin-tight leggings, or ‘jeggings’ (if that’s not a garment altogether different) of the sort constantly in danger of revealing what I believe is called a ‘camel-toe’ at the crotch, then even young ladies who would not look out of place in a rugby front row feel obligated to wear them. Which sight is an acquired taste to which I have not yet become accustomed.
I’m not having a ping at the female of the species particularly here, it applies to both sexes.
A sizable proportion of males coming towards me in a variety of states of hurry, awareness (self and otherwise) and purpose seemed to be sporting long white ‘Captain Birdeye’ or metrosexual beards, ridiculous hats or caps, extraordinary hairstyles and clothes that (in my day) would only have been worn for a prank or a bet.
And this was just another day in central London in May 2017.
No wonder, perhaps, that when I eventually reached the sanctuary of home much later in the afternoon (mind you, after a lunch that did involve alcohol), shortly after my arrival I had decided to retire fully-clothed to bed and then slept for one hour fifty minutes.
