At Oxford Circus a little Hare Krishna procession with an amazingly mixed group of people, painfully skinny young lads, a very county-looking woman, a fat middle-aged Asian man in a suit and overcoat.
A well-dressed man with a light Australian accent was handing out leaflets. He said, “I’m giving these to people who are into health and beauty around the world.” But he didn’t give one to me.
I realized there were more bureaux de change in Oxford Street than you would ever have imagined possible, tucked into tiny thin premises no wider than a doorway.
There was an ‘authentic Indian buffet’ advertised at the Cumberland Hotel.
Outside Litdewoods there was a busker playing an accordion. In front of him was a strong metal collecting box with the word ‘Blind’ painted neatly on it in four-inch-high letters. I noticed the box was chained to the man, to make sure someone didn’t steal it from him. Are there really people in the world who’d steal money from a blind busker? Then I realized of course there are. Thousands of people. There are people who’d steal his money, his accordion, his white stick, his guide dog, his false teeth.
Finally Marble Arch, which I couldn’t see at first because the traffic was so dense and blocking the view. The arch looked monstrous yet unimpressive, run aground on a traffic island, surrounded by the swirl of buses and cars.
This part of Oxford Street, formerly Tyburn Road, was the end of the route along which prisoners were brought to their place of execution, an obscene parade, the road lined with drunken, jeering crowds who threw stones and dirt and dung at the condemned, there but for the grace of God. Maybe De Quincey was right.
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I walked along Chester Row, not far from Sloane Square. Charles Dickens used to live at number one, and T.S. Eliot used to live at number five. I don’t know if Thomas Steams was much of a walker, but he could definitely describe the experience of walking home late at night through certain half-deserted streets.
Dickens too was something of a night walker. He wrote an essay called ‘Night Walks’ in which he described the noise of the city as a ‘distant ringing hum, as if the city were a glass, vibrating’. When his father died he walked the city on three consecutive nights from dusk till dawn.
But Dickens was a walker, full stop, not just at night. In his era my daily ten miles would have been paltry stuff. People must have thought nothing of walking ten or fifteen miles just to go to work and back, but even by the standards of his day Dickens was an excessive, not to say obsessive walker. Friends who stayed with him would be invited out for a stroll and would return hours later, exhausted, Dickens having taken them twenty-odd miles and walked them into the ground. But he didn’t do it just to impress others. He did it because he needed to. At one point in his life he believed he had a moral duty to spend as many hours walking as he did writing.
And I’m not sure whether he used walking as a way of meditating on his feelings or as a way of escaping from them. Certainly he must have thought about his work and his characters as he walked, maybe he even found material he could use, so it wasn’t wasted time, but more than that he seems to have used walking as a way of driving away melancholy.
For myself, I’m not sure exactly what I feel as I walk. I’ve not got as much on my mind as Dickens had, and yet the walking has rather the opposite effect that it had on him. If anything, London amplifies my melancholy rather than rids me of it. Fortunately the act of writing about what I’ve seen then dispels the melancholy. Does this sound glib?
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At the corner of St Swithin’s Lane and King William Street; the place where a hoard of Roman coins was discovered in 1840. They were forgeries, but Roman forgeries, eighty-nine silver denarii; but only silver plate, a thin veneer layered over copper. They dated from Boadicea’s time and had perhaps been buried for safe keeping, to be dug up later if only Boadicea hadn’t done such a thorough job.
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In Fellows Road, NW3 (I’d call it Swiss Cottage but maybe it was Belsize Park), there was a gaping yellow skip in which a fridge, a cooker and a washing machine had been rather carefully deposited, lined up neatly, side by side. A man in a flat cap came out of one of the houses carrying a gas fire which he placed painstakingly in the skip, being careful not to spoil the neatness of the design.
In Winchester Road I saw what from a distance looked like an art gallery showing miniature silver and gold sculptures, carefully arranged and spotlit on glass shelves. But when I got nearer I saw the shop was an architectural ironmonger’s and the ‘sculptures’ were gold and silver bath taps.
In Lambolle Road, a narrow street, cars parked tightly on both sides, I saw a sixties Cadillac convertible with its hood up, bright red, huge threatening fins. It was so large it looked too wide to get through the gap between the cars. But it did, making slow, stately progress, growling like a motorboat.
In Merton Rise I saw a building called Villa Henriette.
At the top end of the stretch of Finchley Road that runs from St John’s Wood to Swiss Cottage, the road became a sort of dual carriageway, but the median was no more than two feet wide. However that was wide enough for someone to have set himself up as a flower-seller, buckets of flowers arranged in the middle, selling to drivers of cars stopped at the traffic lights.
A little lower down the road, at a zebra crossing, there were bunches of flowers tied to the illuminated bollards and to the column of the Belisha beacon, and a yellow police accident sign that asked ‘Can You Help?’
I went to 7 Cavendish Avenue because I knew it belonged to Paul McCartney. It was a huge, forbidding, square house, with a high garden wall, solid green gates. There were closed white internal shutters at all the windows. It looked utterly uninhabited. I’d read there was a sun-house in the garden in the form of a geodesic dome, but the walls were too high to see in.
A little way down the road, one of the houses had a bust of a classical god in the window. It was bigger than human size, and maybe that was appropriate it being a god, but the bust had its back to the street and so you could look up into the rear of the head and see that it was completely hollow.
In Eamont Street there was a place called Gorky Park which advertised itself as a ‘cruise bar’. It was boarded up and available to let.
In Circus Road I saw a very smart woman in late middle age who was standing in the street not wearing a coat despite it being a cold day. A taxi pulled up, someone got out, and the woman ran over and I heard her say in very clear, clipped tones, “Excuse me could you tell me what day of the week it is. You see I’ve been abroad.”
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In Broad Lawn, New Eltham, I saw a workman sitting in a van eating his lunch. I was surprised to see he was gnawing a raw carrot, which didn’t seem like standard workman’s fere. But then I saw the sign on the side of the van that said he was a piano tuner and that seemed perfectly in keeping.
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In Mapesbury Road, Willesden, I saw six disused, uprooted telephone boxes lined up in the garden of a semi-detached house.
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I walked down Waterloo Passage, Kilburn, a narrow lane behind the Iceland supermarket. There was a sign stating that this was a public walkway and rubbish wasn’t to be dumped there. Needless to say, it was almost impassable because of bags of rubbish. Someone had sprayed ‘IRA Wayne was here’ on a door. I hadn’t imagined that IRA members had names like Wayne.
Kilbum; a lot of people in the High Road looked beaten up by life, by drink, by each other. I saw a fancy goods shop that was having a ‘pot pouri clearance’, and a music shop nearby had a ukelele for sale in the window, but there was a handwritten sign on it saying ‘Junior Guitar’. Someone was going to be very disappointed come Christmas morning.