There was an HMV record shop with a poster in the window announcing an EAR OUT SALE. Then I saw that the first two letters were covered up. What it actually said was CLEAROUT SALE.
If certain nineteenth-century enthusiasts had had their way the whole of the south side of Leicester Square would have been taken up by a monument to Sir Isaac Newton. Not prepared to settle for a plaque or a statue, they wanted his whole house to be preserved inside a sort of truncated pyramid, on top of which was to be set a massive stone sphere. His tomb in Westminster Abbey is quite wild enough for most people.
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I was in Agar Street, by the Zimbabwe High Commission, and outside was an official limo with the registration number ZIM 1. It was parked and the driver wasn’t there, but on the front seat there was a bag of Sainsbury’s shopping.
The High Commission is a huge marble building on a corner with the Strand, and set around it at second floor level are eighteen naked sandstone figures. They were carved by Jacob Epstein and are collectively known as ‘Men and women in stages between life and death’, which seems to me a tide you could give to a staggeringly large number of works of art.
The story is that when Epstein carved the figures, the public was so shocked by their nakedness that he had to go back and chip off the genitals. (Only of the males, I assume.) I’m not sure whether the story’s actually true or not, but certainly today it’s more than just the genitals that have gone. It could be chemical pollution in the air, or erosion caused by weather, or maybe it was war damage, but currendy the figures are half eaten away, some of them barely recognizable as figures at all. They look like ancient, crumbling ruins, and in that case I suppose they demonstrate a stage that is neither life nor death, but a kind of continuing posthumous decay.
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In Sloane Street I saw four men dressed up like chefs. I say dressed up because they somehow looked as though they were playing a part; not like real chefs at all.
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In the King’s Road I saw a Chelsea pensioner. I saw a bar done out like a Mexican cantina. I saw plenty of flashy young people in clothes that were either fantastic or ludicrous or both, but I also saw a number of smart old chaps in blazers and trilbys. And I saw an apparently posh old lady walking down the street. She had fiercely permed hair, sunglasses, a black velvet jacket, but she was stopping at rubbish bins, having a root through them. I saw her dig deep into one bin and pull out a discarded copy of Vogue.
I went to Cheyne Walk. I hung around there waiting for something interesting to happen. I read the blue plaques, I looked at the house Keith Richard lived in, but there was nothing worth recording. However at the comer of Cheyne Walk and Milman’s Street I saw a row of three strange garages, their doors shaped like pointed Arabian arches.
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In Ventnor Drive, Totteridge, I saw an abandoned wheelbarrow full of hardened concrete. In the concrete there were half a dozen tiny cat’s paw prints and the huge hollow where a man’s workboot had stamped.
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It suddenly started to hail, as fiercely as I think I’ve ever seen it, and I had to shelter under a walkway in Handel Street, WC1, by the Brunswick Centre, that ran down into a council estate. I could hear children’s voices not very far away and they were telling each other to look at the rainbow. I stuck my head out and sure enough, visible through sheets of hail was a perfect, vivid rainbow. Just then a bustling little girl, not more than six years old, came past where I was sheltering and said, “I can’t stand ‘ere lookin’ at rainbows, I’ve gotta find my little bruwa.”
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How London resists religious and racial cliche.
One: Ridley Road market — the fish stalls and the meat stalls, the groupers and the snappers, the chicken gizzards and the goats’ feet. And there was a stall selling records of religious music. The stall was run by a distinguished-looking black man whose stock mostly consisted of black choirs and spirituals, and if you’d been making a movie of this he’d no doubt have been playing some rousing music of that sort, but in the event he was playing a religious record by Jim Reeves, not the very blackest of men.
Two: If you’d asked me when I started my travels would I one day see a man walking along the street carrying a cross, I’d probably have said that it wouldn’t altogether surprise me. And sure enough I eventually saw him, a black man, bald, fierce, wearing a smart black suit and carrying a white painted wooden cross, taller than himself and made from two lengths of two by one. But the cliche would have had me see him in Brixton or East Ham or somewhere where the black communities are tight, where religion remains strong. In fact I saw him in Kensington Church Street, that expensive street that’s chiefly home to countless up-market antique shops.
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Marylebone Road: Madame Tussaud’s and the Planetarium built on the site of the old bombed cinema. Also the scene of the only war story my father ever tells.
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My map is gradually darkening. I am gradually filling in the streets, making them coalesce. The end seems a long way off, but perhaps this is no longer a matter of beginnings, middles and ends. The kick I get from walking down the streets of London is enormous, but getting home and writing up this diary is better still. If I broke my leg and couldn’t do any walking for a while, that would be rough but I could live with it. If I broke my hands and couldn’t write the diary that would be a tragedy on the grand scale.
I wonder how big the finished document will be. One is tempted to hope it will be as big, as grand, as detailed, as complex and convoluted as the city itself, but I know that’s not possible. All I can say is it will be as big, grand, detailed, complex and convoluted as I can possibly make it.
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I’d stopped for lunch and was sitting outside a pub on Clapham Common. The common and the pub were nearly empty. There was an old man sitting three tables away. I thought he probably wanted to start a conversation with me, but I stared intently at my newspaper. Then a friend of his walked past and the old man said to him, “Do you want to buy a telly? Fourteen-inch colour. I want fifty quid for it, or a pound a week for two years, whichever you prefer.”
“I’ve already got a telly,” said the friend.
“Yes, but have you got a telly in your bedroom?” the old man said, as though he was making an incredibly indecent suggestion.
The friend went in, bought himself a drink and came out to sit with the old man. I couldn’t hear all their conversation but at one point the friend said, “I just don’t see the point of having a lesbian behind the bar.”
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I was walking along Prince Albert Road and I looked into the car-park in Regent’s Park, and I saw twenty or thirty men each unloading large quantities of equipment from the boots of their cars. This equipment consisted in almost every case of a chunky box on wheels and a long thin case. At first I thought they might be musicians, that the cases might contain instruments, that the boxes might be amplifiers. But then I realized they were far more likely to be fishermen, the long thin case carrying their rods, the box containing the rest of their tackle.
This was more or less confirmed when I saw them heading for the towpath that runs alongside the Grand Union Canal, which in turn skirts the northern boundary of Regent’s Park. I was intending to walk that way myself so I followed them. But they formed a little crowd at the bottom of the stairs and I had to push through to get by.
Then I realized why they’d stopped. About thirty yards ahead of us there was a locked gate right across the path. I was as surprised as the fishermen, but then one of them said, “Here’s a man who looks as though he knows how to get a gate unlocked,” and a few others made relieved, encouraging noises. I looked around and saw they were all turning hopefully towards me. I was the man they thought could get the gate unlocked. Needless to say, they were completely wrong, and I had to tell them so, but I was strangely flattered.