The steely façades of the riverfront blocks are now warm to the touch, and builders and tradesmen are stripped to their T-shirts. I left Stockwell in cagoule and cashmere pullover, but as I gain Putney Bridge I strip to my own T-shirt and sit at a zinc-topped table outside a branch of Carluccio’s, sipping a latte and eating an almond pastry. Inside the décor is scrubbed, shining. Cheeses, salamis, potted pimentos — they all crackle beneath cellophane and strip lighting. I’ve met Carluccio himself on a couple of occasions; he’s a friend of a friend. Here he is, on the cover of one of his cookery books, which is propped up on a central display table underneath a dwarf Christmas tree. Antonio Carluccio Goes Wild. He carries a wooden truckle full of tasty herbage; he looks rubicund and happy — not feral at all.
Yes, Jim Ballard was right. The public spaces of London are becoming outdoor atria, retail boulevards servicing Mediterranean-style business parks. Patrick Keiller, on the other hand, was wrong. The melancholia that infuses his epic and elegiac 1991 film, London, has been blown away — like the leaves in Wandsworth Park — by an airy consensus: nothing succeeds like excess. It’s easier for those of my generation, coming to our majority in the dog days of the early 1980s, to embrace a city in permanent decline. The desuetude and neglect of public spaces is filmic, while the camera lens simply reflects itself in mirrored buildings.
I sit reading my wife’s column in the Independent. She’s anatomised the grisly aftermath of the stabbing of Tom ap Rhys Price, a young solicitor who was murdered in Kensal Rise, north London. His killers have been shown extraordinary compassion by the victim’s mother, who has decided to set up a charity to aid such disadvantaged inner-city black kids. I’m still in touch with the mother ship, linked by mobile phone, so I text her my congratulations on her piece as I continue on up the Putney shore, past the boathouses where jolly, hefty girls, shrink-wrapped in Lycra, carry sculls down the slope to the lapping waves.
It’s time to part from Father Thames — I’ll meet him again at Richmond Bridge. I turn aside from the river and take a diagonal traverse across Putney Common. My mobile phone rings — it’s my ex-wife. She needs to talk about our teenage son: he’s indolent and stumbling about in the hazy realm of late adolescence. What to say? At his age I was intellectually omnivorous, true, but I was also teaching myself to shoot up smack. I think he’s doing just fine; he’s charming, funny and personable. But that’s not the point: this phone call, this fishing line, lands me in the reticulation of my responsibilities. I thrash there as I plod through coverts and cross over sports pitches. I’m in Shepherds Bush — not Putney. I’m in my life, clamped in my persona, not the ghost in London’s machine I fervently wish to be.
I’m unable to lose myself again until I break the connection, then find myself at the junction of the Upper Richmond Road and Priory Lane. I resist the urge to divert into memories of ill-advised sex with a girl from Sheen. It was daytime in her girlhood bedroom. . I was shocked by the thick hairs sprouting from the aureoles of her dirigible breasts. . No. Priory Lane runs up ahead of me, I have a rendezvous to make at Richmond Bridge by noon. If I come this way at all, to this outer suburbia, hard against Henry VIII’s hunting ground, it’s only to visit friends banged up in the private psychiatric hospital, the Priory. The Priory — notorious, it is. Notorious not least because its millionaire owner, Dr Chai Patel, is bound up in the cash-for-honours scandal that is, predictably, darkening still more the dying days of the Blair regime.
And notorious also for its celebrity clientele: the jittery cokehead models and smacked-about rockers, who gabble and purge in its addiction unit. The Priory: such a cliché that there’s already been a chat show on British TV called The Priory. The Priory, a fine, large, Gothic-revival house that already by 1876 was being gazetted thus: ‘Built for the late Lord Justice Sir J. Knight Bruce, it is now a private lunatic asylum.’ Indeed, yes. I’ve been here to visit, to sit with desolate friends on its sickly lawns, beneath its magnolia faux-battlements. Or, on provision of an exeat, to wander with these saddos in Richmond Park, anatomising how it can be that their lives have been so dismembered.
But, before I reach the environs of the Priory, I’m struck by a mean little breezeblock parade of shops, stuck in the arse end of a 1980s development. ‘St Marcus’ reads the sign on the largest of these, ‘S.A. Minimart, Biltong and Boere Wors’. Intrigued, I go in, to find myself surrounded by what look like flattened bulls’ pizzles, dangling from steel rails. Signs at one end of these rails read ‘Hard End’, at the other ‘Soft’. These are, perforce, strips of biltong — the sign didn’t lie. This has to be the biggest biltong emporium in the northern hemisphere. There are hundreds of strips of the stuff: chilli-flavoured biltong, garlic biltong, biltong flavoured any number of ways. How many hard-masticating South Africans must London contain in order to support this minimart full of beef jerky?
The great wonder of my adult life — a desultory period, 1979–2006, all are agreed, no Blitz only bits of this and that, epochs of haircuts — has been the cosmopolitanisation of London. The three hundred languages spoken on the streets of the city; the rise in the ethnic minority population from 7 per cent to 25 per cent; the minicab drivers more familiar with Conkary than the Cally Road; and these strips of biltong are part of that, a sinewy girdle about the globe. I buy one to gnaw on, washed down with Evian, as I foot it up Priory Lane, through Roehampton Gate and into the park.
Which I’ve never liked, really. Never liked its trees, artificially grouped: Yikes! I want to cry, here comes the copse! The last day of November and the leaves are still on the oaks and beeches, mellow gold and brown as Old Holborn hand-rolling tobacco. Beneath this canopy lie artily deposed trunks, strewn about on the tawny sward. Their bark stripped by the deer, they’re like the toppled torsos in some de Chirico dreamscape.
Bertrand Russell grew up here, in one of the capacious lodges. A mean-spirited childhood with emotionally retarded grandparents deranged by snobbery and their proximity to power. Think cold winter walks, crackling over hoarfrost in scratchy tweed knickerbockers. Think mortification of the bowels with lumps of suet. No wonder the weedy kid plotted to reduce language to a series of logical formulae. Poor little fucker.
I’ve never liked Richmond Park’s contrived ambience of the farouche — a centuries’ old shtick. The scale of Richmond Park is wrong: people come here to drive about in their SUVs and look at the deer, and, in fairness, this being the time of the annual cull — the deer, that is, not the people — they are in great numbers, the stags photogenically tossing their antlers. But if an SUV in central London is a solecism, here in the park it’s an insult. The local council certainly think so — they’ve become the first in London to levy a special tax on the hypertrophied all-terrain baby-buggies, the Porsche Cayennes and Volkswagen Touaregs. Vehicles, I was told recently, that are known to cognescenti as ‘badge cars’. Henry VIII would have approved. I picture him hunting deer armed with a 9mm Glock pistol, from the front seat of his Land Rover Vogue. He is impersonated by Ray Winstone, who, on cornering his prey, snarls: ‘Gotcha, you filfy littul toerag. .’
I gain the crest of the hill and there it is, falling away behind me, swags and ruches of greenery and brick, under the blue-painted ceiling of its recent conversion: New London, city of the toppermost property prices. I can see a golden drop of sunlight on the glans of the Swiss Re Tower (Lord Foster’s phallus, commonly known as the Gherkin), and the inverted pool table of Battersea Power Station. I can see the Hampstead massif and the Telecom Tower. I can see my life, entire, in a single saccade.