London Loves

[for some reason this didn't post on Sunday - well it did, but randomly on the wrong blog so read as if it was written on Sunday]

I'm on the way back from London again.

Anyone who knows me will know this is a fairly frequent occurance. I go down to London as frequently as possible. There is barely even a month goes by when the draw of the capital doesn't overpower me; certainly not an entire season. And the more I indulge the addiction, the stronger grows the compulsion, the greater the desire, need.

When I talk about London, I don't talk about Greater London with pretty, leafy boroughs of Richmond; or fascinating areas such as Barnet giving rise to curious slang about hairstyles almost perpetually to perplex foreigners; or Watford or Croyden, places of which I can only otherwise imagine. These places are towns in their own, areas of the city that most provicial regions would be jealous of.

No, I am ensconced with the city, the tourist heart. I barely stray beyond Camden or Vauxhall; Kensington or Greenwich; although I will always have a certain fondness for Tooting.

No, the outer boroughs are towns in their own rights. They have all the facilities - more so, even - than some of the towns I have worked in. They are self-contained little enclaves which people operate their entire lives in; fascinating, amazing, simple, ordinary, unique lives in. They don't regularly commute, communicate, engage, indulge or fornicate with. They have no need of Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Royal Albert Hall, the Tate (Modern) or Towet Bridge. They have all their own amazing attractions on their doorstep in Mrs Dorris who works in the laundrette or Mr Chapman who forever tickers with his car on the street. But a million and one people have waxed lyrical about these suburbs ten minutes out and yet 15 billion miles away from the city.

The city is my love. The massively wide roads packed with everything from the longest bus to the smallest cycle which dissapear all the most suddenly into the smallest,, narrowest most forgotten of passages boardered on one side by a lavish, beautiful, toweingly oppressive megolith, and on the other by a quaint, ordinary, almost extinct little building which - although it is the most important building to the many occupants who have worked and lives and LIVED there, and to me; it is passed by without a second thought to billions an d billions of nobodies on a daily basis.

I go into the big, popular museums, galleries, attractions but juxtaposed against the tiny, insignificant, underground and yet fantastically important galleries. The tiny bookshop which isn't an income for the old chap who runs it, for it barely earns enough for his sandwiches; but it is a passion for him. The gallery which, were it not there, would not have afforded the fozens of artists the opportunity to show; or even just to tell someone, one other person "this is my work, my life."

And this is the reason for London: it exists with the massive alongside the miniscule, purely for people like me. If I wasn't drawn by the massive, I wouldn't get distracted by the fripperies which are, to those people, the most important things in the world.

And now I am on my way away from here. From there.