Rambling Tale

Yesterday, like today, was one of those gorgeous mid-September Indian Summer days. The complacency of June, July and August was no longer an option; I knew that this is going to be an increasingly rare occurrence and so lounging around in the back garden with a book seemed wasteful and inappropriate. Decision-making, however, was another matter. I had desire, but no direction. I had a fuzzy head from the night before, when I had been manic and thus not gone to bed until 4am. At one point around 3am I had actually considered getting in the car and doing the hour-and-a-quarter drive to Brighton to sit on the beach and watch the sun rise, but finally sanity pervaded and I made myself sleep for three or four hours.
Staying up all night and greeting the dawn is a lovely concept – indeed, one that I used to embrace regularly throughout my college days – but reality tends to kick in around mid-morning as the pseudo-jetlag sinking-into-the-floor feeling takes hold. As a younger man there were, ahem, measures that I could take to keep myself going, but these days my body is (mostly) a temple and über-concentrated doses of caffeine didn’t seem an attractive option. My twitchy, fidgety mind was already having trouble settling on any single subject for more than thirty seconds.
Sleep calmed me down and thus I started the weekend by indulging in the typical pleasures of the Hg Saturday morning – tea, newspapers, a long soak in the bath and catching up with outstanding online business (okay, weblog backlog – you know me too well). All of this was intended to be the prelude to some kind of Big Adventure, but 2pm came and I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my day. I could see that without an objective I would end up doing nothing, yet faced with the embarrassment of riches that the capital has to offer I was paralysed through excess of choice.
Desperate measures were called for. I tossed a coin to decide whether to take the train or tube into town, got into the car and less than fifteen minutes later found myself at North Greenwich station. Built primarily to serve the beautiful, wasteful Millenium Dome, North Greenwich is an oddity. It’s a typically competently architected Jubilee Line extension station that also serves as a significant bus terminus. It’s currently in the middle of nowhere and development of the surrounding area is slow. It’s incredibly handy for us and I was worried at one point that it would be closed once the Dome’s activities had wound down, but it always seems busy and I hope that the planned Thames Gateway regeneration means that it has a secure future.
I love public transport, for a whole host of reasons that would take too long to explain here. One thing that I particularly love about travelling into central London via the extended Jubilee line is the hint that you’re sailing down the River Thames, even as you sit in a metal box in a tube tens of metres underground. Heading west, the line hugs the south bank of the river and many of the station names have an aquatic resonance – Canary Wharf, Canada Water, London Bridge, Waterloo – until the line heads north and immediately hits the seat of raw power that is Westminster.
I had no idea where I was going yesterday and realised that I’d be quite content just to sit on the train reading my paper. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d been travelling somewhere without any intended destination. I decided to play it safe and got out at Waterloo. I wandered past the Royal Festival Hall and up onto Waterloo Bridge. Away from the hustle and bustle of the shops, in the relative peace and wide open-space of the bridge, I suddenly had a strong sensation of being at home. No longer chasing fun and excitement in the enticing, alluring capital, I was just a man having a wander around the place where he lived.
It was a lovely feeling, capped a few seconds later when I bumped into a friend at the other end of the bridge. We chatted for five or ten minutes, but the timing was against taking it any further. I was in the mood for a coffee, whereas she and her companion had just had one. We said our goodbyes and I carried on walking. Still with no agenda, I wandered up through Covent Garden, down Floral Street, up Charing Cross Road, down Long Acre, through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, down Fleet Street and ended up at Blackfriars.
By this point I had learnt the crucial lesson that however nice the day is, however much you want to hold on to the dog-end of summer, undertaking a three-hour walk in flip-flops is a really stupid idea. My feet were feeling a cartoon-like throbbing sensation and it seemed to be a good idea to start thinking about returning home. I took the tube to Tower Hill, where I walked across Tower Bridge and stared at David Blaine in his perspex box for a few minutes. I’m not a fan, but it’s a spectacle and I wanted to see whether seeing it in real life would change my opinion of it.
It hasn’t, to be honest. I can see the intellectual appeal of it as an exploration of endurance, but three things get in the way of full appreciation. Firstly, Blaine has a history of this whole freeze-me-in-ice, stand-me-on-a-flagpole thing and it’s all rather one-dimensional stuff. If he walked barefoot to the North Pole I might pay more attention. Secondly, (wo)man in glass/perspex box has been done before, albeit Blaine’s implementation is more extreme. Thirdly – and feel free to call me a joyless, Guardian-reading sourpuss here – it seems obscene that someone should choose to deliberately starve themselves to a life-threatening extent for public spectacle, when there are Starving Children In Africa.
The most interesting aspect of his feat, to my mind, has been the public’s response to it. As the Sunday Times reports today:
“What has been clear from the start is that Londoners are not taking Blaine quite as seriously as he is taking himself. He announced on television before climbing into his box: ‘I