Dirty Old Town

ON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsworth, Sept 3rd 1802



Tuesday 2 Dec
For more than a year, Luton Airport has been surrounded by roadworks, preventing people from getting home from the airport even after midnight, which is just what you need after a five hour flight. The taxi drivers huddle in each other's taxis for warmth, speaking Hindi or Urdu. You have to pay a quid to use a trolley for your bags, which is offensive. It's minus one. It feels like the most normal thing in the world to be home.

Wednesday
I wake up in a bed enveloped in Egyptian cotton sheets, lying on the softest pillows, looking at a pale, cool room. Mum's love of decent things even when there's not much food in the fridge means it's comfortable in bed and frost covers the roofs outside like snow so I don't rush to get up. I've been awake for hours, anyway. Thinking. The house is cosy: log fires and hot radiators; tweeting birds and proper tea. I really really hate Staines, but we take Maor to town to arrange an eye test, buy him new trainers and mooch about, looking at the toys. Maor doesn't want to come to Leonie's house so I go with a backpack and a book on the train; Leonie picks me up with Ella, Megan and Tullia in the back, grinning sweetly and wondering why Maor didn't come. The house smells of baking salmon and steaming dogs. Cats hang out on the kitchen counter and lick plates in the sink. Sean and Catia are there already, munching on hard crisps and looking smarter than I look. The house has evolved into a beautiful place - Leonie's canvases line the walls and one captures Grandma's expression perfectly, so I look at it for a long time. Being here is like walking into a warm corner of your heart. Dinner is eggplant soup with mint leaves and pine kernals dotted on top; salmon en croute with Thai paste and spinach on the side, and muesli crumble and custard for pud. I take Florence her dinner - she's babysitting next door. She got fifty quid for it. I'm in the wrong career.

Thursday
Flo(15) has tuba today and can't carry it to school so Leonie drives her in. Ella (13) has her saxophone grading so I listen to her practice after breakfast. She makes me (piss weak) tea - I add another tea bag- toast ('Shall I butter it for you? Yes, please Ella. Do you want some marmalade? Shall I cut it in half for you?) and makes the sweetest little 'oh' noise when she makes a mistake that if I was the teacher, I'd pass her just for that. We take her there - she's so nervous - I wish her luck and get on the train. I walk over the bridge and London hits me like an intravenous mainline shot of adrenaline.





Waiting for Kate on Embankment, I go into the National Theatre, a place I've never been to before. There are lots of these places - London is a city I'd like to get to know better. Upstairs is the 'Landscape Photography of the Year' exhibition so I float silently in front of large canvases of rough British seas, tangled, knotted woods and icy moors, enjoying (just as much as the exhibition) the dark oak floors, the heavy doors of the restrooms and their solid handles, the porcelain seat of the toilet and the thick tissue paper, wondering if that means I'm a snob. In the coffee shop beside the photographs people are quietly eating, sitting upright, drinking politely to the classical music in the placid cafe. In his eight chapters preceding Perkei Avot, Rambam, the King of Spain's physician, writes that just as a diseased body needs a certain cure, so the troubled soul needs to restore itself, and this is done by wandering around beautiful buildings and gardens. He's right, you know. Kate is restorative as well. She also grabs hold of the manuscript I'm about to lob into the Thames and, in a moment of focus and light, tells me exactly what's wrong and what's right. We have noodle soup in Wagamammas and take our cold ear shells off to meet the others in the pub, which was chilly. A crushing headache for hours and hours leaves me reeling. Good to see my writing comrades again.






Friday and Saturday
Maor and I get the train to Pinner and go to Moriah. In the playground, the thin minded, gossipy mothers I never liked anyway give sidelong looks and almost hellos; the ones I loved give hugs and kisses. Inside, the over-controlling teachers leave me with a sour taste in my mouth. Shabbat comes in early - 'I run and I run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking' to get to Chiswick on time. Dinner, champagne cocktails and wine with Mazzer, a spa and steam room in the morning and a wander by the river, watching the kayaking men in woolly hats, and a walk along Chiswick High Road where Jamaicans in a steel drum band play Jingle Bells to white shoppers with expensive beach strollers. A microcosm of society, this place - everyone here is a made-it professional, all the smart homes look the same inside the large, bare windows -it's lovely but it's not quite real. Not for me, anyway. Not yet. If ever. When Shabbat goes out we go to Justine and Pete's; Milly (5) had a temperature but said, ' You made me feel much better, Emma. Will you come back and live here, please?' I make soup for Jess, who's sick as a dog and in bed for a week already, and Justine does her usual trick of saying, 'Oooh, can you double up?', so I make soup for her as well. We deliver the soup and sit with Jess a while. As days go, this one's close to perfect.





Do I miss it here? Of course I do.
Do I want to come back? I do, actually. Kind of.
Will I? Hmm.
Good question.