Tracking
After a schizophrenic night’s clubbing in the depths of Bristol - where a few staggered steps took you from a skiing lodge bar straight from the alps, to a 70’s neon lit disco ballroom, to a padded French whore’s boudoir - I found myself on the train homewards. Tired and sweating iced cider out of every pore, I didn’t much fancy the 3 hour journey home, not least because it took me through London. I’ve never much liked cities, big, dirty, brash and brazen places where untold masses jostle shoulder to shoulder and yet refuse to acknowledge each other’s existence in their supposedly shared space. Reading, Bristol, Luton. Pestilent places. London. London is as foul as the whole lot rolled up into one huge smouldering pile. Ignoring ticket inspectors, given the chance they are remarkably reluctant to harass anyone with a hooded jacket and vacant eyes, I glared out of the window as the train made its slow progress into the beating heart of the country’s capital city.
Trash that danced in the lank breeze filled the gaps between the tracks and sickly dwarfed bushes struggled to push themselves between soot stained gravel. Odd images flashed by. Strange men in neon jackets and hard hats hung in scaffolding, gesturing at the layered shapes and swirls of decades of graffiti, for all the world seeming like future archaeologists examining some alien artefact from a forgotten time. At the station I was pushed off the train and into the flow of the herding business men and backpacked women heading for the Underground. All the while overhead a harsh disembodied voice warned of the necessity of continual vigilance against thieves and the dangers of luggage exploding if left unattended.
The Underground is a place that truly deserves it’s capitalisation. It’s a part of the City, but disconnected in a strange way. Rhizomically attached to disparate streets above ground, the Underground has its own seperate social rules, and it’s own dangers. Keep to the left. Mind the escalators. Beware pickpockets operating. And whatever you do, MIND THE GAP. At the Tube station I closed my eyes against the wash of filthy air that announced the arrival of a tube train. I tried not to breathe. A person’s worth of dead skin hung in that gush of air, the unnoticed Dead recycled eternally beneath the City. If you blow your nose after the Tube, you can actually see the grey grime that is all the Dead leave behind of themselves in that place, smeared like just so much filth in your tissue. Underground we are all the Dead. On the Tube the stations flashed by, named for places long since buried beneath the housing and high rises of modernity, small pools of light in the darkness beneath the City. Every possible kind of person imaginable, from men from deepest Africa in colourful flowing robes, Muslims with dark beards, veiled women, Eurotrash, pierced and mournful goths, every possible kind of person seemed crammed into that speeding cylinder of metal; as if some advertising freak had enforced a strict policy of ethnic and cultural diversity on each and every tube train. The City, it seems, welcomes everybody of all creeds and colours. It welcomes all with open arms, each welcome to try and find work or starve to death in some forgotten nook of walkway deep Underground. It welcomes, welcomes the suspicion that any person could be a fanatic, a suicidal time bomb waiting to drag you and everyone else around you kicking and screaming to the promised Paradise. Avoid eye contact, for Gods’ sake, don’t meet their eyes!
It was with some relief that I finally made my connection and boarded a train set to speed towards the greenery of the countryside. At least in the backwaters of the country the eccentrics are largely harmless and don’t follow you down the street screaming that you’ve stolen their nick nak, at least the worst you’ll see at closing time is a farmer stumbling around, trying to find his tractor. As the train ghosted from the platform the grey concrete of the City gradually blurred into the greenery of leaves and fields that spoke of my coming Home.
