“I’ve got a big meeting in the City”

Noise/ crocodile season, new shoots in fluorescence walking in line/ discipline, routine the backbone of our little island/ Pond side in Springfield Park / the dog walkers / bounding Labradors chasing rotten tennis balls / the lone harmonica player / old grey whistle test theme / the golden hours on weekdays before noon / the dispossessed, the misfits, the ninjas, the jazz talkers, the tops off the early drinkers the ducks and geese congregate.

Early in the post millennial years ragged early adopters of online diatribe gathered close by these Edge-lands, a loose collective of rabid poets, a Welsh intellectual, an old Etonian a now deceased philosopher amongst others. The ‘zone’ had yet to be commodified, reification was a looming spectre, just then it was still just a ‘bit of a laugh’, no beards in sight, a non-career minded sortie through densely overgrown canal side brush.

               

                The ‘city’ as metonym for collective psychosis of money launderers and alpha male members only club. The City as architectural neo ruin, a blast in the face, enclave inside the ‘Ring of Steel’, the closed fist the bunch of fifties rolled tightly bound inside pocket of quilted jacket; awaiting expungement in the Ten Bells before moving onto the Golden Heart of maybe the pride of Spitalfields for the more adventurous hedge funder.  The closed off gaze, the over confident swagger the poking gut if left unchecked. Shirts by T.M Lewin, get a good deal if you spend more, always need to spend more.

The question remains, what relations bind us to this place?  How did we pitch up here?

What circuitous route bore us east among these former ruins? We speculated and praised our ingenuity to escape, but we were only just a few years ahead of the pack, the Olympiad was our Utopia’s death knell. River banks exploding with upturned shopping carts, rusty bicycles and giant hogweed would live on in our imaginations only; as fading super 8mm memories of a pre-digital time of quest without gain, friendships’ without networks, simple anthropological vices, the first wave of Polish Lagers.

Rave culture transmogrified with the travellers’ scene and swept across the south east like a wave of hysterical insurrection, the sulphate swillers clashed matted locks with the loose limbed baggies; desperate to forget the weeks’ work, for a short while a kind of symbiosis was achieved. Sadly, it would not last.

Now washed ashore next to the swamplands of Walthamstow we had time to reflect on a journey from Blackwater estuary flatlands, the tidal saltmarsh of north Essex to this inner city ‘wild zone’, corralled by the lea navigation and the dense urban conurbations of Newham and its leafier neighbour Waltham Forest. 

                Here come the steely eyed buggy pushers / trail blazing unwavering in self- belief/ the sense of entitlement is palpable / “We bought our belonging” / fully paid up, now. Scions of a creative dynasty that forms its nexus beside new formations of ley lines demarcated by high end delicatessens’ and all white Victorian yoga spaces. If this is capitalist realism then these are its foot-soldiers, gliding in unruffled organisation just below a level of passive aggression that is serviceable enough to go largely unnoticed. These are the Passantes ‘of Baudelaire, these boulevards are stained with pigeon crap and discarded nitrous oxide canisters, the hovering flanuer is an under employed autodidact. The pineal eye refracts.

We are at Bankside amongst the company of poets.

‘The river sweats oil and tar’

We have achieved divine inspiration in our alienation, the wind wafts wood-smoke and the smell of freshly baking sourdough. All around the city begins to reveal itself again, shapeshifting itself, re-formatting its guise for another new generation. The city that you remember was never really there, it hovers like a mirage in your memory, every year altered a little until any semblance of reality has long been forgotten. You are Prufrock supine and past your prime, you must go to the banks of the Thames and pray to the river gods, you must submerge yourself in the muddy waters of this great river, this our Ganges.

“You invented it, it is a spectre”