inspiration
This weekend we took our youngest son back to uni in London and decided to escape the dustbowl that is our house renovation project for two days in the capital.
I love London. I lived there for a couple of years after university and worked in three permanent jobs and thirty three temporary ones, so got to know my way around. This time we stayed in an hotel near Covent Garden and boy oh boy was that THE place to be.
On the Sunday, after an incredible vegetarian meal at the Wild Food Cafe in Neal’s Yard we walked down streets where I had first visited my publishers at Octopus and Longman, then headed off to see the highly acclaimed Lucian Freud exhibition. There, as we snaked round the paintings, shoulder to shoulder with entranced art buffs, I got up close and personal to the work of a man who was maybe England’s greatest living artist until he died last year.
Standing close, I could see the brushstrokes that seemed to stamp all over the canvas from his fat hog’s hair brushes. Each dab of paint had been mixed separately, carefully. It took him hundreds of hours to make one painting. Daubs of paint, each pitted with troughs or stippled with dots. This is the work of the English artist to make the most money from a painting in his own lifetime.
Quotes by the artist lined the walls.
“What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.”
he said.
Is that what I do with my writing? They are bold expectations, all of them.
Anyway, thus fortified and inspired by my weekend away, I wrote the following. I hope you like it:
London at the start of spring
The handbrake winces at the slow pace of our arrival.
Stop and start and stare.
Hope wanes at boarded shop fronts.
This is no red carpet.
We gawp through closed windows.
Hunched hoodied shoulders seem to swagger less today,
their unlaced shoes scuff pale pavements.
The endless grey of squat flat blocks –
Downcast faces,
blind to blue breaks in the sky.
But now, as fat black cabs proliferate,
their sunny cyclops eyes tip us the wink. We’re nearly there
and things can change.
The joyous reclamation of red brick warehouses,
punctuates the pastel frames
of quaint new tearooms.
Backs straighten here.
Vintage shopfronts sparkle.
“I’d like to live in Spitalfields,” I sigh.
Up a gear towards the balconies of the Barbican,
where ledges drip with feathered ferns
and ladies in smart jackets pick opera for their ringtones.
And as we creep closer to the heart of town,
I no longer notice the way the traffic crawls.
In the sudden gloom of the overpriced car park, I slam the car door shut
and am immediately buoyed
with anticipation – not for Monopoly’s thoroughfares
but for those roads less travelled.
Secret streets, where price tags, handwritten on brown paper, bowed with twine,
offer me a ‘tartine’ to go, or handmade cheese.
Here, in passageways I cannot name, I brim with joy.
I know my way to the Portrait Gallery, Long Acre, Neal’s Yard.
I stride across roads, away from zebra crossings,
head high, no map in hand.
I know where I’m going
and the sky is blue.
Swinging a cardboard bag with ribboned handles –
inside, that impulse buy from Jigsaw or John Lewis.
I am sated. Happy. Home.
