Free ? write 01
Free writing for free in my free time for anyone to read freely
I have been reading Joan Didion, Colette and P.G. Wodehouse, in winter dullness. The sun sets at 15:53 but the sky is clouded and darker from 14:15. Sometimes there is little point in noticing the time of day.
Outside my house, in a city I love. I was walking behind a girl, a dog walker walking six small, long haired dogs. I was walking to the store behind her, curious about the painting on a wine bottle label. I felt discomfited, like I had no right to be walking to the store to look at the label.
Outside my house, in a city I love to walk in. I was walking quickly, with no purpose at all. I was moving fast because I felt perturbed walking slower. I stopped without warning, abruptly and often when I wanted to inspect something more closely, or take photos for painting reference (to add to the Painting Reference album on my phone acting as font for fresh ideas and prompt for self-castigation when a reference remains unpainted).
I strode on, stopping intermittently, once stopping sharply enough to hear a sharp intake of breath from the woman in a lumpy purple beanie behind me, I’d stopped on the bridge connecting the two sides of the river – I should have stopped closer to the railing than equidistant to the path markers. I thought for several seconds, perhaps tens or hundreds of seconds about when, how and if I should have stopped, and where I should have stopped until this cogitated litany became tedium.
I stopped abruptly because I saw that the clouds in the sky had become tinged with pink, where before the sky was matte frosty, paler blue and gray. I thought the clouds looked fatter, more pleasing and easier to paint. It’s funny that the structures facing the bridge are full of graffiti layered on top of the sign telling you that anti-vandalism paint was used. It’s a little bit sad that the graffiti is just scrawls in tepid color, but you have to walk further than I have yet to see better, maybe good graffiti.
Outside my house, in a city I love, I was walking past a monument standing resolute against cold sky on a fatter, squared and stepped pedestal base embedded with bronze reliefs of some battle on each side. The monument itself is a somewhat diminutive statue of a man atop a long, ridged Corinthian column, there are lions around the base of the pedestal alongside signs stating that climbing the lions is forbidden. The lions were not part of the original monument but added later and you shouldn’t climb them but I have climbed them before, when the signs advising against climbing them weren’t yet there. The lions are slippery because they are bronze, but you can use the ears of the lions (and a mildly abrasive shoe sole) to heave yourself onto one of the ridges on the base of the pedestal of the monument, where you can sit and watch the surrounding streets and intersections from a point of elevation.
Tilting your head you can see a large chandelier in the generic, terribly cozy pub opposite (it might be called The Admiral or something but I only notice pub names with ‘Moon’ in them). The jump down from the pedestal is frightening because you are further up than you think, the lions are a little less useful on the way down. I went back down on my husband’s shoulders last time, climbing him like a monkey or a six year old holding very tight, a little dizzy because vertigo follows even mild heights.
I’m not sure who at the Greater London Authority is responsible for designing the signs advising against lion climbing but I want them to know the pictogram is well-designed given the amount of tourists in this area, but some imposing text perhaps in large black serif letters may have taken a little of the goofiness out of the sign. The stick man falling off doesn’t look like he’s having a bad enough time to stop me climbing the lions again if I want to.
It matters relatively more to me than to others I meet whether street, commercial or transport signs are ugly (intentionally so), beautiful, efficient or misleading. I probably won’t climb the lions if it is raining, but the temptation persists on sunnier days.
I am sitting on a small, spartan steel chair in front of a slightly rusted steel table placed outside a Greek café in the arches of a large building opposite the Parsi-café impersonating British Indian restaurant Dishoom. I have on the table a single glass, a small bottle, a stack of three napkins, a glass ashtray and my phone. The brightness on my phone is so dim it looks switched off, but the battery is so low I’m being cheap about turning it up. I have twenty seven minutes before I can take a charging cable out of my husband’s bag then plug my phone into his laptop.
There are still twenty seven minutes to read the last of Chéri – funnily not The Last of Chéri, but the first book of Chéri, specifically the last of the first book. There is some rain falling from the sky, droplets at best a drizzle, there are a great many umbrellas clasped in the hands of people walking past each other very fast. The holding of umbrellas by people between the heights of 5’1 to 5’9 is a source of anxiety for me when I am with my husband because his eye level is roughly where the ferrules of the spokes of most umbrellas are, in the hands of someone between 5’1 to 5’9. He is not yet here, I am comfortably under the height of most pointy ferrules save when someone is remarkably short. I am sat down away from the street, so the umbrellas should not concern me.
I am watching a woman with another woman, one perhaps mother to the other and they are looking at the Greek café then at the tables outside (they have small droplets of water on them so maybe the glance is about avoiding dampness on their clothes?), they are walking up to the cafe and looking for the menu, skimming it, then heading inside. I am still reading the last three pages of Chéri knowing twenty two minutes have passed but five remain and this is more than enough time to have read even the last eight pages, but I feel a small sense of foreboding and anticipation in my stomach.
I have reached the end of the book and am now reading the list of recommended books on the page after the last page of the book.
There are three minutes left but I am getting up and gathering my phone, tightening my scarf around my neck and buttoning one button of my orange corduroy overshirt (a gift from my mother to my husband but one that didn’t fit him, but it fits me so I wear it).
I am walking fast away from the cafe; not so fast as to alarm the tourists around me. I am thinking about thinking and walking.