The Country Diary of an Insomniac Londoner

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Retire to bed shortly after midnight.

At 1am, my over-stimulated mind is still wide awake, straining to pick up the pattern of late-night footsteps and stray bits of conversation outside.

At 2am, nothing moving save the odd car.

At 3am, black silence, broken only by the quarterly chiming of the church bells solemnly charting the progress of my insomnia. I feel suffocated by the circularity of my thoughts in the darkness.

At 4am sharp, entry of the dawn chorus.

The birds’ joyous polyphony is strangely soothing, and I shift my focus to the individual song-lines, registering sounds unfamiliar to the Londoner’s ear. Slowly, dozily, fuzzy sleep arrives.

Cheery morning is there all too soon, announced by those unforgiving chiming bells.

Remembering the Vote on Europe: 23rd June 2016

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On the day we went to the polls, the rain felt different: a constant warm wetness hanging in the air, monsoon-like and not at all English. Not the drab greyness which London rain generally brought, but instead a strange, close luminosity – a tropical haze in the northern midsummer light. It felt prescient of something.

On the day we went to the polls, train-lines flooded, public transport was over-crowded and sweaty, and I travelled on unfamiliar, looping journeys, viewing the city through the frame of bus windows as though I was watching the opening sequence of a movie set in an attractive foreign capital.

On the day we went to the polls, emotions ran high. Strangers pressed Vote Remain stickers onto me, urging me to cast my vote, and I declared my personal voting decision publicly from my stickered lapel in a way that felt very un-English. On Cheapside, a Remainer campaigned vociferously in a continuous, theatrical monologue, pacing up and down the pavement offering stickers of allegiance. All day I felt a tightness in my throat at the enormity of our collective decision-making.

On the day we went to the polls, I talked about contemporary art with a London dealer of mixed French and Greek origin; I sat in a Turkish cafe looking out onto our multicultural high-street; and I went to bed hoping that the next day I would wake again to a vibrant, cosmopolitan, European city.

 

May

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London trees in May are a lush deep green, as though freshly painted. The new foliage arrives with all the sudden intensity of new adolescence, abruptly changing the face of the city. 

Spring may have been cold and overcast, but the long, light days offer spirit-lifting relief from the grey gloom of winter. Cautiously, Londoners are emerging from their chrysalises.

I have got the walking bug. Energised by the spring air, I join the morning rush-hour alongside the canal, dodging the cyclists and joggers as we all negotiate the tricky narrow tunnel paths. ‘Be more tortoise and less hare’, advises a sign as the droves of bicycles speed past. 

Slow down – what’s the hurry? In a few months the luscious green leaves will be flat and dry, tarnished with city fumes and the heaviness of a London summer. I want to inhale and hold this exquisite, fleeting month of May.