The fast-changing heavens: A newsletter of sorts, though there is no news
Layering nine-dimensional buildings on a four-dimensional city; the way back from frostbite; the tidal bric-à-brac of London; a smorgasbord of freak weather; a statue of Covid...
Imagine that you are in London, England. It is the middle of April. Spring is now well-advanced, but the conditions are out of kilter with the season. The weather vanes do not know in which direction to point. A stray gust of wind, that arrives out of nowhere, vanishes around a corner, leaving absolute stillness in its wake. The amoebae-like clouds have dark grey interiors. They change their faces at the drop of a baseball cap, blown from the head of a man who is walking a few feet in front. The rain starts and then stops like someone is repeatedly turning a shower head on and off. The leaden skies momentarily brighten and turn blue, then immediately fade in graded increments, the grey marbled pallor returning to the heavens. It is like watching a stone that has been rendered colourful through an immersion in water, slowly recovering its drab livery as it yields its film of moisture to the sun’s rays.
It is a quarter to one in the afternoon in the West End of the city. If you look then you might be able to see me. I am the man gazing over the shoulder of Green Park Underground Station. A few yards away from me, to my left, is the arcaded frontage of The Ritz hotel. Behind me, the heavy traffic along Piccadilly comes and goes in fits and starts, broken-up into strips by the numerous pedestrian crossings. I am looking over the low brow of a grassy hill. There is a domed spire in the distance. I could be in the heart of the English countryside.
At certain times of the day, you find yourself within earshot of a group of middle-aged men. Sometimes there are just two. Occasionally they are joined by a third man who is wearing a new, light tweed jacket. He resembles someone who has recently returned from a weekend shooting party on a country estate. His comings and goings are determined by his job, which exists in the realm of high finance. Early in the evening, the number of men number swells briefy to four. You are at a distance where you are able to vaguely overhear parts of their conversation – the broad outline of it. The names of people and places are smudged by the errant gusts of wind or by passing traffic.
J has frostbite; the predictable result of not wearing gloves while in Nepal, until after it was too late. What he actually has are chilblains but no-one knows what they are, so it is easier for him to say frostbite. My father gets chilblains on his feet from being out in the garden in the winter, and even I couldn't pick one out from a line-up of skin conditions.
The back of J's right hand has the appearance of freezer-burned meat. The tissue around the topside of his fingers is an unpleasant maroon colour, swollen yet dessicated, as if all the moisture has been drawn from the skin, which has lost its lustre and it smoothness. He shows me a photo of how it looked a few days ago when there were pronounced milky-white bands across the middle finger joints where the circulation had been partly cut off. At least it seems to be getting better. He shows me a photo of the chilblains at their peak – a cratered sore embedded in the root joint of an index finger. It reminds me of a photograph of a female patient's injuries that I saw when I worked on a Stroke Unit; a pressure sore in her buttock, so deep I could have inserted my fist into the wound. She stayed on the ward for a few days then returned to the care home who had allowed the sore to fester until it could no longer be ignored.
The oldest parts of London – the parts that never change – were built in three dimensions. They aged up to a point where they became ageless and impervious to time. More modern parts of the Capital were constructed, according to the perceptions and abilities of their architects, around four, five, and even six dimensions. When London Bridge Station was redeveloped, circa 2018, the remodelling was undertaken in nine dimensions. The end result is jarring on the human psyche, except perhaps for one that has been enlightened by a dose of psychedelics. The points of departure from this sprawling megastructure, that fuses the old with the new, are clouded in uncertainty; the same exit seemingly capable of depositing you into different parts of the city, always at peculiar and confusing angles. This is how three men, two of whom know London well, emerge from the vaulted brick corridor of a shopping mall wearing expressions of bafflement. An attempt is made to locate The Shard, currently London's tallest building. We cannot find it; no, wait, it is directly above us. At ground level the base of the gigantic needle absorbs its splintered peak, making the building appear significantly smaller than it really is. In the blue sky overhead, the clouds race past.
We have relocated to the basement of a well-known sandwich chain. There are functional wooden tables - squares and long rectangles - and padded stools.
D recently sold bit of a bitcoin. It went up in value while he was attempting to work out how to cash it in. He works in the banking system. If even he struggles to fathom the basics of crypto, then what hope is there for the rest of us? I see D so infrequently that I get years of news out of sequence. There is no relation between cause and effect, only disparate events. Today he mentions his sister who died of cancer at the age of 38. She was a doctor. It happened a long time ago but I am finding out about it now. I try to reformulate the grief that D must have felt at the time so that I can commiserate with him. The best that I can manage is an approximation.
My enquiry after the well-being of one of J's friends – a man who I have only met on two occasions, but who I like – causes the conversation to take a dark turn. He is being psychologically abused by his girlfriend. The details are unpleasant. He has been browbeaten into a state of dependency and cannot extricate himself from the relationship even though it is miserable for him. Instead he rationalises the abuse. He is a very clever man. In comparrison, my IQ, when it was comprehensively tested at the age of 18, was found to be 96. Who knows how far it has fallen since that time. It pains me that someone who is so intelligent can get themselves into such a state.
I am shown a photograph of him with his girlfriend.
“They look like the ideal couple, don't they,” says J.
He zooms in on the smiling face of the woman. There is madness behind her eyes; the mechanism of a personality that is missing parts, but still functional.
I haven't met T, nor will I, but I hear plenty about her. Nepalese customs strip-searched her on the way in. They shoved two fingers up her vagina, stole half her money and laughed while they did it. Every act of wickedness perpetuated by an institution, or by a country, is laid down on a crumb foundation of individual expressions of inhumanity such as this. How much evil are you personally willing to countenance or hand-wave, so that you can gaze out from your window across golden sands and sparkling coastal waters?
J and I have crossed over Tower Bridge. We are now walking alongside the north bank of the Thames, heading east, towards Canary Wharf, where we will later reconvene with D, and with another man from our past who, for the purposes of this entry, I will name L. The path along this stretch of the river is frustrating taking in short sections of the embankment wall, before a warehouse/apartment conversion forces pedestrians inland along winding picturesque streets of flat cobbles. It is impossible to get an unbroken river view.
At the end of a short, narrow alleyway, the barred gate to King Henry's Stairs has been left ajar. They were previously called Execution Dock Stairs. There was a gallows nearby where those who were found guilty of piracy and other nautical crimes were hung for their misdeeds. The stone steps that once sunk their right-angled teeth into the river at high tide, have been broken off. A metal ladder descends perhaps 20 feet onto the beach. At the bottom, a broad apron of pristine wet sand spreads from the foot of the high embankment wall. This flood defence fuses almost seamlessly with former warehouses that loom over the water; the rampart of a defunct trading empire. They were long ago converted into apartments. The cranes, that once unloaded the ships that anchored alongside, still cling to the outer walls, reduced from functional to ornamental status. Closer to the foreshore there lies a galaxy of boulders; the detritus of London. River-washed pebbles of smooth red brick, that were once part of buildings elsewhere in the city, have been thrown back at the Capital by the repressed, quarantined fury of a high tide that lacks the raw power to drive them all the way to the stone buttresses that line the north bank. Wapping Dock Stairs have been washed away. New Crane Stairs have lost their lower steps but it is still possible to climb back up.
J recently returned to a hotel in New Delhi that was popular with the kind of backpacker on a budget who no longer seems to exist as an archetype. I have fond memories of the 'cafe' outside. Essentially it consisted of a man with a gas burner and the wherewithal to make chai. A long wooden bench spanned the length of a shallow crater in the road. Frequently this depression would be filled with dirty water, the same opaque brown colour as the spiced tea that was the only beverage available. A listing telegraph pole protruded from the centre of the depression like the mast of a sunken ship. Partway up, an electrical junction box clung precariously to the wooden trunk. We would sit on the bench, with our feet above the water, perpetually on the brink of being electrocuted. The first night I went there, I sat next to a Frenchmen who informed that he had robbed many people in the hotel and that he would rob me too. He claimed to possess a knife, though he did not show it to me. In any case, he neither robbed nor stabbed me.
Somehow the hotel still exists, though the upper floors have been gutted and are no longer habitable. J spent a lot of time there, but then again so did a lot of people. He says that, as he entered the lobby, the man behind the counter recognised him and his jaw dropped. J told him:
“I didn't used to care about clean sheets, but I do now.”
The hotel has fallen into such a state of neglect that they had to go out and buy some. The only other people staying there were a group of Italians. I expect, in a few years, it will be gone.
Canary Wharf is another multi-dimensional redevelopment laid down on old foundations. The renovated canals and basins that once functioned as working docks give a misleading impression of where you are in relation to the Thames. I recall the area before it was renewed – miles of crumbling warehouses and waste ground.
Then they built the Canada Tower – a four-sided silver obelisk. When it was going up, my grandfather pointed it out to me from the window of a train. He told me, when it was finished, it would be the tallest building in London. Many years later I worked there for a week as an intern on The Independent Travel Section. The eighteenth floor. A spectacular view all round. If you climb the winding stairs of the Wren monument to the Great Fire of London, in the Square Mile of the old city, and look towards Canary Wharf, the tower and two slightly smaller buildings that appear to flank it – the HSBC building on the left and the Citigroup building on the right – all face directly towards you – the new financial district of London acknowledging the old.
In the space of ten minutes a powerful, sustained gust of wind chases through the broad avenues between the columns of the buildings. Dark clouds of hail, wrapped around airborne currents, scatter across the mirrored facades of skyscrapers. A single bolt of white lightning cracks the grey heavens. It is accompanied by a prolonged rumble of thunder that lasts for over a minute. Then everything returns to normal. The pavements dry out and it as if none of it happened.
We loiter outside the building when D works waiting for him to appear.
“You could have waited inside,” he tells us.
Both me and J look like we've wandered away from a Grateful Dead concert. Long hair. Beards; J's is in the process of turning white.
“We don't really fit in here.”
L arrives in double denim; a jaunty out-toed stride; cheerful.
“They were waiting outside the building. I told them they could have come in, “ says D.
“I think we would have been asked to leave.”
“They would've probably thought you were Extinction Rebellion,” says L.
I am perturbed by a red spherical sculpture, on an outdoor plinth, that resembles a piece of hard coral.
“What's that supposed to be?”
“It's probably a statue of Covid,” says D.
The same prolonged gust of wind that blew through the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf has bought down the power cables on the Fenchurch Street Line. It is evening rush hour. At West Ham, people are queuing horizontally across the platform. In an act of calculated prophecy that will turn out to be slightly out of sync with reality, each short column of commuters have aligned themselves to the approximate location of the carriage doors of a delayed train that is yet to arrive.
The train detours along the Tilbury Line where it is outpaced by figurative snails. I am strap-hanging from a tired arm, in the over-crowded entrance to the carriage, with a view of the light industry that outlines the docks at Tilbury: The container parks and the ashen mounds of gravel; the immense cranes, shaped like coat-hangers, that load and unload the big ships that ply up and down the deep water channel. A pair of bags dangle from my other hand. I am reluctant to put them down in case someone treads on them. Periodically one tired arm exchanges labours with the other. I don't feel well. It has been building all day and now it is here. I have a blood test on Wednesday. The two forms are like a shopping list.
A dream: I am lying on a dull silver gurney, paralysed from the neck down. There are two other people in a similar position. We are waiting in a lobby that is shaped like an obtuse triangle, with angular protrusions jutting from the walls. There are no distinguishing features apart from some kind of door towards the pointed end. My bed has been pushed up against one of the long, white walls. The third stretcher is at an angle in the middle of the room. A man lying on it tells me that it's the worse pain you will ever experience. You will be conscious of it throughout, but afterwards you'll forget it ever happened. If that is true, then I want to know how he knows.
There are grey aliens with black bulbous eyes moving me about, manhandling me into position.
Sometime later, I am a head and a spinal column, sealed below the neck into a tapering body bag. It is made of some kind of matte black plastic with a grey seam running down one side. It is strange looking down and seeing only rumpled flatness where there is usually form. The remainder of my body lies elsewhere.