edges

[devi]

I'm sitting in the back garden, in the sunshine, with a straw hat on. I have a cold drink and the internet and a cushion to sit on. My stereo is playing The Girl With The Sun In Her Head from just inside the dining room. I'm surrounded by dandelions and some kind of blue flower that just appeared suddenly, in clumps, one day. Thistles and brambles as well, but – shrug.

And what am I doing? I'm missing London. Silly.


When I go back to London these days it all looks different. I come off the Oxford Tube into Victoria station and I'm struck by how big and how busy everything is. The huge indoor space full of crowds and a hundred things to pay attention to. It's always been like that, but the last couple of visits I found myself liking it. It was exciting, the way it was when I was a tourist coming from Ireland. Not a place to rush through with shoulders tensed, in a hurry somewhere, irritated by the crowd, worrying that there'd be a huge queue at the cash machine. When I lived in London I was carrying my obligations around with me. Now it's somewhere I go to play. No wonder I miss it.

Going on through the tunnels to catch my tube, last time I was back there, I was moving at half the speed of everyone else. People dashed and jostled and I just strolled along, early to meet ultraruby and dr_f_dellamorte and taking my time, in a calm little bubble of East Oxford crusty peaced-outness.

Moving out of London has slowed me down. That's fine. It's nice not to feel like you're hanging on by your fingernails. Or like you've got stimulus fatigue and alcohol poisoning from going to films and gigs and stuff every single night and need to spend a week by yourself in a plain white room eating plain white rice. But it does give me a funny indistinct feeling of having lost my edge. I don't hear about new stuff as much as I did, unless I make a conscious effort – music, films, even news.

It's all to do with the tube. If you take the tube every day, you see posters for movies or events or music, even if you aren't taking them in with your fully conscious mind. You buy the paper to occupy your hour-long commute. You read other people's newspaper headlines too. You see what books people are reading (and if you're in a carriage where every bugger is reading The Da Vinci Code, you get depressed, but never mind). All of it gives you a feeling of being in a place where Stuff happens, lots of it, so much Stuff you can't possibly take it all in. If you've got the energy, that feels really good.

(Pause to shoo an insect off my keyboard. That's better.)

Later we were at dr_f_dellamorte's house in Hendon, with fabulous 70s movie posters all over the walls (Don't mess aroun' with Foxy Brown! She's the meanest chick in town!). He kept putting on music like I'd never heard before and I kept going "oh mygod what is that? I must have that," like the first time I ever went to a goth-alternative-indie-rock club (in Dublin it had to be all those things at once). I was talking to Gemma about edges and the loss of them, and I found myself saying that I'd spent four years in London stuffing ideas and experiences into my head, often with little time to do anything else. But in Oxford I have the breathing space to consolidate that. I can let the ideas sink down in my mind and become compost out of which things will sprout in time.

Comments

[millionreasons.livejournal.com]

Really nice to read London-love from someone who has left.