Blog: Meeting with Sue continued

Today I am writing under the auspice of the great Jeff Buckley. It seems that Buckley's spin of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' eases me into my writer's mindset, if there were ever such a thing.

London is a big place and I can never sum it up easily. I was walking through an urban contradiction punctuated with pockets of greenery. It didn't matter where I walked: past the Eros statue with the encircling pigeons or risking sanity by crossing the 3 lane roads- I have seen it before. Walthamstow or the ill fated postcode 'E17' was somewhere I had lived for 3 years. I say E17 is ill fated, because a short-lived pop group (largely dedicated to a congregation of screaming teenage girls) decided to use their area code to emphasise their urbanite origins. Well there you have it my tenuous link to the rich and famous!

Meeting a friend removes the sense of depersonalisation in such a large city. Maybe it has something to do with the 7 degrees of separation (funny that our connectedness is tied to a concrete number).Walking through what the Americans would call a promenade; Piccadilly traversed through the bohemian beats of Longacre, the banks, financial square, the officialdom of Regent Street and Piccadilly's final ushering towards the stupendously regal Green Park (where congregations gawp at Buckingham Palace. Ironically the Queen is hardly at home).

For a second, my temporary pliancy saw me dragged into an Audi car showroom. Whilst walking around like a man pausing to behold a Goya print (probably the man eating ogre with the very earthy colours that plagued the backdrop), I heard intermittent cooing from Sue and her friend Kiera: 'The TT Coupe'�it's mine. Wow! They have pamphlets (loads of information on each model).'� Moving towards the front window was a spinning carousel of model cars. The contraption had stages which alternated in a conveyor belt fashion, revealing all of Audi's range in minature. Staring on and on at this revolving monster had prompted the somatic symptoms of seasickness. Feigning alertness was a feat on my part; the coffee I had savoured 2 hours before was losing its will to punch buttons on my consciousness! During the 30 minutes or so, I wasn't aware that I was playing the same music in my head. It was a cyclical piece lasting 6 minutes called 'Le Onde' by Einaudi. The lack of a definitive ending, meant that I could loop the rhythmic piano chimes endlessly in my imagination.

The field was hiving with activity in Green Park and a few squirrels approached us. Their curiosity about the environment was fascinating to watch: a scurry here and a twitch of a head every now and again. I reeled off a few photos of one of the fury things, whilst it was standing on its hind legs. I think it had a grey mottle along its back and a white oval coat on the underside, just like a tabby would. Between enactments of being strangled (Canadians are hardy) and just hurling my legs in midair, we chatted about our approaches to writing. Besides a predisposition to approaching writing as a skill, I vehemently believed that craft can be learned by modelling: a psychological explanation of how we emulate the works of others. I then gestured that only after a certain period of experimentation would an individual voice awaken from slumber. She was entertaining other ideas.

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