Sunday, January 27, 2013
It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names... and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskilful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn or, more recently, motorized, and the needs of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every colour and manner and kind.
- Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
It was snowing in London last Sunday, and I sat in a freezing converted-warehouse cafe wrapped up in mismatched layers of scarves and jumpers, reading the ever-impenetrable Umberto Eco over a plate of fried oysters and a white peach bellini, feeling like I had all the time in the world and feeling very young. The very next morning, I was hurrying to work in a dark suit and crisp white shirt, trying not to spill takeaway coffee on similar dark suits all around me in the streets of still-white London city, working with no thought to time and leaving for home after 1 a.m. in a cab with an equally tired driver, only to repeat it 4 times over such that the same long days rolled into the same long week.