A London Encounter: Episode 1

The following post was a challenge to me from my mate Poly to get writing again. I have felt lost for words too much in recent months and years, often not writing (or at least publishing) more than my daily evening diary entry. I am meant to be a writer, not just a baker.

So here, dear reader, is the result. I’m a bit rusty, it’s a bit of a melange of my thoughts of an encounter yesterday that both Poly and I had — but it’s a start.

If you read to the end, that means a lot. I’d love to know what you admire most about London, especially when you’re feeling down. Is it your favourite city in the world too?

Sunday 27th April, Soho

Are you still a Londoner if you’ve been living in Somerset running a bakery for five years? Is it time to return? Why is it so damn hard to string a string of dates together in this city of millions?! 

My friend Poly and I were fresh from watching fantastically funny, feel-good film Penguin Lessons at our favourite cinema Picturehouse Central. Streets away as we waxed about it and wiped the last two or three tears away, something was nagging away at me. Some things. 

If you’re tired of London then you’re tired of life so Johnson famously said, and I tend to agree. But sometimes you’re just a bit tired, a bit stressed and a bit lonely and London doesn’t reach out and help, it simply shrugs at you. Sometimes it feels like London wants you to be tired of it.

We ambled over to our next spot. Two glasses of house white please, my round. Poly pulled up a pew, all ears in return. I rambled and I raged, I bit my lip. I rambled some more. 

Poly wasn’t the only one listening.

Whether his mates had gone or he just felt generous, a man with a soft South African lilt piped up from behind my left ear. 

‘What are you both drinking? I don’t like to see empty glasses’

Oh here we go, I thought. 

Owen, a wiry, energetic, close shaven and spectacled man in his 70s asked again and we replied second time around. Were we being hit on, and were these refills worth sticking around? 

This sort of question is quite futile though, when stood inside The French House on Dean Street in Soho. 

This is a pub, bar and restaurant that’s been open for yonks. The staff stand strongly by the handwritten sign at the bar, that people on their phones are to be actively discouraged. It’s in-person conversations they’re after.

Over our glasses of vin de la maison, Owen opened up. He had stories, and until he’d interrupted our conversation I hadn’t realised that perhaps they were precisely the stories I needed to hear. 

He’d just run the London Marathon for starters! ‘For the first and last time’. How was it? ‘Harder than Everest Base Camp trek, and with much less interesting scenery.’

London, you see we could all agree that it was the best city in the world, but sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted, to treat some of the most stunning architectural achievements ever undertaken as just the wallpaper to our daily grind. 

Online dating? Owen had plenty of sympathy for our hatred of it, and we were all in agreement that ‘dating now’ is nothing like ‘dating then’. Owen later told me that his Sardinian partner had just moved in with him after ten years of dating. 

Perhaps. ‘then’ and ‘now’ are not so different after all… but I bookmarked that thought for another day, another conversation. 

The beautiful thing was that they bled into my recollections of travels past. His tales of Everest became my Mardi Himal trek. His night dive when the group ran out of oxygen on a calm, warm night became our local guides getting me and friends lost deep in the heart of the Ecuadorean Amazon Rainforest during a storm. His partner’s ’excessive owning of many different shapes of pasta’ and cupboard hoarding was my own. 

It was such a balm. 

Sometimes London is just going to feel like thousands upon thousands of strange ships in the night. Often the shit show of your personal life will not find solace in your surroundings alone. It’s on you to keep the repairs running. 

But, now and then, accept an invitation from a stranger in a pub on a warm Sunday evening. Perhaps that’s all the repair you need. To listen, and to be listened to. Wine or no wine. 

Faith restored, London, and Londoners! 

Now, where’s that paracetamol gone?