Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash
Chris’s Room
When Auden bought his first home- a farmhouse in Kirchstetten- he wept tears of happiness for the days of impermanence he was able to relinquish, the simple anticipation of place. And I have never been far from the routine of cheap rentals, jerry-built basements, corners, floors and sofas, beds borrowed from friends long gone. That year, home was a one-roomed studio, across from the hospital which said something for my state of perpetual helplessness and most nights, lonely and bored I would cycle across the city, to visit Chris in his room, while butchers chopped loins in mournful night abattoirs and postal workers sorted the dead letters of our ambition. The bare walls of faded magnolia called across the city, the bleepy somnolence of night radio. The dying geranium and a table of loose carpet tiles. Early mornings of weird TV. A time comfortably dead. I will always understand aspiration by my longing for that room, how I would have been deprived of transience by its space, with that view of the cathedral and a pub drowning in ivy from the lowly galley kitchen in which we never ate a meal.
The Epicureans
Maybe because they lived on two-year work visas, sou-cheffing through Soho or mixing their Last Words for city boys in high-rise bars, comfortable in the starch of their denim aprons, as they navigated the balance of maraschino and bitters, quoting Saki on green chartreuse. Or out and adrift in cellars of Lamb’s Conduit Street, or the river smeared walls of London Bridge, where they trawled for New Zealand Pinot to remind them of parties on the volcanic sands of home, or Californian Zinfandel, and outsider Cabernets, and long summers in Oregon cooled by pacific winds and by renegade ice cream of cherry and bone marrow. In their bare house-shares on the edges of Dalston, they brewed excellent coffee tasting of cocoa and lemon and spent their evenings, fuelled by Fleurie and quail blowing the gas bill on Petrus, Gewurtztraminer, Armagnac, coasting on their knowledge of viticulture, like the ancestors who brought the old world in fragile Syrah vines, the way their grandchildren made the return journey, hauling along civilisation in the bottom of a rucksack.
G in London
He prefers the scrappy areas of the north, the stretch beyond Camden Town tube, Blackstock Road, Kentish Town, these high streets which are nibbled at by decay. Free-sheets are there to be filleted. Each day presents new opportunities for a quest. Charity shops, the perfect greasy spoon. A leather maker crossed him with inflated prices. A Ukrainian beauty sold him the perfect Panama. A brass duck, a book of quizzes are the latest trophies. He finds that passers-by approach him unbidden, drawn by the white beard the stiffened gait. He will tell them of the vagaries of fortune. I’ve had a full life by any kind of measure. The first man in Russia, witness to a beheading in Chop-Chop square, the late, dry years kicking around the desert of Bahrain, hungry for the buck he always chased. A case holding a million dollars, the tale of Acker Bilk’s toupee. These fables of grandeur and invention prove that memory is only a sliver from imagination, about the width of fate. He walks with his hands clasped behind his back. His wrists are strong, still but his voice will tremble when he mentions his late discovered fragility, a wound not healed.