30.

I’m restless for change, constant reinvention.

I went to South Woodford yesterday.  When we moved there in 1984 it seemed vibrant, cosmopolitan, gritty.  Eastenders started that year, and I think I expected our new neighbourhood to be similar.  There was an archway leading between Victorian buildings on George Lane, and two huge tower blocks where students lived, near the railway lines.  Nowadays it is just an average outer suburb.  I suppose it always was.  Birds Of A Feather terrain.  The north circular road cut a big channel through the centre, and demolished a few houses on the ends of adjacent streets.  There’s an underground reservoir in the forest, and the remains of an old road which is now covered in grass.  It’s easy to find if you know where to look.  Our house had a garden wall which belonged to a previous larger house, I think connected to the church.  Next door was a big detached gothic Victorian house divided into multiple bedsits.  I wish I’d managed to look inside then.  As a teenager I was fearless, I’m more cautious about trespassing now.

Visiting today (should I call it visiting?  Roaming perhaps) I felt quite detached from the time I lived there years ago.  This isn’t surprising.  As I’ve often thought, there are few palces I can go back to and feel a connection with.  This is unusual, liberating, and terrifying.  Most people have somewhere to go back to where family exists.  I could, theoretically, go anywhere and function, at least exist.  I no longer really have anyone to explain myself to either.  I don’t think I could relocate and restart  emotionally any more though.  I want to belong in London.  I suppose I do belong in London, I’ve only recently allowed myself to acknowledge that.  It was one evening whilst waiting for a night bus in Waterloo after being out socially that I decided I enjoyed just being there.  I should explore the city at night more.  That’s where the real city life is.  Thomas De Quincy found it, whilst coincidentally looking for whores.  He got high on opium, although it has the opposite effect on me.  I should explore other cities when I can too.  Roam at night.  Go home in the early hours.  Travel light.  Get dirty.  Paris, Rome, Berlin, Athens, New York, Budapest.  That will do to start with.  Roam in Rome.

Today will be just another day here.  Grey outside.  Nothing to do or be stimulated by.  I’ll clean the kitchen.  Nobody nearby to spend time with.  Where is George?  He can’t be pinned down.  I can’t go to empty speakeasy saloons every day.  Old people do that, don’t they?  They go out walking out of habit, in the hope of seeing life.  Nothing wrong with that I suppose.  I’m just at home with low level anxiety.

I’m saving old clothing to make a rug/throw thing out of small squares.  I don’t actually know how to sew the parts together though yet.  By the end of this year I will have evolved into something else.  Goodness knows what.  I don’t need to worry about it at the moment.  This is my natural state, an inbetween state.  Toby is messaging me about an experimental course he and Adele are setting up, about what practise is, how other people are involved.  I don’t want people involved especially.  “The formal setting for group dialogue to create momentum in projects”.  Quite Ben Cain.