I’m getting the hang of America now. It’s loud, brash, fun, tiring, large, egotistical. All the things we think of it when we’re at home on our tiny little island off the mainland or Europe in a disparaging smug way, but all things that I’m loving and embracing while I’m here. People are open, honest, upfront, not subtle. The buildings are equally large and in-your-face. Ridiculous neon signs the length of several storeys advertise mundane things like car parks. The elevated railway (‘EL’) forms a loop around the downtown city centre. The streets follow a grid pattern so at many intersections you can look in every direction and see an elevated line forming a horizontal axis. I might take a trip on them on the last day. It must have been such a strange experience to live in a tenement building so close to the trains. I don’t think there are apartments on the streets close to the EL now. In parts of New York there are, large brownstone tenements with fire escape ladders. I should visit the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village next. Is it called Lo-Ea-Si? Loweasy? That’s what they do with place names in New York.
There was an anti-Trump protest yesterday, apparently there were lots, all over the country in major cities. Many roads were closed, shops boarded up, police presence, a very friendly atmosphere. Frequent road blocks meant the streets were traffic-free. An all round pleasant vibe. When things like that happen in London there would be rubbish, trash, garbage, panic, disorder. London sometimes has these things every weekend, and to those of us who live and work there they are just a huge nuisance. Often it is hard to tell what the protests are for or against.
When away from home it is easier to see objectively how we compare to other societies and cultures. I feel a bit sad about London, jaded, over it. The right wing extremes on some social media platforms love blaming Sadique Khan, the Mayor of London, and immigration for everything that is wrong with the city, making insane claims that the city is unsafe and crime ridden, that “gangs of foreign men” loiter on corners waiting to assault innocent residents. It sounds like something from Victorian melodrama. Some groups then invoke a fictitious nostalgia fuelled rose tinted London of the past, with photographs of sweet innocent scenes, like children playing on bomb sites, and empty milk bottles on doorsteps. That era of London, if it existed, had crime, as well as TB and polio. The thing is, I want to tell those criticising current crime ridden London that they are wrong, but the streets are dirty, and there are regular reports of thefts near where I work. There probably have been for a long time though, long before Khan was in power. Soho used to be full of vice and far more serious violent crime in the 1960s, as dramatised by Jake Arnott, and others. 1950s film noir classic “Night And The City” also delved into this world, with night drinking clubs, murder, Googie Withers, Herbert Lom.
Two days later, I’m on my way home now, at Chicago O’Hare airport. A slightly odd melancholy feeling. Harry remarked earlier how odd it was for us to part on a downtown street corner in a foreign city. It is late afternoon here, I’ll arrive tomorrow morning, but six hours disappear on the journey. Travel by rail and sea would have taken days or weeks, and the mind would have lost all sense of time. I’d like to do that some time.
I’ve ordered the DVD box set of Stephen Fry’s programme where he visited all the US states, met people, and explored the notion of each state having it’s own identity and culture. It was made in 2008, long before Trump, Johnson and Brexit messed up everything good in the world. It wll be interesting to see if there was a feeling of positivity and optimism then, and if so, where it went.
Wednesday morning. Back in London now. Enjoying blank time at Heathrow airport, giving my phone a chance to charge before heading home. There is a direct train to my neighbourhood, remarkably. A group of teenage students are adjacent, I think Spanish. Noisy, excitable in anticipation of their trip to wherever they are going. All have white western features, some very tanned. Airports are the epitome of liminal space, designed overall for function, not in keeping with their surroundings, but with occasional incongruous architectural flourishes. I’m looking outside now at a space enclosed by the café part of the terminal building, a car park, some escalators. In the middle is a tawdry water feature which no one can get to, no one will even bother to look at as it is so mundane, depressing even, in a place no one is encouraged to linger. Airport designers treat the land they build on as inconsequential, insignificant, impermanent. Heathrow’s development and subsequent unstoppable expansion has necessitated obliteration of entire villages, and potentially some reservoirs are likely to be lost if further expansion is allowed. Our plane landed so far away from the terminal building (Terminal 5, there is no longer a Terminal 1, it was too small) that we had to take a bus on a ring road for at least two miles. Along the way we saw remnants of old runways, service roads and equipment. Beyond the terminal buildings and runways there is a huge sprawl of bland shd-like buildings to house adjacent support services – on board catering, freight parcels, supplies for all the retail outlets in the terminals. It’s all very well developed but constantly shape shifting. A temporary mini city for travellers in temporary states of existence. I think in the future I could exist permanently in that temporary state.
Home now, to plan the next trip.
Andrew Stevenson 