The fog has rolled in over London, and it has made people dozy. A woman, without looking, steps into the path of my bike and only just manages to jump back before I crash into her. She mumbles an apology, and I mutter ‘dozy bat’ under my breath as I veer away. But I didn’t mean it, and I feel bad afterwards, even though she didn’t hear me.
What is one supposed to do with this autumnal weather in April? If it were November, there would be the comfort of Glühwein and mince pies, of warm slippers and hot water bottles. The scent of autumn is a bright, deepwarm earthy brown, of woodsmoke in the mist, and bronzily-smelling apples. It was in weather like this that I spent one glorious breaktime with my best friend Robert under the Three Chestnuts, collecting the beastiest and most beautifully shiny conkers we could find. We weren’t allowed to bring them back with us to class, so we carefully stashed them in a damp peaty hollow and covered them with golden leaves, making sure that no one saw our hiding place. The next time we went out to play under the Three Chestnuts a day or two later, we found our lovely gleaming treasure sagging and wrinkled under a layer of white mould, smelling like dark earthy humus. That is the smell of autumn.
Today, in London, there are no scented apples or gleaming conkers. The fog dampens the sinuses and the focus. All is monochrome, like the Long Winter of Narnia under the spell of the White Witch. Ivory cherry blossom sanctifies the bare trees like snow. This is a sinister Halloween fog, the type that Dementors and Spectres swoop about in, draining souls dry; the fog in which Scarlett O’Hara lost and found herself. Few commuters this morning have thought to bring umbrellas, because it didn’t seem as if the sulking clouds would open. Now the people drift about dozily in the damp air, with hoods around their creased faces. The fog has seeped into our brains; at my lunchtime boxing class our trainer has to repeat himself after we all confessed we had drifted off into separate daydreams. Perhaps these are the wrackspurts Luna Lovegood warned us about.
In Ireland this fog would be comforting: the cold mountain air rolling down to meet the sea in a soft, safe blanket. Or, in the Cotswolds, it would wisp around the edges of copses, skip playfully over the blond stone walls, and come to rest in a beaded cobweb. Fog in the Loire valley is a beautiful thing, drawing up like a whispering tide over the open fields, waltzing gracefully along the waterways, and softening the regimental plane trees into a misty endless skycathedral. But here in the city the fog is inelegant and dirty. This vast metropolis hidden in the fog is unnerving; like when you walk the rounded corridors of the tube, your solitary footsteps clicking loudly, and you turn the corner onto the platform only to find hundreds of people standing absolutely still and silent. It makes you jump. Only in a large city do you find such an unnatural vacuum of sound.
The London clocks have stopped. As I cycle over Waterloo Bridge, hazy in the fog, I can see Big Ben to my left wrapped in his constrictive scaffolding cast, looking stiff and sad. The great clock atop the Shell Mex building on the Strand, which used to tell me how late I might be for work, was stopped at midnight three weeks ago, and then slowly engulfed in a cage and plastic wrap. There is something unsettling about timeless, silent London, like the jarring chill one feels from the first line of Orwell’s 1984. It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. What is a city without its clocks? No honest faces to bear witness to the parliamentary pandemonium in which we have been submerged. Swaddling our clocks instead of our political system leaves me cold. I think of the lethal chill of Catch 22’s Snowden, whose leg injury Yossarian erroneously bandages instead of the mortal wound in his stomach. Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear? Où sont les Neigedens d’antan? An important, absurd question with no answer.
A spring with no sky, a city without its clocks, is an absurdity. I have long admired the absurd in literature, but this interminable waiting in a blind fog for Godot to arrive at Westminster is one rhinoceros short of a circus.
Two days later, the fog lifts. The defeated daffodils lift their crumpled faces to the blue sky, and dance in the cold air.
What is one supposed to do with this autumnal weather in April? If it were November, there would be the comfort of Glühwein and mince pies, of warm slippers and hot water bottles. The scent of autumn is a bright, deepwarm earthy brown, of woodsmoke in the mist, and bronzily-smelling apples. It was in weather like this that I spent one glorious breaktime with my best friend Robert under the Three Chestnuts, collecting the beastiest and most beautifully shiny conkers we could find. We weren’t allowed to bring them back with us to class, so we carefully stashed them in a damp peaty hollow and covered them with golden leaves, making sure that no one saw our hiding place. The next time we went out to play under the Three Chestnuts a day or two later, we found our lovely gleaming treasure sagging and wrinkled under a layer of white mould, smelling like dark earthy humus. That is the smell of autumn.
 |
| Le poirier, 2007. Photo by me. |
Today, in London, there are no scented apples or gleaming conkers. The fog dampens the sinuses and the focus. All is monochrome, like the Long Winter of Narnia under the spell of the White Witch. Ivory cherry blossom sanctifies the bare trees like snow. This is a sinister Halloween fog, the type that Dementors and Spectres swoop about in, draining souls dry; the fog in which Scarlett O’Hara lost and found herself. Few commuters this morning have thought to bring umbrellas, because it didn’t seem as if the sulking clouds would open. Now the people drift about dozily in the damp air, with hoods around their creased faces. The fog has seeped into our brains; at my lunchtime boxing class our trainer has to repeat himself after we all confessed we had drifted off into separate daydreams. Perhaps these are the wrackspurts Luna Lovegood warned us about.
In Ireland this fog would be comforting: the cold mountain air rolling down to meet the sea in a soft, safe blanket. Or, in the Cotswolds, it would wisp around the edges of copses, skip playfully over the blond stone walls, and come to rest in a beaded cobweb. Fog in the Loire valley is a beautiful thing, drawing up like a whispering tide over the open fields, waltzing gracefully along the waterways, and softening the regimental plane trees into a misty endless skycathedral. But here in the city the fog is inelegant and dirty. This vast metropolis hidden in the fog is unnerving; like when you walk the rounded corridors of the tube, your solitary footsteps clicking loudly, and you turn the corner onto the platform only to find hundreds of people standing absolutely still and silent. It makes you jump. Only in a large city do you find such an unnatural vacuum of sound.
 |
| La Maine in Angers, 2007. Photo by me. |
The London clocks have stopped. As I cycle over Waterloo Bridge, hazy in the fog, I can see Big Ben to my left wrapped in his constrictive scaffolding cast, looking stiff and sad. The great clock atop the Shell Mex building on the Strand, which used to tell me how late I might be for work, was stopped at midnight three weeks ago, and then slowly engulfed in a cage and plastic wrap. There is something unsettling about timeless, silent London, like the jarring chill one feels from the first line of Orwell’s 1984. It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. What is a city without its clocks? No honest faces to bear witness to the parliamentary pandemonium in which we have been submerged. Swaddling our clocks instead of our political system leaves me cold. I think of the lethal chill of Catch 22’s Snowden, whose leg injury Yossarian erroneously bandages instead of the mortal wound in his stomach. Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear? Où sont les Neigedens d’antan? An important, absurd question with no answer.
A spring with no sky, a city without its clocks, is an absurdity. I have long admired the absurd in literature, but this interminable waiting in a blind fog for Godot to arrive at Westminster is one rhinoceros short of a circus.
Two days later, the fog lifts. The defeated daffodils lift their crumpled faces to the blue sky, and dance in the cold air.
______
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