The day began usually enough. My alarm clock rang too early for its own good, and I lounged, yawning, in bed, but only for a few minutes; there was sunlight dappling the white walls of my room as it filtered through the newly fattened boughs outside my window.
The walk to Hackney Central takes me through two long blocks of brown tenements and dirty brick row-houses before spitting me out at the Round Chapel on Clapton Road, a nonconformist church that has, like Hackney, attracted weirdos for over a century. I stopped for scrambled eggs on cheap wet toast at the Marina Cafe above the Mare Street Narroway; the matronly egg-scrambler sang "Locomotion" along with the radio, while workmen in fluorescent yellow vests spooned up beans, caffeine, nicotine.
The 48 bus, which takes me to work, zips London down from north to south, beginning at Walthamstow and meeting me at Hackney Baths, a public swimming pool built in 1897. The 38, which zigzags from northeast to southwest London, follows the 48 awhile but turns after the train station, bending gracefully around Hackney's more genteel curbs before bulldozing its way into the melee of junky hardware stores and West Indian groceries and Senegalese fabric shops and Turkish barbers of Dalston Junction. Dingy curtains flap desperately from a squat's blown-out windows, like pirate flags; the streets become a veritable carnival of color.
The 48, however, chugs down Cambridge Heath and turns into Hackney Road, down the long row of small factory fronts touting office furniture or custom-made shoes or woodturning services. Some are specialized merchants who've built a business solely upon PVC pipes or sticks of incense or divots; some were and
went
bust, their storefronts boarded or bricked up, their windows jagged shards of glass. We soar, all of us pieces of variously burnt toast sitting in a glass-walled toaster, over train gullies strung below with electrics like spiderwebs.
In Shoreditch the atmosphere changes: suddenly, the city's begun. A blue-neon strip club atop the precum of Old Street at which a former housemate of mine worked forms the frontier; behind it, the bricked-up factories, before it, the bars and workspaces of the City, which intensify exponentially until Liverpool Street Station, a quivering hive of people-ants circulating like an ant farm on fast-forward.
The ground on which the station stands was founded as the priory of St. Mary of Bethlem in 1247 (where was your genetic material then?). It became the world's oldest psychiatric hospital: records show that at least as early as 1403 the hospital served patients with mental disorders. The hospital's reputation is tarred by its history of putting patients on display, insanity as a public spectacle--hence the reason, incidentally, that the word 'bedlam' came to signify chaos. Visitors were allowed to bring long sticks with which to poke the inmates; in 1814, there were 100,000 such visits.
Liverpool Street station was built atop the hospital in 1874, took a hit from a Gotha bomber in World War I (162 dead), had its glass ceiling shattered in World War II, burnt down in the 1960s, appeared in Mission: Impossible in the nineties, and got a subterranean tunnel blown up during the July 7 bombings last year. (The oldest building in Miami's from, like, 1920, but hey, Will Smith wrote a song about us!)
The effects of the congestion charge become immediately apparent past Liverpool Street; private cars all but disappear. The only vehicles owning this chunk of road are red buses and black taxis and white delivery vans. If I'm sitting on the top level, I've got ten minutes to watch a county of drones peer tiredly at the hulking monitors perched before them, ticking at keyboards, reching for their bottomless cups of coffee or Diet Coke or little twisty bags of cocaine. (Or their bloody tea. This is England, remember.) They sit next to and atop each other like alphabetized spices on cupboard shelves.
The streets here still have medieval names like Cheapside and Poultry Street and Pudding Lane, the last named for the 'puddings' (entrails and organs) that would fall from the carts coming down the lane from the butchers in Eastcheap as they headed for the waste barges on the Thames. There's even a Gropecunt Lane; I'll leave it to you to figure out what was on offer down that street.
Finally: London Bridge. As a bridge it's relatively boring, but the view--foggy, rainy, sleeting, gray--is always beautiful; in the sun, the reflection off the waves and glass windows of the buildings limning the river positively dazzle. On the other side of the river: Southwark, Borough Market,
Neal's Yard Dairy.
Fuck it, though. I'm not going to work today. Instead, I've got a lunch date with the Fat Duck.
