Dancing about architecture
Here begins an urban fairytale.
Staying in is the new going out. It’s the new black. It’s what everyone’s wearing this season. I don’t get out much, as a rule. Out is overrated. Too much of a muchness. I prefer staying in, carefully tending to small outcrops of dead skin cells as if they were plants, watching every day for tell-tale shoots of recovery. I keep within my four walls and my forehead. My castle in the air rarely pulls down the drawbridge, even for visiting dignitaries from the most far-flung lands.
Yet needs must when the devil drives, and so I step outside to breathe in gulps of air and remind my lungs that they still exist. My respiratory system duly responds with swift, hacking rejections of the noxious fumes, and I return behind my blackened ramparts to lick my wounds and read about the world beyond the murky windows until my eyes sting, stick and shut.
Then, and only then, do I dare to take a line for a walk.
Not that I can decide which line, of course. Black, definitely. Maybe a hop, a skip and a jump over to light blue, then dark? Take the yellow to watch nothing of the world go by at such a reassuringly sluggish and slow pace? Or straight to purple and ride, ride, ride out into a suburban patchwork of slate, glaze and brick? Yes, that’s the one. For old time’s sake and distant memories of long commutes to my first gainful employment, I might even rewind some thirteen years and shudder from side to side as we hit that combination of giddying speed and deafening clatter, underpinned by an unsettling sensation that the rivets of this decrepit tin box in which we’re housed might fall apart at any moment.
It’s been a long while, too long, since I descended into the bowels of the earth like this, but it all comes flooding back in the time it takes the digital display to inform me that only one never-ending minute remains before the next arrival. I may be a country boy at heart, who was only imbued with the city sickness via accidental infection, but this routine is by now second nature, hard-wired into my genetic make-up. In, swipe, down, wait, open, sit, stand, up, down, wait, open, sit, stand, up, swipe, and out.
Along the way, everything else remains the same, as if I had only made my last journey that past evening. Still the regulation blank stares, still the involuntary movements leading to a sudden intimate knowledge of armpits and a mouthful of clothed shoulder, and still the ever-changing conveyor belt of bestsellers, doorstops and potboilers being perused by weary faces eager for escape.
No, of course I’m not just dreaming. Why would I dream of monotony and repetition? I’m still taking that line for a walk, a favourite walk wrapped round and round my every muscle, ending at my heart. Living and breathing, even as I imagine.
Even the longest line has to reach its end somewhere though. and this is where mine well and truly hits the buffers. The last stop. All change, all change. Now there’s really nowhere else to go but outside.
Everything is at once strange yet familiar, and as I nervously wend my way through the streets, I imagine Betjeman’s warm tones and lived-in face welcoming me home to his Metro-land, even though I decide to politely turn down his invitation to meet him for a brief encounter over a pint of warm English beer in a station buffet.
This is the kind of location that demands twitching net curtains and muffled church bells, but the windows of the post-war semis remain firmly untouched. There are no chimes to be heard either, rather only seen in the inappropriate naming of a retail temple bedecked in shining glass.
Finally, a house. A house much like any other in this western outpost. Even as I approach it I’m consumed by nervous churning, and begin a pointless internal debate about whether to knock, ring, buzz or call ahead. Maybe I could send a letter of intention or a warning telegram? These and other foolish notions occupy my mind and distract me from the fact that my footfalls have already carried me up the path to the front door. Thankfully, I am saved from any further agonising by the outline of a familiar female figure standing on the threshold. Did someone say I was coming?
I prepare my words, carefully scripted down to the last nervous cough during my long-imagined journey. Take a deep breath. Insert pathetic joke. Take a shorter breath. Insert flippant remark. Forget to take breath. Insert inane comment about the weather. None of these, however, appear to want to form themselves into anything resembling coherent speech. Only one thought, astonishingly dull in its accuracy, comes to mind.
“Have you ever heard of Charles Holden?”
Silence. Perhaps a slightly puzzled expression crosses her face - though since my left eye is concentrating on an indeterminate point fixed slightly above her head, and my right eye is drifting off to gaze behind her at the stairs beyond, I completely miss this particular nuance.
“Charles Holden. He designed some of London’s most memorable tube stations of the 1920s and ’30s. Including mine. And yours. Even though they are located at almost opposite ends of the city. Isn’t that fascinating?”
I am sure, deep down in the pit of my stomach, that I travelled here to say something else; indeed, to say almost anything else apart from this stuttering regurgitation of facts gleaned during an aimless evening spent cultivating a glazed expression and a deathly pallor in the bluish light of a computer screen.
“Charles Holden?”
Finally, two words. A response. All is not lost. Clumsy, certainly. Faltering, definitely. Calamitous, maybe. But not lost.
Sadly, this interruption brings my progress towards conversational normality to a juddering halt, hitting the same buffers that brought me to the end of the line and under the roof of Mr Holden’s economic and efficient art deco design only a short while before. Reverting to type, I drag out my notebook and begin to write. Capital letters, which is a sure sign that the message is going to be short and to the point. In unwinding the long line that led me to this particular unremarkable front door on this particular unremarkable residential road, I find that the reality of putting pen to paper is comparatively brief.
“YOU AND I WERE BUILT BY THE SAME ARCHITECT.”
I tear the note from its spiralled metal cradle, fold it precisely, and place it into her hands. I know that I’ve got my message across, said all that needs to be said. But now, as ever, time is against me in this strange flight of fancy, and the minutes are counting down to reality. I’ve got a train to catch. It’s a long way home, and being outside doesn’t suit me, even if I never left the imaginings of my own head and the safety and security of my own four walls, way up high over this misty city.