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.