The Last London

Solid psychogeography. Evocative and dreamlike (hallucinogenic) writing but somehow all a little bit too comfortable? “I’ll just wander about a bit and knock a psychogeography of London.”

As the diarist John Evelyn remarked, after another conflagration, the Great Fire of 1666: ‘London was, but is no more.’

A story with unlimited chapters and no resolution. The point being to find the inspiration for the next journey, a new beginning. Another shot at redemption.

It’s great to be where it’s happening, before it actually is.

Church-sitters are on the far side of this thing: trauma. The worst has already happened. Now they are all waiting. And watching over nodal points. Halfway to becoming statues. Halfway to vanishing into the stone.

Shardenfreude. It assaults you: vanity in the form of architecture. Desert stuff in the wrong place. Money laundering as applied art. Another unexplained oligarch’s museum of entropy for the riverbank. A giant dagger serving no real purpose: an exclamation point on the Google map of an abolished city once called London.

The meditation of a hooded man sitting all day on a bench? Or another who dreams the fading city through all the hours of daylight in an Arsenal-branded sleeping bag? ‘

pondering the sketch of rock markings he holds open across his lap. Like Esperanto, the movement of the pictographs are in a universal language that nobody remembers how to use.

Umbrellas are a discourtesy and a menace. Their bearers and brandishers walk around, insulated in little domed shelters, private tents, poking out the eyes of innocent pedestrians. What is so wrong with getting wet?