A swan song
A swan song
‘How simple, how easy, how very much like jumping off a cliff!
But courage requires first a decision, and then a leap.’ - Meg Fee, Places I Stopped On The Way Home
The seasons in London feel special because of their brevity – one flowing from the other and on to the next in a cyclical loop over and over, again and again.
You’re forced to enjoy each section of the season – the start of it, the full height of it, the lingering drawl of it – knowing that each won’t last. You enjoy the irises for what they are, knowing that they must pass before the hollyhocks can stand to full height. The closing of summer is softened by the arrival of dahlias.
Today marks four years of calling this city home, yet my time in London is starting to draw to a close. This summer is the last full season to be lived as a local, which only serves to make this moment in time all the more special.
I begin to let people know of my plans to leave, and, in doing so, enter a liminal space: part local, part tourist.
This is a swan song summer, a time to soak up the city I have called home for years, all while not knowing when I will return to see it again. Though the weather largely persists with an overcast chill, this is a summer to soak up as much of London as I can. To enjoy English gardens with their overflowing abundance of roses, camelias, and hydrangeas. To go for long walks, to sit in parks and on heaths, to make a day of it with scoops of gelato while walking around Seven Dials.
This the summer to soak up quality time with those who’ve made London home. With the friends who’ve helped to bring the city to life, who’ve helped me lace the streets and parks and restaurants and pubs with layers of happy memories. Already, the thought of saying goodbye – again, not knowing when we’ll be together again – is a thought too far. I distract myself by thinking of the friends I’m lucky to return to instead.
In the meantime, there’s reminiscing about all that London’s given me – anonymity, freedom, adventure – and that London’s helped me become – a writer, a pond-dipper, someone more courageous than before – and all the lasting memories in this city, many still to be formed in the coming months.
Of band-aid rips of conversation.
Of bravery found in quiet spaces.
Of looping laps around the gently shimmering lake.
The daisies are confident – tall and striking – this year. The poppies astound in their brightness. A great torrent of rain falls, ricocheting off balcony tiles, cars, and open windows, drenching over-flowing gardens already ripe with rain.
The semi-final of the Euros and the roar of many – from pubs, beer gardens, and houses – bellows across the streets and city, up and out from the Thames.
It feels like the spirit of 2018 – the summer of football-fuelled drinking, (white) male violence, and a city clad in St. George’s flags – only somewhat diluted. It’s coming home, it’s coming home, football’s coming home, is repeated over and over, mantra-like, across the length and breadth of the country.
I walk down the local high street one evening. The church doors are open and there, at the altar, stands a large TV: Gareth Southgate, in place of a sermon.
The canopy of Hampstead Heath is thick - luscious, rich, and emerald. Spanish guitarists serenade us by the station while a man in a three piece and bowler talks to out-of-London tourists. The lack of international tourists is notable this year - disorientating when you begin to really notice it and realise that London is deeply missing the snatches of conversation in languages from far and wide.
Ducks glide with grace across the ponds.
I walk further - the paths appearing as if through a forest. It’s quiet apart from the bubble of excitement spilling out of the mixed ponds.
I think of the iterations of Heath visits - of wintery days with family, visiting Keats’ House, of stomping through mud before the New Year, of winding our way down from Kenwood in autumn. Of previous summer days - the ladies ponds seeming utopian, teeming with picnics of friends taking the day off work amongst a heatwave, of other days arriving at the ponds not being brave enough for a dip and going for a picnic instead.
There are now tickets to enter the ponds and others, unknowing, are turned away.
Earlier, I searched for the postcode of the ponds and saw, instead, someone asking Google if they can swim in it with their mermaid tale on.
‘Yes I suppose!’ was the answer. The magic of the place.
The sun comes out as we wait in the queue to enter, blue expanding across the sky as we timidly climb in one step at a time. The water is refreshing and silky smooth.
We swim out to a buoy, celebrate joyful news, before swimming out to where the sun shimmers and warms the water. It feels glorious to use our bodies in such a way - to swim! to not be stuck behind a desk.
We chat and swim, chat and swim, as the sun warms our faces. Our legs tread water, using muscles in different ways, for the first time in months.
We join the anti-clockwise crew and return to the deck again, our bodies sated and sore, our hearts full. To share a such a moment. For the sun to shine, so perfectly timed. To swim in amongst the rushes and reeds, as leaves - green, a little yellow in parts - skim across the surface.
We wonder why it’s taken us so many years to do this, but so glad we carved out time for it, that we could share the brief sun, the one precious and joyful moment, with each other.
There’s something magic about the shared space of a women’s changing room, of the chatter that flows along the queue to the loos. Of the safety felt, of the comfort in being around women’s bodies in a way removed from society’s sexualisation of them. A dress is admired for its post-swim, slipped-on ease. A dog snoozes under foot.
‘My question is this: when you stop loving someone, what are you meant to do with all of this information? Where do you put it?’
- Meg Fee, Places I Stopped On The Way Home
Moving here was a great leap into the unknown, and moving back is too - in other ways, yet no less profound, drastic, or daunting. There’s a sense of whiplash – a drawn-out break-up with I city I love so deeply, so dearly, yet know I need to leave.
We walk up the hills of Highgate from the station, and then back down the hills of Highgate to the cemetery. The tour guide declares – DEAD – on the front cover.
We set off in search of the few names we know. Sidney Nolan, the great Australian painter, is one of them. We take a detour, scrambling through the undergrowth. I pay my respects.
Seeing him buried there feels like yet another tug drawing me back home.
‘The garden is full of the smells of evening – the jasmine, the honeysuckle and the lavender – and the low humming of the bees.’ - Anna Hope, Expectation
A burst of sun and heat finally arrives one Wednesday afternoon and I jog around the bustling park, filled with others similarly rejoicing at the sudden arrival of summer. Yet by Thursday evening, the warmth has dissipated, and we layer up while eating pizza and reading poetry together in the park. Evening falls and we move to a courtyard; I wrap the thick picnic blanket around me.
Summer returns, perfectly timed on a Friday. I go from South London park to South London park, enjoying summery drinks in the shade.
We climb to the top of Gipsy Hill, get salads from the local Italian deli – summer, contained in a box – and take our picnic to Crystal Palace Park.
Finally! I tick the dinosaurs off my London bucket list – those delightfully charming representations of what Victorians thought they looked like, all the way back in 1854. The dinosaurs appear as if spotted in their natural habitat, so thick is the greenery that surrounds them – the abundant ferns, a gracefully weeping willow, everything rich and vibrant from summer rains.
The burst of heat, the heady pulse of sun against footpath.
The rattle of a fan drifting through the night.
Glimmers of summer, long-awaited.
The heat holds for days – finally, summer, hanging on, here to stay. An extreme weather warning is sent out – the first of its kind for this country. The climate crisis alive in the heat of the air.
One afternoon, clouds drift across the sky as the rumble of thunder rings out in the distance. The sky breaks, petrichor filling the air.
The heat returns the next morning, beating against the kitchen windows, turning our main room into a greenhouse once again.
The buddleia run riot along the train-line from South Bermondsey to Peckham, as the skyline of Canary Wharf towers in the background.
The firework blooms of hydrangeas. Barbeque smoke wafting through the air. The orange glow, the evening sinking of the sun. (As Siberia burns, Germany floods, China is drenched).
The heat sticks and stays, clambering in through open windows, filling rooms with stuffy air. The cool evening slinks in as we toss and turn in our sleepless beds.
Soon, it passes. Clouds pull across the sky bringing a blanket of cool air with them. The city wakes one morning to the sound of rain pouring through trees.
‘Girl roves around town, having various adventures, getting herself into scrapes, learning difficult lessons, falling in and out of akvavit-soaked love. But the real love affair is the one she has with herself, or maybe the city. Haven’t figured that bit out yet.’ - Ana Kinsella, ‘Wayfinding’, Tolka, v.1
Endings are complicated. As I begin to say goodbye to this city, its hold on me becomes clearer. Walks through the city – from Spitalfields through Bunhill Fields, and on to the Barbican; through Canonbury and Highbury, down to Islington – remind me of all the memories made here, all the magic moments that have helped form who I am, have changed how I see the world and my place in it.
I went for a walk this morning. Found a new way though old streets and a collection of Hills Hoists - icons of suburban Australia - in a Victorian-brick courtyard. A reminder that there’s always – always – more to discover in London, no matter how much you walk, no matter how many years you live here. It will always - always - have something to offer, something unexpected to see.
I remember years ago – one, record-breaking hot summers day – arriving in London from Australia and being taken around the city by a relative local. I was amazed at her ease of navigating us throughout the course of an afternoon drifting to night – from north Soho to St. James’, down through Embankment to the South Bank. Separate parts of the city were linked together like a seamless chain. I’d loved guiding a friend around London years before, was proud that I could do much of central London without a guidebook, but this act of connecting previously disjointed parts of the city together was awe-inspiring.
Now, I pride myself on knowing great swathes of London like the back of my hand, of being able to navigate it without the aid of my phone. Even though months on end of barely venturing beyond the confines of my flat has softened my knowledge, I take great comfort knowing that I will be able to come back in the years to come and know my way around.
I will be back one day – I don’t know when, I don’t know how – and remember that this was once more than a place that I lived, that this was once home.
'There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.'
- The Naked City, 1948