FREEZING FOG

Windows is back, and, guess what… not my fault it corrupted! Hurrah! It’s made me feel a little better, though admittedly, I am still a bit bruised from the experience.

Last London of the year today. It was a foggy morning beyond the railway tracks; misty silhouettes of buildings, trees and cranes, lost in the purpling sky. I suppose it was a bit like a Turner painting - or rather, the scenes that inspired him so much. Funny how weather has always been weather. There were misty mornings for Turner; there’ll be misty mornings for the commuters on the hyper loop. Though, to be fair, they’ll barely notice as they’ll be travelling too fast to blink.

I got off the tube to the usual beep and swoosh of the doors.

The London Underground really does have a unique smell doesn’t it? Not unpleasant, but sort of warm and dusty. I don’t think it exists elsewhere. It must be the air that races through the tunnels, the grease of wheels on tracks with a tinge of electric sparks flickering down the line - some combination anyway.

I don’t mind it. It reminds me of the long tunnel to the Natural History Museum, my earliest memories of the city: saxophone players reverberating jazz from curved tiles, and the echoing steps towards the concrete street, the exit, and the dinosaur bones.

It was an okay day. We went for lunch at an Indian restaurant which was too noisy, and weirdly full of men in ties. I was exceptionally quiet so I tried my best to be interesting without being weird. Forty years of that and I’m still not an expert at the balance. I was wishing someone might ask me about dinosaurs instead of Christmas plans, but the world just doesn’t work that way.

The tube home was smelly for a different reason. It was packed. I mean it was unbearably full, to the point where I clung to a pole for dear life while the masses squashed in uncomfortably. Coats and bags, hands and phones, almost dismembered by each other like a Picasso painting. I closed my eyes and gripped as the bright train lumbered and flickered its way through the darkness.

So that’s it for the year. No more trains. Two more days of work, but both from home, both hopefully uneventful. with my freshly-restored and error-free laptop. Perhaps this is the part of the cross-country run where the finish line looms into site through the freezing fog.