Happy on the Heath
(View from the peak on Hampstead Heath: London, England)
As per usual, I am surprisingly economical with time when I travel – in the sense that I seem able to squeeze many events, meetings and activities into the allotted time with some skill. In that one London weekend, lasting from Friday evening to Monday morning, I managed to eat dinner with Mark, go to Camden market and have a pub lunch with three chums, see an exhibition with three friends, buy a drawing and a gift, meet another three friends on the way out and go to dinner with these original six plus yet another four (that’s an eleven person dinner) at Chalk Farm’s Marine Ices, watch most of a film, take an hour and a half stroll on Hampstead Heath, go for lunch with three friends – one of which was Ying’s cousin, take a long train journey to and from Surrey to visit my own cousin, uncle and aunt, and purloin a pair of her ski boots. I think I did even more than that, but really, that’s all I really recall. It sounds like it would have been totally rushed, but to be honest, aside from catching trains, I never felt hassled at all.
Mind you, the colossal protest was taking over portions of London that day – we arrived at Embankment station to find literally hundreds upon hundreds of placards and discarded posters. There was a general atmosphere of heightened activity and tension; the buzzing of multiple helicopters circling overhead becomes unnerving after half an hour and the volume of detritus left by the protesters was astounding. I had never seen anything like it. Unfortunately with my dodgy camera and the police presence, I decided that photography wasn’t an option.
This photograph was taken after a slightly breathless stride up the hill on the heath, the cloudy city just visible below us. When Mark and I were flatmates in Glasgow, we would habitually take walks almost daily after dinner, simply to get some air, exercise, relaxation and chat before beginning our also customary long working evenings. Now neither of us has a night walking companion, nor really a friend we can coax out for daily walks, so we relished the opportunity to trot around the heath on Sunday morning. It was alive with mummies and daddies, toddlers, babies, children on tricycles and dogs and puppies galore. There were two people flying enormous kites that occasionally lifted the pilot right off the ground. Even in London, it is possible to find a space that for a short time could be considered almost perfect in aspect; the sun was beaming down, mocking our winter coats and forcing us to carry them in its heat. From here, we met Ying’s cousin, Grace, and our friend Tania for lunch in Belsize Park. It is these times when I am attracted to the concept of London, when I want to live there. But painfully shortly afterwards, I missed a rail train because of the underground system and I remembered half of the things I don’t like about the ‘big smoke’. I suppose the same thing happens to me in Glasgow too – I realise I love it and hate it at different times, for different reasons, in different moods and I think that’s just called ‘real life’. London however is so extreme a city compared to Glasgow, so I feel the dissatisfaction of it so much more – all in all, the pace of Glasgow suits me for now and there is not enough to draw me to London. More importantly, London seduces me into spending more than I can afford!
– Today Rosie is doing all sorts of things in Glasgow, Scotland –
Looks like you had fun darling! Keep some room open in your schedule in late November, early December, as I hope to be making an appearance in Europe and there’s plenty of bourgeois adventures to be had!