On return from the Isle of Wight, I've become aware of how cluttered this city is. No sooner have you set eyes upon a rotund lady skidding her feet insistently across Waterloo station, but your next remembered person is a bulky bloke with strident hair (hair-gelled of course) wandering past the Millenium park on Waterloo road as an old lady with a far too heavy sack cycles past...
let alone all the other cars, roadsigns, commercial options, and other distractions that constantly usurp my attention.
Perhaps the confused construction of that sentence overstates the perverse compression of memory induced by metropolitan sensory overload. But it's really weighing on me in this room where I write. The inside of this dining room is an elegant Georgian space with a Turner print hanging over what used to look like a fireplace but is now doused in stack after stack of unread newspapers. It's as if my mum, who is normally a wonderfully industrious and organised person, wants to reproduce the city she loves on the inside of her home. It's really quite Dickensian. And what a contrast it is to the blissful holiday I have just had on the Isle of Wight.
I don't want to forget the long walks with Emily along the shifting-coloured contours of the beachscape. Or the calm friendly immersion of the community at the Millers'/Whitworth's place in the Duver, Seaview. To paraphrase Pete, walking in London cannot be relaxing in that way; you'd be too worried about being run over by a car.
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