When I visit my eldest sister, she’ll sometimes say, “Why don’t you sit down and relax?” but, just like for her, relaxing is one of the least relaxing things I can think of. I need perpetual distraction. I need to eat up novelty wherever I find it.
January is rarely much of an On The Road month. This is a period of rebooting, doing the mundane things, like finally remembering to invoice for all the work I did the year before and reminding my family what an annoying presence I am until they break and send me back out on tour.
Without the novelty of a new town every day, I walk. Walking is increasingly important to me. It exercises my eyes as much as my legs. I rarely use public transport when I go to London. I want to see more than an advert for Malta and the confusion of a tourist on the Piccadilly line. I have started taking photographs as a reminder of what created a spike in my brain.
I see a pattern. I fizz. I catch it. The search for changing geometry means I can crush the boredom of waiting for trains. A 40-minute delay at Crewe becomes a solitary game of I-Spy. I walk around and look at the angles of piping, shapes in the walls, archaic signs, the dead land where something wild still lives. I follow the philosophy of Calvin and Hobbes: “There’s treasure everywhere”.
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I look through last night’s walk to St James’s Church in Clerkenwell. There’s the neon of the St Athans Hotel sign, made even more fabulous by the rain on the lens; there’s the pattern of a fire escape; the lines of the brutal block at the Brunswick Centre; diamonds made by the lights against the supermarket. The same path is never the same path.
