belongings

I took the M40/M25/A127 to Southend yesterday, visiting my brother and his family for bonding, beers, and biryani. (OK, jalfrezi -- but I love alliterative sequences, as they're so sinuous, supple, and sexy.)

I lived in west London, where the M40 terminates, for thirty-odd years, and that part of the world, and the west to north quadrant of the M25, is familiar territory for me. And yet...every time I'm driving in towards Wycombe, and Hillingdon and Uxbridge, I get a bit weirded out: I start remembering drives back from Oxford in my mum's clapped-out old car, twenty-five years ago, when the fog was so thick that we could hardly see where we were going, or when we "all had to pedal" to get the car up the hill at Stokenchurch; the weird thing is that this used to be the journey home, and I knew that when we got the Polish War Memorial roundabout, it would only be a matter of minutes before I was back amongst my familiar things, enjoying a cup of tea while the dog went mad at our return. By the time I left London, I'd really come to dislike/despair of the run-down, threatening, and gloomy nature of the district that I'd grown up in.

Driving back that way now, I feel like an alien as I near the big circuit of the M25: it's as if the whole area knows that I'm a poisonous virus, and it wants to make me feel unwelcome, speeding me on my way with hostility and malice.

Once I get on the M25, and away from the really specific environs of my birthplace, I start feeling a bit more comfortable: I start to remember that I'm a 'generic' Londoner, and that these places are full of people who speak in the same accent as me. I like that thought. It makes me feel as if I could blend in, and merge back into the city, as if I'd never left. I start to remember the strange, functional beauty of the light industrial estates; the canals, half-forgotten behind high walls and bushes; the massive, miles-long ramparts of brickwork flanking the approaches to the railway termini; all the thousands of lives in the backs of the houses glimpsed from the elevated railway lines and out-of-town tube sections; the richness of the demographics and entertainment; the sense of dynamism, complexity and importance of living in such a great metropolis.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that it wasn't London that I was fed up with, but the job/emotional situation I found myself in back in 1994. I realise that that emotional weirdness has coloured my perceptions of London ever since, and I realise that I wouldn't mind living and working there again.

It's like it's calling to me. Is that weird?