A weekend diary ramble, London
It’s Saturday, 1st of June. There’s no excuse for the British summer not to take to the stage now. It was so promising at 7.10 standing in the cool air and warm sun on the platform at Sea Mills waiting for the two-carriage train on the first leg to Paddington.
Temple Meads is bustling but quiet. Few are managing speech, preferring to sup at their black Americanos like babies on the teat and consult their mobiles for news that maybe could wait.
I’m no better. I look once, no twice, to check my reserved window seat number on the Paddington train. The London-bound herd has to migrate to Platform 11 and the immense beast arrives, loads its passengers, and is gone, slithering snake-like round the bends exiting the station after the briefest of hesitations.
I have my window seat and a table from which to watch the oncoming clouds and the disappearance of summer.
Fussing with available networks I navigate to a poem on Word written in 2020 when I was feeling rough, maybe with Covid. Reading it again, and fleeting fragments begin to coalesce. It’s called 20kg to highlight how administrative errors by computers are just as racist as humans.
Did I mention clouds? How dull the countryside looks compared to when it’s bathed in the summer sun.
The hubbub of conversation fills the carriage. I hear random words: pig, dry-cleaning, rugby, steak, Treacle (someone’s nickname!)…
I am in a curious bubble cut off from the world cocooned in tiredness – it was a long day yesterday and, with five hours sleep, I feel as if I’m in a tunnel of impenetrable cotton wool.
Reading. Last stop before London. No seats left around the table. I’m waking up, I think. Maybe it’s writing this that’s keeping me conscious. Poor daughter 1, who’s meeting me and will be full of words to pour out, may have to suffer Pa, whose capacity to listen is greatly diminished and needs the nap that he cannot have.
Here’s that poem:
20kg
No words flowing in my veins
No lift of consciousness
To see things small and great
Knowing they are one of the same.
I am unwell.
Corona alarm bells are ringing
Medical professionals pass me
From one number to the next
From one Covid screen to the next
On-line I yield my NI number, my NHS number, my mobile number,
My DOB, my postcode and
Although, when ill, humour is suppressed,
I laugh as the United Kingdom’s database
Cannot identify me!
Have I slid between a crack in the binary?
Could there be an unknown portal between 0 and 1 and 1 and 0?
That algorithm, that App, that whirring computer,
That overheated, CO2 polluting, electricity sapping,
Power-consuming mega, giga, terra server
Cannot identify me!
It required a human to pull strings,
An agent with a pulse
A simple kind woman on a telephone
To put Kasparov ahead of Blue once more
To identify a fellow human, a citizen, a real
Flesh and blood tax-payer, Portsmouth supporter,
Whisky-loving, cigar-smoking, God-arrested, retired Chemistry teacher
And father of five.
Did a whiff of Windrush just slide by?
Of being denied
Though the truth, standing at 38 degrees and not quite well
Had walked upon Jerusalem for six decades and more?
I had smelt the it.
The officials who, unlike the woman, denied rights
Denied existence, denied certain proof, denied humanity
And, hiding behind endless forms
Couldn’t identify…
…Jocelyn John and many others
Jocelyn John with her 20kg bag allowance uprooted and deported
On Christmas Day
Jocelyn John who, unlike me, didn’t find a woman to defeat Goliath
But who fell between the 0s and the 1s
With more documents than needed to build a bridge to Grenada
Was sent away, deported, unidentified, an innocent branded a criminal
On Christmas Day.
It took 10 minutes to find me
The lost, unidentifiable, me
For those moments I was no-one
Applying for a Covid test, feeling unwell
But otherwise fine.
Birth certificate? Check.
But for Jocelyn five years passed,
Three million contested minutes later
An official apology emerged
A repatriation, a restoration, a righting of wrongs,
And JJ’s name is back where it always belonged - in the computer.
Jocelyn John. UK citizen. British.
Bring out the fatted calf.
Put rings on her fingers and
Buy her a new pair of dancing shoes
Let us eat and be merry
For that which was lost has been found.
End of diary entry #1.
Diary entry #2
Monday. On carriage A seat 16 from Paddington heading home. Reserved. Window seat. Facing forwards. Table. Quiet coach. Perfect. A rather peaceful-looking golden-haired dog across the aisle from me. I hope he/she understands the word Quiet.
Two days on tubes, buses, shags pony have taken me to Surbiton, down by the river and the first of numerous flat whites. Thence to The Telegraph open plan offices with sleek black laptops forlornly looking for their operators on a Saturday morning. It’s like a beehive with the queen bee in the easily accessible centre – the Editors’ oval holy of holies.
Across to a street market for an eclectic and international choice of hot food. Jerk chicken consumed; we head back to number one’s flat to zonk out watching a film.
Pre-church flat white on Sunday with number three, then St John’s, or ‘Saint’ as it’s known colloquially. There is an emphasis an immediate ethos - a ‘cool’ and contemporary vibe. Great music, good sermon on the equal need we have as humans for communion with God and community with each other. Can’t knock it. A far far cry from the stiff and formal CofE of my upbringing, ancient stone floors, musty, green-edged hymn books and the all-important black prayer book that only the regulars knew how to navigate…and much silence. Switch that to noisy, rock concert, and emotion and you’ll understand the difference. Could be summed up as the gap between religion and relationship but the truth is that both can easily become a tradition that binds its adherents into a self-perpetuating pattern, empty of meaning. So…ignoring the style…one needs to dig deeper to see if it’s a case of style over substance or substance exhibited in a more exuberant style. For example, the previous Sunday, a lady preached who had been miraculously healed from paralysis, a wheelchair to walking miracle following prayer. If accounts like that don’t stir the blood and justify the feet dancing and hands waving what will!
After church, we move on to lunch at a bar/restaurant offering food from Tel Aviv, Sicily, and Lebanon. Bit later we’re in a lift hurtling into the sky and landing up in a rooftop bar looking down on the Gurkin. 40 floors in just few seconds. St Paul’s looks like a squat little house far below.
…the previous Sunday, a lady preached who had been miraculously healed from paralysis…
Of course, in between all these places are serious and humorous conversations, and ‘impossible to hear’ moments on noisy tubes, people watching, eye-catching buildings, tall and modern, and historically recognisable districts. At one point, for example, we’re near Spitalfields, which figures strongly in the novel I’m trying to write, located in the summer of 1796.
I’ve frequented numerous bathrooms; all clean, with an array of soap dispensers, hand driers, and flushing techniques. One has to be mentally agile these days. I’ve ascended and descended I don’t know how many escalators, stairs, and ramps and passed by the 2012 Olympic stadium, now home to the Hammers, as if it’s normal to do so.
And now, all is done. Just the return journey with the still silent dog to my left and the dull green countryside on a dry, cool, and cloudy day. Saturday and Sunday, by contrast, were very sunny and warm.
You’ll have noticed I have restricted this diary entry mainly to activities and places – an external rather than an internal account. The distinction between private and public, facts and feelings, is interpreted differently by different individuals but the footballers’ refrain ‘what’s said in the dressing room remains in the dressing room’ isn’t a bad adage.
Over and out.