their way, people included, while whooping at some achievement only they who knew the secrets of skateboarding could appreciate. Behind them, the walls were so thick with graffiti that the council had given up, determining that this was art, not vandalism. Great splashes of colour thrown over each other again and again until the shadowed depths of the place looked like a psychedelic grammar lesson - words spelt to a careful level of comprehension, so only those in the know would understand - bubble letters of silver, their meaning lost to the detail of their drawing, and here or there, smaller notes along the usual lines of “B IS COUL” or “7JS B 4EVER” and other mystic warnings.
The wall being taken, some graffiti artists had moved on to the pillars, spinning paint round the concrete columns to make snakes, or poisoned twisted ivy, or biting barbed wire, or even, in one case, to say from the ceiling down to the floor in bold white letters:GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
I looked at this a long while, wondering. It seemed like a strange sentiment to go spraying up on any piece of concrete, let alone a pillar beneath Waterloo Bridge.
We kept on walking. Books for sale at stalls under the bridge; outside the theatre, modern art, or twisted bits of concrete depending on your point of view; one busker on the Jamaican drums outside a TV studio, others playing Beethoven outside Gabriel’s Wharf. Oxo Tower, all orange brick and iron banister; grotty concrete flats in the city’s best location, glass fronts looking into open offices where meetings were being held to talk about magazines, covers, content, pictures and staff. Blackfriars Bridges - all three of them, if you counted the row of stubby pillars in the middle of the river, across which no road ran. Tate Modern (more art/twisted concrete), Globe Theatre, restaurants, Southwark Bridge, offices, black reflective glass over a broad stretch of water between bridges, looking out towards a building site and Cannon Street, a forgotten station; the rattling of trains overhead, the rumbling of buses crossing Southwark Bridge. Pubs, restaurants, cafés, cobbled streets, hotels, men holding beer and women chatting in silly shoes; buskers again, jugglers, fire eaters, ranters with their loudspeakers worrying that you haven’t met God yet and now is the time, the smell of curry powder, the smell of chips. Little lost newsagents selling everything you’d expect, at double the price; the Golden Hinde, an extra “e”’ added on for historical authenticity, a ship built for short people next to a shop selling almost nothing but pirate hats and plastic swords; Southwark Cathedral, where in summer all the shoppers at Borough Market sat outside to eat smoked salmon and heart-stopping chocolate cake.
London Bridge.
A grotty bridge, if all truth be told, grizzled concrete and fierce traffic. By night, it was beautiful, lights directed along its length in the colours of the rainbow. From its pavements you could see all the things a tourist might want to see. To the west, the London Eye, Charing Cross station, the BT Tower and Centre Point. To the east, Tower Bridge, the Tower, Butler’s Wharf, HMS Belfast and City Hall, which would always and for ever be known by Londoners after its inaugural mayor as Ken’s Bollock.
We stood on London Bridge and faced the wind and let it wash the pain out of our bones. Here, we felt safe.
I looked towards the Tower of London, and thought without words. Wind and walking were all I needed.
A voice said, “Midnight Mayor.”
My voice.
I tried it again, a few more times, rolled it over for size. “Midnight Mayor.”
Repetition didn’t make it seem any more a good thing, so I shut up.
I kept on walking.
Full circle.
I hadn’t known I was going there, but when I arrived, I knew with absolute certainty that it was the right idea.
The Museum of London sat at the southern extremity of the Barbican. Its white tiles and grey, rounded walls gave it the superficial appearance of a boil-in-the-bag toilet that had got too big for its own plumbing and burst up from street level in a grimy eruption of clay tiling and half-swept dust. Strangers to the city always had a hard time finding it, since the main entrance wasn’t at street level at all, but a storey above it in that network of ramps and walkways that made up the space-time vortex that was the Barbican Centre. Even if you found, at street level, any sign to mark its