About our limitations; so many things are going on all at the same time, and there are so many questions to decide upon and so many events to choose from simultaneously. Can we really succeed in going any faster than we are doing now? And am I about to miss the booking deadline, or have I already done so?
Over the Easter weekend in London, I was sat underneath the north road flyover where it crosses the waters of the Regent canal, the other side of the bridge where the gleaming new King’s Place concert auditoriums (and the Guardian and Observer newspapers) are located, close to the crossroads with Goodsway, the road to the St Pancras InterRail station and newly reopened hotel spires, leading past the rubble of the old brick bunkers that had once stored the coal for almost the entire city of empire one hundred years previously, the coal being all brought by horse drawn canal boats from the Midlands at walking pace.
And it occurred to me as I leaned back on the towpath grass of the Jubilee Greenpath that at walking pace only a small change in the spelling of that phrase was required and I was already arrived at Kings Place, so that it indeed seemed possible that we had set out from Leicester on the London Road only moments before, in a kind of musical transposition that was interweaving the swarming sounds of tabla, voice and sitar from the Darbar Festival performers of the classical Indian traditions taking place in the concert auditoriums throughout the Easter weekend with the sounds of my boy and young adult life in the east Midlands between 1951 and 1973.
It was less than we were promised all those years ago I thought, looking up at the series of large ‘artist impression’ billboards representing the vast new developments about to take place between the to-be-built hypermarket and the Kings Cross and St Pancras railway stations. Several bargees and their canal boats were chuffing by with mainly younger people on them lying in exaggerated positions of relaxation, holiday drinking cans of beer and bottle of wine in the warm sunshine, while alongside me were several older men fishing with their rods and lines dangling over the canal water. The nearest to me dressed in football ‘No 1’ t-shirt and faded red sun hat was being spoken to by a companion stood behind him swaying slightly with an open can of beer in his hand. No work, no money, no fuck, the swaying man said in a torrent of ongoing fuck-me fisherman speak.
Sat in front of the billboard on which the single word “gentrifuckation” had also been scrawled in thick black marker pen, I was like a wanderer in Zagajewski’s poem – I stop for a moment, / uncertain which suffering I should / join.