Trifter

When I left for London, everybody warned me about the weather. They told me that it rained all the time, and that there was so little sun that everybody was constantly depressed. They suggested that I should really think about going somewhere warmer. I researched the climate. Did they know something I didn’t? Because where I was living, the rainfall and temperatures were almost exactly the same.

Which was actually what I wanted. “Make sure you pack warm clothes!” What did they think I was going to pack? A bikini to go swimming in the Thames? (Not recommended, by the way) Did people say that to the arctic explorers? “Off to the Arctic are you dear? Are you sure you wouldn’t rather a nice tour through France? Well, make sure you take a cardigan! ” Actually, they probably did.

The weather is one of the best things about London. London is a city full of all kinds of architecture thrown on top of each other. You round a corner and find a Tudor townhouse against a Georgian wall pockmarked with damage from the bombs of World War 2. You get on the tube and you have a suit on one side of you, a punk on the other. London is a confusion of moody beauty. Put a sunny day over the top of that, and you just confuse people.

Sunny days in London bring people out of the woodwork and turns them a raw shade of pink. (You can usually tell the foreigners by the fact that they go brown.) They lay in the sun all day reading chunky books, or running around like mad things chasing Frisbees. I didn’t know people still had Frisbees, but they do. And the English make you wish that you had kept yours from childhood. They run after it, diving, laughing, falling over and getting up, throwing it to a dog or a small child and then starting all over again. I have no idea what the rules are, there don’t seem to be any, but just watching them puts a smile on your face. Because you know that this same kind of person will be the one glaring and ignoring you on the tube tomorrow. Sun sends Londoners mad. (But it’s wonderful madness).

I like the rainy days the best. I think a moody sky or pelting rain brooding over the cobbled streets of London town is so much better. Jack The Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and Oliver Twist could only exist in this climate. Ok, so talk to me again when it’s snowing and I’m freezing to death waiting for the Night bus at 3am after a night on the tiles. Or, stepping out of the house after just having done my hair to have it drenched and ruined by a blast of wind and driving rain. But honestly, London is at its’ most beautiful, sprawling in all its dreadful majesty, when it’s suffering from English weather. The buildings seem to huddle together as though sagging with the weight of their years, or crowding around with eerie interest in the people who disappear into their gaping maws. The new stands sternly next to the brooding ancient, and crazy lanes and byways appear out of nowhere, whilst the pavement changes from cobbles to cement beneath your feet, as though as fluid and changeable as the rain which washes over it.

London is a beautiful, textured city. Grey cement and metal, silky brown wood and crazy-paned dark glass in the windows. Slate tiles, red bricks, and carvings in stone and timber everywhere. The green man in terracotta on the tall slim townhouses in Swiss Cottage and Hampstead, and the lights of Piccadilly coming at you in multicoloured glory out of the mist after the white Georgian curve of Oxford Street.

I love Regents or Hyde park in the summer, with the faces of happy children, lovers and the drooling grins of dogs. But give me Primrose Hill on a moody evening, the lights of the city sweeping away below, obscured but beautiful, the sounds of the lions at the Zoo, unsettled (I’ve heard them on a few occasions) and rumbling, and coming home, stumbling out of the dark and into the warm glow of home. There’s nothing else in the world like it.