Arrival
So, I understand that an unplanned and highly urgent flight back to the UK due to the death of a parent isn’t a wholly auspicious start to writing a journal of the first visit to ones country of origin in eighteen months (or additionally that neither the area immediately surrounding Heathrow nor the Piccadilly Line is Britain’s most aesthetically pleasing location) but after 25 hours of flights and 8 hours of stopovers – these were my first observations, as I wrote them:
• Weather. It is COLD and dark, considering the fact that it’s 2pm. Gloomy.
• Everyone looks really unhealthy.
• Everyone looks really fucked off.
• No one is English. (Which I then contradicted within half an hour by writing ‘I keep thinking that I recognise people, but I don’t. They just look English’).
• I’m sure that I remember it being more beautiful than this. (Oh, there goes a coppiced mews with a load of four storey Victorian townhouses).
• Everyone’s reading the sun with a front page headline about Cheryl god-forbid Tweedy. (This obsession with pointless celebrity, I have not missed).
• Girls have all got too much make up on.
• LBC Commons. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Brick_Company) Now I’m really in London.
• Where the hell have the Irish gone?
• There’s no way I’m doing this again with this shitty suitcase with knackered zips.
• I wonder if my Mum has got any Rioja.
• With that shirt and tie combo on sunshine, you’d look a dick anywhere.
• (I notice at this point that I have four days stubble, big black rings around my eyes and my hair is sticking up in several directions and thus decide to stop commenting on everyone else’s appearance before I can address my own).
• I get a sudden and very deep pang of regret for dropping out of University.
• I notice that the bloke opposite is watching me write and trying to flirt with me.
• Ooh, adverts for decent UK/European cinema that I actually want to watch.
So, I alight the train at Cockfosters (the ultimate northernmost stop on the Piccadilly line), ring my sister (whom is still around 40 minutes away) and decide to go over the road into a local cafe to wait.
The cafe is called Miracles and is run by a (some would say stereotypical) Greek Cypriot family. I walk in at 14.30 hours on a Tuesday and it is more insanely busy than any commercial establishment that I have been in, in my entire time in New Zealand (bar perhaps somewhere in Queenstown in peak season, or Toast Martinborough Wine Festival). I am totally and utterly shell-shocked and it takes several minutes of me thinking “Where have all these people come from? What’s going on today?” to remember that London is just like this.
Literally every table is full to bursting and I drag my jetlagged self and bags into one corner. As far as the clientele is concerned, there is a rough mix of ‘workmen’ types and local North London Greeks – I can see four generations of a family sitting at one of the tables. The atmosphere is somewhat boisterous, to say the very least. It is, in fact, more lively than the average central Wellington bar on a Friday night.
I order with the impossibly good looking and well presented waiter, whom skids up to my table within a heartbeat of me sitting down and wait for my order, people watching all the while. Outside, there’s a group of three Greek Cypriot brothers wearing white T-shirts and black leather jackets talking by their cars. They are driving a Porsche Cayenne, White Landrover Discovery (with matching white alloys) and a Black Landrover Discovery (with matching black alloys) respectively. Other cars parked in the lay-by include a new Mini, Porsche Boxster and an Audi TT. The women whom I see getting into these cars shortly afterwards are either the same three men’s wives or sisters. They wear matching outfits, lots of make-up and lots of jewellery.
After an indeterminately short margin of time my Cheese & Pickle Toasted Sandwich arrives. It hasn’t been put through a Breville; it’s just a sandwich that’s been made with toast. As a garnish, there is some salad and a bag of proper Walkers Ready Salted crisps has been poured out onto the plate. I am jetlagged, tired and emotional. It is one of the most comforting things I’ve ever eaten and I (for the first and possibly only time in the next two weeks) feel totally and utterly at home.
