London: greyness and light

Sometimes I get a bit fed up with the greyness of London, the rude, unfriendly people, the horrible traffic and the rain. (Especially in January.)

But some days it just seems brilliant.

Last night on the bus, London was divided. I couldn’t read my paper because a huge, slumbering guy behind me was blaring out R&B from his jacket pocket. There was nothing to see from the window but the concrete of Stockwell. It was an annoying Sunday night journey, slow and everyone on separate journeys.

Then a group of people on the back of the bus starting singing. It was a beautiful song in an African language. They were forgetting the words, and laughing through it. It was a beautiful lilting melody. The slumbering guy came to and turned off the music from his phone. They sang louder, and we all sat there listening.

Getting off the bus and walking over Waterloo bridge with the wind hitting the side of my face, the lights were lovely. Purples and peaches lit up the National Theatre. Lovely blue blobs adorning the Hungerford bridge. The yellow glow of parliament beyond that on the right, the blinking pyramid of Canary Wharf off in the distance to the left. The view was only marred by the London Eye, which was flashing psychedelically.

Heading towards London Bridge on the South Bank, the trees sparkled blue and white. Rather than being lit from above the benches along there have lighted underskirts. “Like wideboys’ cars,” said Tom. “Or pimp my bench.”

On the shore of the river, by Gabriel’s Wharf, a group of crusties were sitting around a fire on a sofa moulded from the sand. Further on was a sand “angel of the south” surrounded by flickering nightlights in reclaimed plastic bottles.

Along the way we had an impromptu tutorial on playing the berimbau (a musical bow) from a busker with dreads, who made a wonderful cacophony with the pitch-bent twanging of his bow which he accompanied by shaking a rattle and singing.

Coming back the same way we went past the mini beach party again and as Sunday faded towards its end we were in time to see the rising tide crumbling away a huge rounded skull. Thoughts of the impermanence of beauty, the power of nature and the inevitability of time were brought back to reality by a hippy emerging from weeing in the shadows.