Plunging in…

My friend Leigh Tillman Partington wisely admonished me on Facebook that “anxieties are part of the process!” Another friend reminded me that I’m not wasting time when I’m sitting around, I am being. (Coming from someone not especially known for just being, this was particularly striking.) (You know who you are.)

So perhaps the place to start this Substack two weeks in, is anxiety and being.

I’ve been here in London for nearly two weeks, and in that time, I’ve been told by various female friends that they couldn’t do what I’ve been doing; or they’d be a nervous wreck doing all this alone; or they’d be hopelessly lost and terrified trying to find their way places and how brave I am.

[Let me pause to make an exception for my Facebook friends about yesterday—that was the first time I panicked, and I’ll get to that.]

I’ve got several points to make here. One is that this is the ninth? time I’ve been to London since 1986, although the longest I’ve spent until now has been five days. But I came in with at least a sketchy working knowledge.

Two is that London is an incredibly safe city compared with any American metropolis. For much of the 20^th century, the police were armed only under extraordinary circumstances (usually because of fears of the IRA), and even today more than 85% of British police are unarmed. (This is not to say that I haven’t seen cops here with big honkin’ guns, but that’s because I’ve spent a good bit of time in the very heart of political London, around Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. I guess you can’t expect everyone to do their duty with a narwhal tusk, like the Polish guy who took on the terrorist on London Bridge in 2019. Guns don’t seem an unreasonable standardized response for situations like this one.

I’m not insensible to terrorism here. I was here several times during the Troubles, and experienced  the public management of bomb threats and actual bombs by the IRA. The coronation of Charles III on May 6^th is gonna be a big target, make no mistake. Biden’s recent overseas trip to celebrate the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement between the UK and the Republic of Ireland was calculated to remind various parties that a resumption of hostilities, despite the feckless behavior of the pro-Brexit Tory government with regards to Northern Ireland, is a no-go for the rest of the world. (Honestly, six months ago, I was predicting that both Northern Ireland and Scotland would be lost to the UK within the year. Subsequent events have made that less certain; but that doesn’t mean that separatist parties won’t try for it.)

But I was talking a few days ago with three women traveling solo, two American, one Australian, and all of us American women agreed that we felt vastly safer here than at home. The reason? Fewer guns. We felt safer in tube stations and on buses, in restaurants and pubs, in parks, in any crowded situation, knowing that there weren’t guns around us. Yeah, a guy might have a knife and no good on his mind, but that’s a hazard of being female and one we felt we knew how to be alert to.

Mostly, walking the streets of London these past two weeks, I’ve felt both the alert obliviousness of the big city, which notes the weirdness and accepts it, and the strangely reassuring onset of the Age of Invisibility as a woman. Much has been said about the latter, mostly disgruntled—but I find it very empowering at 52 to have become both invisible and immune. I was worried, packing, that everything I was laying out was too drab, all black and gray. Turns out it’s perfect! And my scarves, so superfluous in Florida, are the accents and sine qua non of the wardrobe here.

You only wear bright colors in the city if you want and are prepared to be noticed.

I’m absolutely happy with having eyes slide right over me. Nobody registers me; nobody cares. And that means that I don’t have to take up my time with them caring. I can just be here.

And that brings up being here.

There’s a feeling I’ve always had in London, a physicality to it for me, I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe, why I wanted to be here. There are more beautiful cities in Europe. There are cities with older and more visible histories (visible being the key—London is 2,000 years old, but has been radically remade several times).  It’s the capital of a tiny island that once colonized much of the globe, with both the evidence of that imperial power everywhere and the ridiculousness of puffing itself up about it in the face of 21^st-c events and thinking. But there is something about London that lifts my heart and puts a smile on my face. I can sit on a park bench and look at a picnic of women in niqab and chador, all in black in the weak English spring sunshine and the green grass, with elaborate ewers and plates laid out among them, and wonder what they’re eating and what they’re talking about. I can sit in Trafalgar Square, monument to one of England’s greatest heroes, and think of the last words of Horatio, Lord Nelson—“Kiss me, Hardy”—and ponder whether the admiral was in fact gay, or bisexual, or just wanting human comfort in the face of the dark. I see the bright red splashes of color of the passing London double-decker buses, and I know both that they were very nearly extinct thirty years ago, and that they’ve been part of the city’s greatest triumph in the war against climate change. I’m gastronomically happy that the city’s most iconic dishes are fish & chips, and tikka masala (or at least a “cheeky Nando” curry). (I’m sitting in a pub called the Duke of Battersea right now, typing this, listening to reggae music and eating bangers and mash.) I’d know the smell of London anywhere—frying ginger and garlic from a nearby kebab house, fresh-air cigarettes because nobody can smoke indoors anymore, and a faint cold tang of damp stone and concrete and river water. There’s so much history in this city that’s built glass and steel skyscrapers with snarky local names like the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie, the Shard, the Blue Fin. If you look closely, you can see the old buildings amidst them. The heart of London is still a maze of tiny alleys with names that call back to their origins—Stew Lane, Garlick Street, Pilgrim Street, Paternoster Lane.

I love this city.