home again

Returning home is strange thing. Spend a while away, and you begin to wonder where home is, where it ever is. I’ve spent so much of my life sleeping on sofas, ever the gypsy, that I tend to make my home wherever I lay my head. But I kind of got out of the habit of late; got into planning… Land, responsibility, and a longer view of time… but here I am sleeping on a sofa again, and I feel content. It’s a homily, I know, but home really is a state of mind. It was a different sofa yesterday, and it’ll be a different one tomorrow, but it will still be home, and it’s great to be back.
On the way to yesterday’s sofa I walked back across Waterloo Bridge, scene of so many of my crucial moments in life (what is it about bridges?) and noticed two things. The first is that Cardboard City has gone. This is no news to most people in London, but it was the way in which it was gone that I found noticeable: big boarded up areas where the city used to be (what goes on inside there now?) and glittering lights and passageways making the familiar shapes look arty. Memory’s a funny thing. I find myself wondering if it’s always been this way, whether my attempts to recreate the old landscape there are just some weird dystopian exercise in illusion.
Where did everyone go?
The second thing of note was that in addition to Cardboard City, London as a whole is more illuminated than last time I was here. And while I can’t speak for London’s occupants in this respect, they do at least seem smiley, animated, alive. That’s what being away does; you notice different things when you come back, find new things to compare. People still walk into me as though I’m partially permeable (I had to buy a filter to protect the lens against such collisions – front elements are notably non-permeable to all but light) but they were always nice, always smiley and apologetic.
But there was light everywhere. Colour. A vibrant celebration of the shapes of London. I found that I’d stopped walking. I was staring not out across the river, but at a stark profile picked out in violet. Good God. It’s the Carbuncle. I’ve stopped walking toward the welcoming arms of tonight’s sofa of choice, and I’m staring at – appreciating – the Great Carbuncle of the Southern Shore. So that’s what this is about. Shine some ultra-violet at any old piece of nonsense or ugliness and it becomes art. And as another passerby bumps into my static form I realise that this superficial illumination of London and Londoners has worked: I’m standing here smiling back.