The Sensationalist
Walking around Mayfair, The Burlington Arcade, Jermyn Street etc. can send some people into a kind of nausea, sickened apparently by the glaring wealth. It never had that effect on me. I was there recently and found myself, as I often do, in a sensual trance- soaking up light, texture, shapes. This happens especially in the smarter parts of London where I feel haunted by another life that I have either lived or am living in an alternate roll of the dice. The prevailing mood of such a life I can detect by simply staring at the masonry. Details are vague of course but vagueness can be compelling (like a misted window that lures us in to clean it).
The other life rolls out a montage of most excellent moments in most excellent ambiences, a life so departed from linear narrative that it might be seen as a gorgeous chaos. When my imagination doggedly pursues clarity and stumbles through the fog, I finds the charmed life in the lap of a character called Roger. I don’t know if he is supposed to be Me, as there is so little to see.
I always find that when I play a role in life that is not truly within my range- the concerned friend, the fun-loving extrovert, the keen new employee- these characters are necessarily and quite awfully one-dimensional- a fragment posing as a whole.
Beyond Roger being a sensationalist, a flaneur, we had little in common. So I messily filled him out, as if bound by a sketch that another artist had already started.
Roger works in the international department of winemakers or was he a buyer for Fortnum & Mason? He’d recently bought himself a silk smoking jacket from New & Lingwood for a party. He pops into Paxton & Whitfield for a tangy cheddar, strolls in Green Park paddling his loafers through fallen blossom, enjoys an onion soup at The Wolsey. It’s his father’s birthday at the weekend, so a pipe from JJ. Fox seems in order, then it’s down to the parent’s Somerset manor house in the open-topped MG, round those high hedged single lanes, cloudy cider in mind, cloudy mind, shiny tree bark, sunlit leaves, and memories of a party in an orchard two years ago where they all went skinny dipping in that chilly river. Tom had just come back from Nepal and seemed oh so ‘spiritual’, even had a Jesus beard which on a young man looked cool. That night he went down the Old Coaching Inn to meet Richard and Sally- who looked much comelier as her skinny frame had gone through the 30s fill-out. For dinner it’s glazed pork belly and mash and sprouts in a dark woody corner with candlelight, not from elegant candles, but from one huge, disfigured staff that had been burning for three nights. Dad had looked fresh-eyed and country well. He asked about the job. How was the flat (which he owned)? Did it need a fresh lick of white paint? Actually, Roger preferred a light blue to go with the dark blue velvet curtains because blue in all its forms brought us to hopeful skies or fervent seas. Of course, such preferences could not be justified because his father was not a sensationalist. Perhaps that’s why he was rich; he knew how to play with money. Roger knew nothing of money, wanted no part in the life-to-work deal and wanted very little action: Action is fatal for sensationalists; it puts the world on fast forward. Perhaps his parents always knew that, because they had paid for everything, had even wangled him a job where he was doing little more than well paid ‘reacting’ to the molehills (as he saw them) that sometimes appear on the landscape of any client relations. That’s not to say work hurt him. He liked the office. It was in an old Regency building with a stucco facade, with a staircase, so beautifully carpeted with a pattern of yellow finches peeking through leaves of a blue Eucalyptus trees, and the smell of wood polish on the banister made Roger himself feel polished like the walnut stock of a Purdey. Vibes with colleagues were good and in Summer they all took their lunches of salt beef, humous, dried tomatoes and chunky bread in the park, under the sycamores, Roger laying down to dream the dreams of the relaxed idle, which, unlike the fantastical dreams of the truly desperate, are garden party-esque with the slow tumbling in of soft delights like dandelion blowballs and swaying willow boughs.
In Spring the hopes of everyone in England rise in the ether. They settle on the best parts of London masonry and permeate the brickwork. Roger likes to spread his palms across the warm stone and feel that familiar dream of a life without parents getting frail, friends losing their jobs, partners disappearing, decisions being wrong. That day he put his back to the side wall of a shoe shop to feel the hope, and the sweetness in that hope, which like the cold syrup of a honeysuckle or was it the subtle sugars of a Jacob’s Cream Cracker?
As I continued to amble very slowly around that area, halting to savour whatever qualia that a sensationalist might consume like the very cheese-ness, the very stone-ness, the leather-ness, the day-ness, I noted Roger had recoiled into the shadows a little. As distance grows between two people, they begin to lose their fullness and become in the eyes of the other somewhat deconstructed, like a list of ingredients of the cake and less the cake itself. Thus, Roger was now a less blended, knowable character. I wondered if he knew he was being watched and had chosen to flee from my thoughts.
The gilded curves of the arcade entrance, the sepia of windows in classic shops both dimmed a little. Over the course of half a minute the sky grew cluttered with cloud. What had been a golden corridor of Sundays finest vibe hardened into a passage of a much greyer intent. It was the moment like in everybody’s Sunday when suddenly the illusion of a life of easy pleasures is under threat and is quite rapidly replaced with a pre-work or pre-school angst. People then rush home to do the clothes washing, to batten down the hatches and prepare once again to be at stake in the world.
However, it was too early that day for such an alteration in mood. It was more likely that under the glare of my scrutiny Roger had panicked and taken flight. I hadn’t bargained on him being quite so self-conscious and as he returned to his vaguest form, I made a note-to-self that sensationalists are overly sensitive.
A Bentley blocked my quickening saunter. A wealthy Arab family huddled together on the pavement. My shoes suddenly seemed from another part of town. Roger with his command of the area, I suppose, was ousting me from his neighbourhood and from my own imagination. I ran.
Before long I was back in Paddington on the train in a rear carriage. The flakes of a Greggs sausage roll, spilt strangely on the thin windowsill, held against the blue dusk, were like the crumbling remains of a distant Petra, and beautifully offset the tired faces warring their way back to Slough.