Postcards (4): Queen's Park

Hey,

It’s slowly getting warmer, isn’t?  It is beginning to feel as though we’re finally limping into summer.  Who knows, by the time this reaches you it might even be ice-cream and cold beer at nine in the morning because you can’t sleep weather. 

Way back, all the way back in February when we began this absurdly futile attempt to grow up, I had an image in my head of sitting in the garden, my feet up, trapped by the sun, a book and a beer to hand.

That hasn’t happened, yet, and the seasons’ refusal to shift along has helped us feel as though we’re stuck. 

Still, at least it isn’t sunny as such.  Clammy, sweaty and threatening to rain is more accurate, but then, isn’t that what constitutes an English summer?  If we’re being honest.

You might be wondering whether I’m being completely honest in these postcards.  Am I just pretending that I miss you?  Am I just trying to ensure that when we finally return it is to an embrace rather than a snooty rejection?

Yes and no.

Case in point: Queen’s Park.

Queen’s Park is delightful, it really is.  I already knew this.  I am not surprised - and nor was I really surprised about the pleasures of Muswell Hill or Brixton.  There are large swathes of London that are perfectly lovely.  Indeed, I struggle to find areas I dislike.  Chelsea, perhaps, for being too ostentatious.  I’m not really a fan of Camden, I suppose.  It’s not as cool as it likes to think it is.  Similarly, Clapham isn’t as down at heal as it pretends.  All those hooray Henrys thinking they’re roughing it south of the river.

Queen’s Park is two quick tube stops along from Maida Vale where my girlfriend lived when we first met.  It’s familiar territory, or, at the very least, just down the road from such.   And so we fill our weekend with the things we used to when she lived here.  Or we try to.  A walk to Hyde Park in-between the downpours.   Dinner with friends in a Burmese restaurant followed by the News Review comedy show in the Bridgewater. 

Sunday, I hike all the way down to Kensington to meet a friend.  We’re going to watch Brief Encounter in a roof top cinema.  On my way to meet her I walk through much of my history.  The bus stop where my girlfriend and I first kissed.  The pub we where we ate pizza on our third date.  The street she grew up on.  Notting Hill Gate which, ten years ago, was a still a scuzzily congested transport interchange and I didn’t understand why it was thought to be plush.  The WH Smiths still seems out of place.

A friend tells us that the Cypriot place around the corner from the cinema, where we had another relatively early date, has closed down.  The owner retired and none of the family were willing to take it on.  One of the final Notting Hill places that could have been there in the seventies finally limps off.  The Book and Comic Exchange on the corner, which is warily glanced at by the Prada brandishing twelve year olds, now seems the last vestige of a time when this corner of the city wasn’t a centre of affluence, but of violence.

We occupy our friend’s room on the top floor, amongst the rafters, while she’s in the Lake District.  I’m jealous.  I want to go and climb a mountain.  It’s proving impossible to schedule any sort of holiday as we keep getting trapped in the cycle of expecting to move and then being disappointed.  My girlfriend gets to go to the States on business and I stay in London making my daily phone calls to try and sort this mess out.

Queen’s Park has long been thought of by its residents as a hidden central(ish) London gem.  Filled with tall affluent houses surrounding a pleasant park, an independent focussed short high street and well regarded weekly market puts it is high the estimation of many.  All of this is true.  It has all of these things and yet it reminds me so much of you.  Nice, big houses – although many more of them kept whole rather than Brockley’s sixties fall from favour and flat conversion – centred around a park – albeit a more cultivated and tamed space than Hilly Fields and also lacking the South-East’s view.  Yes, it’s more centrally located, but the proximity of Kilburn’s traffic clogged high street with rambling crazies outside the pound shops and the high rise with the dubious reputation reminds me of both Lewisham and Peckham simultaneously.

Essentially, I could be home, but I’m not because it’s not about the location, it’s the insecurity.   We don’t appear to be any closer to getting out of this mess and I’m running out of ideas. 

Distracted one morning, I make a wrong turn on my bike.  Trying to work out the one-way side roads and avoid the oncoming bus, I am too close to the parked car when the door opens.  The next thing I know, I’m lying in the middle of the road, a car honking impatiently and the door swinger standing above me telling me I’m all right.  Life, in that sudden moment, all seems so unfair.  I’m mainly okay, just scrapes and bruises, but I think the end of my handlebars caught me in the ribs on the way down and the stiffening pain there will get a lot worse as the day drags on.  In that one brief moment, a little bloodied, I’m tempted to just give up.