Destination:Anywhere

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

I say as much to Vanessa who has travelled across the world and finds that she still has bad days and shit times. Haven't we done more or less the same thing? I say - It's a new life, a new way of being, but she is on some continent I couldn't even find on a map, and I'm in South East London still. I add something chirpy at the end about not wanting at any point to go back home. Not at all a lie: I haven't wanted to go back, even when forward hasn't seemed like such a great option either.

I set out into town, in search of adventure and just to get out of the house. Three days without human contact and I'm going stir bloody crazy. I've watched too many movies, read too many books and am in serious danger of slipping into a fantasy world where I expect everything to go my way; like some sort of Richard Curtis film with better sex. As Richard Curtis makes fairy tales and I'm hardly Keira Knightley this is definitely a bad idea. I decide to visit cafes, draw, take photographs and generally hang around looking fabulous. I wear a dress, and spend time on the train marvelling at the fact that I have knees. Does it look to you like I've left the fairy tale? Of course not.



I pound the streets of London in my high heels. I visit a shop where characters from High Fidelity live and breathe. I skip cheekily past taxis, help an unknown Antipodean retrieve the contents of his spilled bag from a puddle in the middle of Old Compton Street without ever meeting his eyes, listen to people moaning while they drink cappuccino, draw people eating their lunch, photograph shops in the rain.

Somewhere in the middle of the day it hits me like a brick wall. On the corner of Christmas-crushed Regents Street it occurs to me that all this frantic activity doesn't change the fact that I am alone, and feeling somewhat lost. The walking and my aching feet might push away the feeling but it still follows me around like an unwelcome cousin. The fairy tale dissolves around me like a puff of smoke. I lean against the wall in the underground station while people push past me and refuse to cry, refuse to feel like a five year-old whose mother has better things to do than scoop her up when she is sad. I have no idea where to go, what to do next. In the end I force myself down the escalator, onto a train, back out onto the street, into a café.

I am aggressive with the waitress; trying to pick a fight with her, but she skilfully disarms me so that in the end we stand and laugh. The only table I can find is in the dark under the stairs, but when she comes to clear she tells me that people are leaving, follows me to the new table, is solicitous with me over my long coat dragging on the floor. I stare into the middle distance while I drink something orange and artificial which is labelled 'summer'. Everyone who comes to join me soon finds somewhere else to sit and I have the table to myself. I sit and stare at people, watch the barristas dancing to the café jazz during the lulls, hold my sketchbook up in front of my face and draw. No-one notices me. I begin to enjoy the fact. Reconstruct my bubble.

Later I wander further through London, allowing myself to lose my bearings and get lost in areas that I know extremely well. I find alleyways that I didn't know exist on streets which I have walked down for 20 years, stare at stage doors I've never noticed, photograph dark buildings which suddenly appear beautiful. A busker fills the air with New Orleans trumpet. The streets throng with people and I try unsuccessfully to photograph them. It feels as though I am on another continent. At one point I come across a life-sized statue of Jesus, up on a pedestal; complete with flaming heart. He holds up his hands as though he has just told a very good joke and is trying to calm the crowd so he can go on to the next one.

I wander into a bookshop and leave with yet another copy of Neverwhere, the slipperiest book I have ever owned. As I sit on the train home it occurs to me that reading this book on a train coming out of London is exceptionally exciting, and that I ought to have stayed and found a comfortable alley to read it in. Or a pub. I would like to draw a map of the places and characters. I realise that nowadays I identify with Richard, not with Door. When did that happen, I wonder.

I stumble up the road, apologising aloud to my feet the whole way home for my poor footwear choices. Once indoors I order a takeaway, and instead of reading as I had planned slip the DVD of The Hours into the player. After I have finished sporadically sobbing my way through it I download my photographs. They don't even come close.