London Diary (10)

I looked down at the crowds below. Ten years ago, I was doing exactly the same thing as they were. Singing, dancing in the streets, smiling. Happy. Back then it was 1999, and anything seemed possible. Things could only get better. Surrounded by friends and family, we heard Big Ben chime away. We held hands and sang. A couple of Australian women were close by and joined in with us as we clambered on top of some statue. Someone had a bottle of champagne and we splashed it around like a set of Grand Prix winners. Okay, we never got to see the fireworks by the Thames, but somehow, it didn’t matter. Man, it was 2000, there was something special about the occasion! It was the beginning of the third millennium, this was it! It was our time! This was not just our year, but our life!

And so, ten years later, as I looked down at the crowds lining the streets below me, I did not smile lovingly as I looked back at a lost decade. That was it, ten years, gone. Finished, never to return. If I was lucky, I would have another four or five decades left on this Earth, then that will be it for me. My pitiful existence, gone, with another moron taking my place amongst the masses, looking out over the river and singing away with their hopes and dreams ahead of them.

Where had the last ten years gone? Nowhere. I was not any better than I was ten years ago, I could not point to some great achievement that I had made, life was still the same, I had not changed.

And what did I have to show to the world? Nothing. No hopes, no love not even any cash in my hand. I was as poor now as I was then!

It was as if the whole decade was just one endless series of hoops, being jumped through, but I was the only one setting those hoops. All those trials were for nothing. Friends had been lost, and enemies had gathered around me on this road known as life. I had seen too many good people die for no reason other than to validate the phrase, ‘it’s life’. And I had seen too many bad people continuing to live, polluting this Earth with their existence for no other reason then to validate the phrase, ‘life is unfair’.

The last ten years, have, been unfair. Where was this hope, this mass of goodwill that was stacked up as a result of a few digits turning to ‘zero’? Year 2000, Y2K, the New Millennium! Just think, such an event comes round once every thousand years, and really should be a point for humanity to reset itself and become better than it was.

Instead, all we got was more wars, more mistrust and more hatred. There was no love from the last ten years, only more of the same, but worse. There was no reason for all this, negativity, this let down of society. We had it all, the technology, the communication, the vision and the hope to really make ourselves altruistic, to move forward like at no other point in our shared history. Instead we got caught up in the greed of the times, we wanted more for ourselves, we thought only of our own pockets. How to get on top of the grease pole and stay up there. We wanted to reach for the stars, but instead of helping our brothers and sisters up, we shut the trap door on them.

The fireworks are already over, and the euphoria is gone. People stop looking at each other in hope, and look down at the pavement as the minutes tick past midnight. There is no more holding of hands, no more shared vision, no more love. Just a need to get out of the snow, to go home to our over-mortgaged lives and back to our so called security. An illusion that we have created for ourselves. Ten years down, four more to go…

Turkey Haiku

Turkey on the plate.
It used to be my best mate.
That’s until I ate.

London Diary (9)

(Considering it is Christmas, this is a controversial story to write, but this one has been playing on my mind for a while… remember, this is (mostly) a work of fiction, so don’t get offended – CMD)

‘There has to be something more to this, you know, something after this life when we all…’

I looked up from my packet of chips but he couldn’t finish the sentence he had started. It was an accident, no one blamed him for it. But still, months after it happened his hands shook a little bit too much. His gaze couldn’t hold your own for very long. It was as if he was still reaching out, searching for a reason, fathoming a concept far beyond his own existence.

To be honest, I don’t know how I would have coped with it. As I said, it was an accident, no one blamed him for what had happened. But that does not make it any easier. A sharp sound, a yell from across the road, anything could be a trigger for the memories of that night. The mind is an exceptional tool, us humans have evolved it over millennia. And it can deal with all the traumas of life throws at you. But how does the mind deal with death? The reality of this final destination that we will all reach, maybe tomorrow, maybe many moons in the future. And how does the mind deal with death, when you were its very agent?

‘You know, there has to be a purpose…’

I swallowed the chip. Despite its heat, I didn’t feel it slide down to my stomach. Instead I had to think fast, on my feet. Now what could I say. I didn’t just sympathise with him, he was my friend, we had known each other for years, been through way too much. But I also had to be careful, at this point not to speak entirely what’s on my mind. Something that had got me into a lot of trouble beforehand.

‘Well,’ I started.

He looked up at me. His eyes were filled with a glimmer of hope, but holding back something much more forceful. A torrent of emotion was there, but his mind was struggling to apply some logic to that horrific night.

Come on, I did not believe in jack. Look, in life, you make your own choices. And whatever happens, happens. God does not put his hand down, touch you on the shoulder and ‘whoosh’! Life is life. And then we die. We all die. It is a universal law, just like gravity, or the sun rising in the east. Life and existence continues. One day humans will evolve into something else, and all the hopes and dreams that posess today will be fossilised as coal.

God exists, God does not exist, I can’t prove that and nor do I care! I have bills to pay, I got mouths to feed and I got to turn on the heat. No God has ever put cash in my pocket. My own mind, my own wits have got me to where I am and to be honest that is not very far. After all, it is a Friday night, all I have is bag of chips and a friend looking for answers. Philosophy behind a set of dustbins, and not much else to keep out the cold air.

‘You know, there might be something, for us after this life. There may be an afterlife and some divine reason behind all of this. Then again, there may not be. And everything on Earth, that we experience is a result of human action. There is no guiding hand. Or maybe it is a little of both. I don’t know, the Ancient Greeks and beyond were coming up with the same questions. I guess since man first looked up at the starts, we have all asked the same thing!’

He chuckled.

‘Yeah, I suppose so. We’re trying to answer in a night what no one else has figured out so far!’

He grabbed a handful of chips, and shoveled them into his mouth, his hands still shaking that little bit too much. I had eased the pain for now, and whatever was inside him had subsided. But no matter what, until his dying day, he would always have that horror in his mind. No matter how many times we all told him that it was not his fault, he would still lie awake at night and think, ‘what if?’

He chewed on the hot chips, rapidly gasping as he tried to cool his tongue. It was a chilly night, and the vapours from our lungs filled the air. I looked at him, but he did not seem to notice. Whatever was going on through his mind, I hopefully would never know. But in this life, you are always one step away from death itself…

London Diary (8)

The driver pulled up to the bus stop and opened the door. There were two people at the bus stop, an old man with a walking stick and a young woman in a tracksuit. The driver knelt the bus down and the old man hobbled on, snapping his Oyster card onto the reader. The woman came on. She held her hands together. It was clear that she had been crying, her badly applied make-up now more obvious.

‘Er, can you let me on. My boyfriend’s just kicked me and I’ve left my pass…’

The bus driver gestured to her to get on board as he shut the doors and pulled off. It was not the first time that this woman had come onto the bus and claimed she was getting beaten up by her boyfriend. But it was 3am in the morning, and the secret to the Night Bus was to let everyone travel for free. After all, at this time, who really cares about a bus pass?

As he drove through the empty housing estate, the snow began to fell. He checked the temperature on the dashboard, and it stated it was 2C. That meant that the snow would not settle and instead leave behind a slush that would eventually turn to surface water. Good the driver thought, he didn’t feel like having a difficult night behind the wheel.

The driver looked in his offside mirror and saw a pair of headlights riding close to his bumper. He pulled into the next bus stop and whizzing past him went the taxi cab. In his mind, it was better to let them go. They were in rush, while he had an easy timetable to stick to. There was never a rush at this time of the night. All the revelers that had decided to brave London’s cold streets had long gone home and it would be another hour before the first workers of the day would be seen shivering at the bus stops. But at this time of the morning, it was only the strange that decided to ride on the Night Bus. Those that had no home to go to, those that could not sleep, those that had too much to drink and could not wake up.

He reached the traffic light at the end of the estate. He waited at the red light, ready to turn back onto the main road. A van passed by, rushing to somewhere that was only important to him. The driver overheard the conversation of that young woman with the old man. She was telling him how her boyfriend had assaulted her. Again. But by the end of the night, she would return to him. She always did. And the next time the driver was rostered to drive this particular route, odds on that she would be back on the bus, with tears running down her cheeks again.

London Diary (7)

Our eyes met across the vegetable aisle at the supermarket. It was well past midnight, and the shop was mostly deserted except for the night workers stacking the shelves.

She was talking on her mobile phone while pushing a trolley, I was holding a packet of pak choi.

The eyes are the window to the soul. In that instant, a multitude of opportunities opened up before us as our souls connected.

And that is what is so scary and yet thrilling when you look into the eyes of ‘the one’. The fact that the life you had been leading up until that magical moment was been completely meaningless. What I had thought important, my priorities, my convictions, they all went flying out of the window, when my eyes and hers locked onto each other.

The moment was brief, almost instantaneous. If I had blinked, I would have missed her. She would have been another midnight shopper, roaming the aisles, looking for packets of chicken soup and bottles toasted sesame oil. But instead, she was something, nay, someone so much more. That one look revealed to me a soul that matched mine, if only we both reached out to each other.

But this is London. And in this city, two wonder struck individuals walked past each other as if nothing happened…

A very British Haiku

Rain, rain, go away,
Come again another day.
Sun, sun, come today.

Caution Wet Paint – A look back at 2009…

I rarely double post, but this was an imprtant comic strip that I decided to also publish on this blog too…

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Get your own

This is quite a personal comic strip. It has been a tough 2009 for CWP, but rather than blog about it, I decided to illustrate it. The big question I am asking myself is ‘what do I do next?’

And to be honest, I do not know…

A look back at 2009

London Diary (6)

‘Fucker!’

The cab nearly knocked her over as she attempted top make her way across the Euston Road towards St Pancras. The station always looked imposing and now free from the scaffolding that pieced it back together before the Euro trains whistled in. And that is why she was here, she needed two tickets for the first train tomorrow morning. No questions asked, cash paid in full and a sweet smile was all she wanted from the ticket clerk as she entered the station.

St Pancras is a vast station, but she ignored the surrounding splendour on entering the main concourse. Instead she headed straight for the ticket office and waited in line. There was not much of a queue but she still did not take time to admire the surrounding beauty of restored Victorian Architecture. Instead, she kept her eyes down to the ground. She fiddled with her wedding ring, smiling at the irony of wearing that band of gold. It was with her lover that she was escaping the country tomorrow morning. Escaping to a new country, looking for a better life and a new beginning. Buying the ticket was the easy part of the plan she thought. What would come later that night would be the difficult task ahead. How to extract herself and her cash from her marriage…

‘Next Please!’

She looked up and approached the counter.

‘Two tickets to Paris please, leaving on the first train tomorrow morning.’

As the clerk typed on the computer, she looked around and checked behind her shoulder. Of course no one was following her, but-

‘That will be £290 please.’

She paid the money and received the tickets. Heading out of the station, she took one more glance around. No one was following her. She hoped. There were a lot of things she was going to miss about London. After all it had been her home for twenty years and no matter what, she had built a life for herself in this city. But she was starting anew, and needed to get out fast. She lit her cigarette and attempted to cross the road. A cab driver nearly ran her over.

‘Fucker!’

London Diary (5)

As the tube train rumbled into the platform he stood up.

While waiting for the trains, he liked squatting down. Often it gave his legs a rest from the many miles that he did, pounding the unforgiving streets of the city. His trainers were worn out, after all, they were a cheap pair that he bought in some discount shoe shop a while back. Still, they came in handy for running, when the need arose, which was unfortunately for him, becoming a more frequent occurrence. The vantage point from a squatting gave him an unusual view of the tiling that adorned the tube station and he also got to see up the nostrils of his fellow passengers, also waiting on the platform.

The doors hissed open and there was that usual embarrassed semi-scrum that always accompanied the ritual of embarkation onto and disembarkation off a tube carriage. It was the proper thing to let passengers off first, but there was always that worry that the driver might be in a temper and shut the doors on you, so leaving you behind on the platform, stranded underneath the streets of London. Of course, this had never happened to any of the passengers on the platform. But the mere fear of having to wait three minutes until the next train was too much to bear and so as the last of the passengers were trying to alight, the crowd surged on. He joined them too, riding the wave, almost euprhoric, of getting one step closer to a destination.

And what was that destination? The doors gave their warning before slamming shut and
as the train slowly rumbled out of the platform, he began to think of where he was going. Life had not turned out all happy go-lucky. Those rosy-tinted days of looking forward to a future had given way to something more realistic – ‘life’. For all the optimism that he should have felt, he in fact felt very lonely, despite the fact that his carriage was as crowded as ever. Standing, crushed against the plastic-enamel interior of the carriage, he may have shared the same thoughts, hopes, dreams and fears as his fellow passengers, as well as the same final destination, both literal and metaphorical. But of course, this is London, and while the whole train may have felt the same, for him, it felt that he was the only one that was experiencing it so vividly, with his heart racing away, as drip by drip, one second at a time, life itself slipped from his grasp.

The doors opened and he got off. He rushed towards the escalators, but for once, decided not to climb up and instead held onto the handrail and watched a few others overtake him on the left. The breeze from above ground hit him in the face, his nostrils picking up the scent of fried chicken and exhaust fumes wafting down the shaft from the street above. On reaching the concourse, he tappped his oyster and headed outside. It was a chilly night, and as he felt the sharp whip of the wind, he drew his collar close towards him. He still had a long way to go until he reached his ‘destination’…

London Diary (4)

It was night time, and the river lapped against the embankment. Two lovers kissed as the Autumnal air swept past them from up the estuary. Not that they noticed, enticed as they were by the rapture in which they held each other. Millions of couples have done this before, under Waterloo Bridge, dancing the dance of the twosome. But of course, for them, like every couple before them and for every couple afterwards, this was their moment, this was unique to them. It was a clear night, despite the wind, as their lips locked.

And then they stopped. They took a look at each other. Despite the passion, despite the intensity, they could see into each other’s souls This moment, was as empty as it could get. Just another moment by the Thames, but in each other’s hearts, they knew that this would be a fleeting moment in each other’s lives.

But the kissing continued. Who cared if this was a fleeting moment. It was ‘their’ moment together…