5am. Milkman rattling-carted clinking-bottled stop-starting up the avenues and roads, the streets and mews cobblestones. The timer on a million boilers clicks to automatic and ten million radiators warm to the flush of central heating’s miracle. The teabags and teaspoon, the cups and the tray, all sitting still-ly waiting for water as Mr. and Mrs. Webb, the actuary and his wife, lie in dreamless, calculated-risk sleep upstairs at number thirty-nine.
The longhaul flight flies in over the estuary and past Docklands.
“Ten minutes to landing, cabin crew, ten minutes”, as three hundred and forty souls wake up, tidy up, scramble for their strewn belongings, bacon-buttied and cream-crackered.
Smithfield porters, pub-bound and bleary, done for the day already, lazily eye the early bird tourists gawping at sheeps’ heads, ambling the cold stores like a gallery of Damian Hirsts, all offal and fat and beautiful carcass.
Orange lozenged taxis, sharp-eyed new shifts watchful for fayres. The nightdrivers, puke-sodden beer-reeking minicabs headed for the washer, going off duty to rest before they tide the bar crowd back into tonight’s town.
Suited and booted the chauffeurs are ready, ferrying plutoctrats, diplomats, aristocrats and people on a treat. The joggers, the runners, the walkers. The too tidy ladies, their necks kept taught by Harley Street surgeons and serious sterling. The black faces of the bus drivers. The girls on the top deck giving you a second look. Kissing couples can’t-leave-eachother-alone as they part on their separate ways to work.
The big, bearded mama of a mid-wife clinks on to the street off duty with two more bottles of Bollinger she cannot and will not drink and un-named baby girl lies, slightly jaundiced in her incubating sun-bed as her mother gazes at her through half-sleep eyes. It is the last proper sleep she will have for two years.
Pardeep and Jack have their first born in their bed, warm and snug like a cuckooing hot water bottle. In one minute Jack will get up to go to work. Pardeep will still be in bedclothes when Jack gets home, unable to cope with the thing in her bed.
Window cleaners scraping at the already pristine shop fronts on Sloane Street. And all of this great steaming, churning, gargantuan city is on the move now.
Bankers whose first day this is today, whose last day it is, those who daydream of the black-beamed mullion windowed mock Tudor Surreyness of home. River boat men. Lawyers. The sandwich maker and the army of barristas at Starbucks, at Nero, at Republic and Costa doling out early morning kick-start in their counterfeit communitied, High Street hi-jacking way.
Fruit stall holders in Soho’s Berwick Street market flirting out ” pound a pound ” to the pretty secretary, knickers stuffed in her bag, stale from the club where she’s been all night, hoping to get away with it with her bosses on pro-plus and her come down buzz. She’ll be walking dead by noon.
The train tide has ebbed now. Barrow boys and Southend-on-Sea make good traders and dreamy dream filled dreamboat talon-nailed gold diggers looking for their ticket out. School runned children in their Chelsea tractors kissing mothers spit-flattened unruly boys hair fresh for class. Bags, shoe bags and smuggled in toys. The hollow eyed lonester little bullied boy. The bicycling duet of music professor Christelow and his daughter, methodically orchestrated on their slow/ tempo/ ride/ to/ school.
Pristine perambulating yummy mummies with their proud charges wide eyed nursery goers of Clapham. At the weekend their deck-shoed Timberlanding husbands will uniformly swing Hamish and Ellie as they talk of next schools and moves to the country.
Homeless, grey clothed, scratty bearded hobo, walking his patch between Seymour Street and the top end of Gloucester Place. Trolleys from Tesco, paint cans by Dulux, binliners and bits of broom, he is a living there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I. Moving round his turf, one trolley at a time in his Sysiphean circular relay of rubbish, bemused and ignored, this garbage entrepreneur.
The blue stockinged Cleverdons read every book exhausting the local book shop, ravaging the shelves like literary termites, devouring page after page, charming, effortless, oblivious to the world in their five storey, unmodernised, book lined, book staircased home in the Islington Square.
Well meaning, mean social conscious social worker Lorna cold hearted and cruel dispenses her law binding decisions to the dispossessed as her husband – in name only – weeps inwardly in his banished monk-like cell at the rear of the house. He pines for what his wife was but she is gone and they live a lie for the sake of their kids. Divorce courts beckon in Bromley but ssshhh, the children mustn’t know – it’ll spoil their teatime treats.
In the Toastrack media pushy Pru moves the pieces on her social climbing battle board. At their party tonight, Keith, her socially pimped, re-wardrobed, internet ensembled husband, will wander through the crowd of all so important people to know, to find a friendly face outside in the smoking section. He does not know a soul inside. Pru sniffs him out and pulls him onside inside to hob-knob and climb a few more rungs.
Vapid and vain, the Kensington hard bodies with their single shot Evian come out to play with their fitness instructors. In Goldman Sachs, four million a year SWAPS specialist Jacqui Hao skips as she skips lunch. The Jews at Golders, the Arabs on Edgware, the Italians in Greek Street, the hooded hoodie gangs of black youths outside the Clapham Grand. The resent-filled-butter-wouldn’t-melt white neat woman mutters mouthreadably silent obscenities and vile, fury filled bile about all the foreign filthy unfamiliar-ness of her street.
This is my London.