Bog Myrtle & Peat

There are mosaics to commemorate the life and work of William Blake in the underpass of a railway bridge in Lambeth. I went to see them, and understood them as an apology. Because that railway bridge was laid across the house on Hercules Street where Blake lived in the 1790s, and grand stirrings of the great man’s world are now little more than butter in a sandwich of mud. Having so completely obliterated a site of extraordinary cultural value, the mosaics can never hope to comfort the loss. But they’re there, and the new context is differently fulfilling. There are rats in the rafters of the railway, and lashings of something like piss on the pavement. Feeling my way towards Blake, there’s plenty to be found in the flicker of the overhead lamps, and that’s enough to start me on the journey.

It’s hard to look at London from where I’m standing, and I have kept myself away from the place for most of my life. It has sometimes appeared in my imagination as a stealer of friends who go away for work and come back with a strange intolerance for things which used to please them. The enormities of London have frequently cast me in the shade, and it has been tempting to lean away from the city and claim that I am only for the brose, and hell mend the beefeaters. But that’s a variation of envy, and my ugliness is heightened by a refusal to engage with the light. So I have pushed myself to know the place a little, and on several trips I have found more than enough to love. Standing on Westminster Bridge in December, I heard the old bells chime for the first time and discovered things to leave and take away. I was involved, and for the simple cost of going.

In politics, it’s easy to claim that Edinburgh is a sensible place for Scots to hang their hats. And having been told for so long that we are remote, it’s gratifying to reverse the accusation and claim that we are not in the wrong place – you are. But I detect that London is not so bold or sure of itself as it seems. In truth, it’s hardly more than a thousand ideas trying to rush through a single doorway at once. Even Londoners are puzzled by London, and points of convergence are strained and confused. Certain squares and streets operate like miniature republics, while other spaces belong to nobody at all. When I have allowed the radio to speak of the city’s anatomy, I had not imagined how close those famous constituent parts would lie together until I went to look for myself. And now I’ve seen Pimlico, Southwark and Elephant and Castle in what amounted to little more than a short walk from Westminster. Everywhere so big and overpowering, but the reality much smaller and more fragile – as if the mighty names have been unhooked from their meanings and allowed to float in loosely anchored orbit around borderless acreages of flats and railings. And I doubt that Rome or Jerusalem was ever more Holy than to those who never went.

In the sharp inhalation which follows, it’s possible to think of London as simply what you make it. Blake is unusual for the fact that he was born there. He had nowhere else, but in a sample group of a thousand people caught briefly at lunch or running for the train at Victoria, the grand majority are only passing through, even if only for a few days or decades. Many grudge the decision to participate, holding their noses in the short term for the hope of a greater good. They might have lived in London for forty years and still insist upon claims of belonging to Yorkshire or Devon. In certain lights, I’m lucky that I never had to go – although luck is a subjective way to measure the greenness of grass. And I start that I should have to justify myself for even having visited; to explain that going was not an inevitable act of submission. Because I’m a better Scotsman for having gone, and I’m no longer scared of The City.