The first time I was in London was my honeymoon. Four nights in the Park Lane (the groom’s mother apparently pays for the honeymoon with Starwood points) en route to the Cotswold, Bath and Edinburgh. After a few months of Virgin Radio at work, it was astounding, all of it: the Tube, the double decker buses, the London Eye, the wild array of cell phones in the shops, the West End – and way too much time spent in the easyInternet cafe posting about it in the pre-smartphone era.
The second time I was in London was 2007, and it reflected its era as much as the honeymoon did: a scattered trip with Paris, Oxford and York excursions built in, tiny hotel rooms in the streets behind Victoria station, an iPhone with no service and at the mercy of Wi-Fi that was not the least bit pervasive, and a general bewilderment matching the chaos of having guessed wrong and left Apple.
The third trip, in 2010, the world was better…but I was towing relations through the same stuff I’d already seen, for the most part. And I still couldn’t unlock an iPhone 3G, which was an impediment (as was the shite camera) so I was carrying two devices, neither of which was particularly useful most of the time. Lot of ducking into Pret to get mail and Tweets and download more music.
The fourth trip was 2016. It was a little over a week, and probably should have been for longer. It was right after the Brexit vote, so the world had already started going to Hell – which you could tell because the high temperatures were 90 degrees and up on almost every day. It was the first trip where I was actively seeking out pubs, the patrons of which were unfailingly gathered outside for want of air conditioning. This time we were in a cozy boutique hotel by Kings Cross, and there was a real sense that something had shifted because we flew over international business class and stayed in this nice accommodation on our own credit card points.
And now here we are. Halfway through three weeks in London (apart from a day trip to Oxford for a chartered private boat cruise). Our world isn’t exactly better, and it my not get better, but it has reached equilibrium in a way worth celebrating – and worth not deferring, because who knows what could happen. Tomorrow is not promised to you, and if you’re sat on the thin edge of the Third World War, best you should do so on vacation and using up those intangible points that you accumulated through two years of a pandemic.
Two years. Two years of Watched Walker on YouTube, the getaway we couldn’t have, dreaming of these same streets we are walking now – not particularly quickly, and not all the same, as as often as not we’re in the front of the top of a London bus taking in the scenery. I did have one day where I hit ten pubs and drank thirteen different beers, but it wasn’t as enjoyable as one evening and two pints in the upstairs of the Rose & Crown around the corner.
I’ve enjoyed it here, in this 20s and 30s Bright Young Things hotel for the third time but the first under our own steam. Everyone has been very nice, and while the war in Ukraine looms over everything, I haven’t had to think about Jamf deployments or job hunting or American political bullshit or my relations in Alabama or my mortgage in California or whether the damn charger is finally installed for the ID.4 or what is sufficient dress for an overnight restroom visit. We are in Mirror World, with its heavy plugs and its heavy coins, a place where everyone except street beggars has switched over to touch-free cashless payment (and the spectacle of at least one pub that would not accept cash at all, astoundingly).
I’ll miss walking around the corner in the morning, heading down White Horse Lane until it bends out of sight, and finding myself in a tiny urban village with restaurants and shops and newsstands (and four pubs). I’ll miss that first step onto the sidewalk facing Piccadilly toward the Green Park underground station, which always feels like that first time in London renewed. But I have another ten days to go, in a different hotel with different objectives, and the prospect of a weekend abroad with friends. That – after the last two years inclusive and everything about them – is a dream far too long deferred.