Ben's Londunroamin'

I intended to ask if my geographic romanticism could so easily be put aside as my...er...romantic romanticism. As I read Ian Nairn's words about some favoured piece of architecture that was demolished 35 years ago and that he saw but that I cannot I feel emotionally bound to the past. Bound to 'a better time', 'a happier time', a not now. But then in the next entry in 'Nairn's London' he is describing another building pulled down before he could see it. This building isn't even remembered by a photograph with the pencil engravings and their soft focus lending it all the more mystique and evocation of those better times.

Did Nairn feel like a man out of place? That if only he cold go back before the bombs and before the rubble and before the concrete he'd know himself? If so I'd feel a little better. And a little worse. Better to not be the only one and, indeed, I would be in esteemed company. And worse because this debilitating fantasy affects people greater than I. If they can't resist it then what chance do I have? This yearning for winding lanes, gaslit and fogged streets, hovels, holes, tight and unregulated spaces is really, I think, a desire for subsumption. Suck me in, absorb me whole. Let every nerve be so gently pressed. Lift me up and lay me down. It all sounds a bit Freudian. The city, the backstreet, the cave as a womb. The big world reduced to a small one. A place of safety. When I can't live in the present I retreat to the past and the greatest comfort. How credible our experience of the womb is though I don't know. And then it occurs to me that these Dickensian locations I flee to aren't safe. They are dank and dirty and you are untethered to them. If you are in them then you have nothing, no rights, no possessions, no opinion. You'll be sloshed away like afterbirth should someone wish it done. That might be the attraction to me. The purity of lack of choice. When surviving the day is marked by your ongoing existence at the end of it. I might envy that as the street urchin envies my plethora of choice, my material goods, my insulation from harm. 'To have a hundred choices!' he'd say. 'To have to choose one!' I'd reply. Not equitable situations for sure but neither promises happiness. Well mine does actually.

Work hard
Buy nice things
???
Happiness

Hmm, just a little harder please.

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