#45 inner chiding —the teetering — like me like me like me
My inner voice is a Puritan, chiding and so it is that, seeing the children being wheeled in buggies down Edgware Road after dark, my first thought is of it being far past their bedtime. My habit towards self-correction, however, is getting better the older I get and it’s not long followed by the thought of how wonderful it must be to grow up amongst the bright lights of this neighbourhood; the smoke rising from the one kebab shop with a consistent queue; the thrumb thrumb of suped up cars waiting at the traffic lights with the rumble of the overpass overhead, windows vibrating with the bass; people weaving between cars with arms raised or bulging bags of charcoal or phrases hollered in greeting; one man striding onto the stage of the crossing lit by headlamps and starting to juggle with seeming ease, his shadow undulating in and out of the potholes up ahead.
I spent most of October cycling wide-eyed down these streets, noticing all of the things that I had failed to before then as I teetered on the edge of enormous change. I handed over my bookshop keys one Sunday with a small, stifled welp and, for the first time in almost a decade, peered down the barrel of a new job. The bookshop was almost the only job I’d ever had, one I’d had for almost as long as I was at secondary school, almost as long as I’d known my now-husband; a job I mostly liked but which had come to feel confining, something from which I had long-plotted to escape. No matter that, once brave enough to face new colleagues in full Lycra, my commute would be substantially the same; I had set to thinking how unlikely it was that I’d cycle this stretch of road again, how many near-misses it had inflicted on me over the years, how many insults had been flung and punctures accrued. It had joined a small but not insignificant list of things I was unlikely to miss (along with collapsing cardboard boxes and prolonged exposure to the general public).
Still, there were worse times of year to be reunited with the underground as, above it, rain clouds gathered and dark nights made cycling a less tempting prospect than usual. And so, with a backward glance on my so-called career thus far, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I found the beams of oncoming cars — many bright enough to provoke an old-man-ish cor that’s too bright — drawing me inexorably back towards the dark nights of my childhood. (This is not a metaphor). The arcing sweep of them reminding me of narrow country lanes similarly spotlit, the denouement of a journey invariably involving a handover of us children from one parent to another. This would usually take place at a Little Chef just off the motorway where we would reliably conform to well-worn habits: E loading up on bacon rashers, W nudging food around the borders of his plate, me enthusiastically filling my pockets with free lollipops from a glass bowl by the door. I can still feel the laminated menus, tacky to the touch.
When he wasn’t blasting Gary Numan or Chumbawumba, my dad would occasionally play Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring — loud — on these drives southward, narrating the story of the animals and the fire (one I only recently discovered to be fictitious) while the trees overhanging the road on both sides cast their towering shadows. The exhilaration of the gathering strings as the trees parted to make way then closed behind us like a velveteen curtain. He had wanted us all to be musical and we would all fail him in various ways (perhaps none of us more spectacularly than E whose own musical endeavours were cut short when he cleaned his trumpet by aligning its bell with the stream of a running tap). My own sugar high notwithstanding, chins would soon be nodded towards chests and eyelids drawn closed; O to be sound asleep and carried up the garden path slumped, loose-limbed over a parent’s shoulder — what profound, lost pleasure.
That’s not to say that there aren’t profound pleasures to come, of course, only that they can feel less certain, harder-won than those we leave behind. I could put this down to the cynicism that comes with age or the fear of failure that can eclipse our view of future pleasures; that’s certainly been my experience in recent years — best to stick to what you know rather than venture beyond it into the question-mark-shaped unknown. When Stravinsky debuted The Rite of Spring — with Ninjinsky’s Ballets Russes in Paris — audiences famously reacted with uproarious, mocking laughter; I like to think this itself emerged from fear of this new and unusual style. (It is now considered one of the most influential pieces of the 20th Century).
All of which is to say that I am, against all odds, writing to you from that unknown: a centrally-located office with a desk and a chair and the prospect of promotion (though still, reliably, surrounded by books). And sure, there’s a certain, unavoidable squirming that comes with doing something new, having to ask someone sorry sorry just one more question and I’m sure I’m not alone in doing fewer things that fit this brief as an adult. But the pleasure that comes from pushing through this ickiness — armed with the armour of a new bag, a new notebook and a (pre-existing, admittedly) keen sense of like me like me like me — is unfamiliar in the best possible way. And is that really so bad? To display our wanting so openly? It’s 2024 and wanting so openly is in, baby.