“But, look suppose people could be in the country in five minutes walk, and had few wants; almost no furniture for instance and no servants, and studied (the difficult) arts of enjoying life, and finding out what they really wanted: then I think one might hope civilization had really begun.”
William Morris

We ended up in London again the other day. I feel it almost always happens that way: we do not plan to go to London, we do not make our day around the journey, we simply meet, after work, and are suddenly on a train speeding into the city. Maybe because of this I invariably arrive and feel I have left a part of myself back in Oxford–slower than the train, it straggles behind and tries to catch up with us as we crisscross the underground world of tunnels and subway cars and escalators that are so tall they make you dizzy, but it never quite does. So things like not being able to find a bin for my coffee cup in Paddington Station set me off on a tirade. I watch the woman on the platform while we wait for a Circle Line train with the thick blonde hair and the impeccable suit and the tall heels and the leather laptop bag. It’s a Thursday night; I picture her, young still, going home and having a bath and thinking about work and waking up and doing it all again, and before she knows it she’ll be old. She depresses me deeply; I do not envy her her life, though she looks perfectly happy and as she listens to a message on her phone her pretty lips broaden into an enormous grin. I think: poor woman.

There is always a reason to be in London; we are never there just because we are there. This time it was the launch party for the QI issue of The Idler magazine, so perhaps it was only appropriate that I did not envy the working woman (“The Idler is a bi-annual, book-shaped magazine that campaigns against the work ethic”). The invitation promised a “May Day Riot” on “London’s Clerkenwell Green”, and all we knew about the festivities is that there would be a pig roasting. I vaguely pictured a vast and lush city park, where civilized folk in elegant cocktail attire sipped champagne from plastic flutes and ate their pork with knives and forks. It had been raining heavy this morning but now things had cleared up; it was warm, even. We took the tube to Farringdon and made our way towards the Green…

…which was not, as it happens, green in the slightest. It sits on a small slope, surrounded by pubs but otherwise in what seems to be a limbo part of London, where tall bank-like buildings and underpasses and boulevards cut you off from the rest of the city. Rather than being a grassy park, the Clerkenwell Green is in fact just a concrete space in a concrete city; but on this evening it is chock full of people eating roast pork and sipping beer out of plastic cups. The pork sits smoking furiously while the guests, a number of whom are in Renaissance garb, line up with slices of white bread and then stand to the side slurping up the applesauce-and-pig sandwiches.

At first I am delighted: we go to the pub on the corner and get cider and rejoin the party, which has spilled out into the streets. The Renaissance people are playing strange instruments which made a thin, almost whiny sound, and dancing in circles near the pig. My love tries to tell me something; “Shh,” I say. “I’m having a surreal moment.”

Then it starts to drizzle, and people start leaving the Green, and the charm of it all wears off, a little. Badaude is there, wearing a chic black blazer and looking, I think, very city-cool; we stand chatting on the fringes of the Green, where the Renaissance people (Renaissance-ites? Renaissance-ers?) have produced an enormous dragon head to add to their strange, swaying little dances until she says, “can we move closer to the pig? I’m getting cold,” and I have to agree that the warmth I felt emerging from the tube has all but disappeared. My hair is getting damp and it occurs to me that the only reason I am enjoying this is because of juxtapositions: the community pig roast in one of the world’s most major cities.

So my love and I decide to try the pub where the party has, for the most part, moved on to. It is around the corner, across from a church, whose lone spire dominates the sky at this hour. It is also crowded; I mean seriously, profoundly crowded. I literally fight my way through a thicket of people, using my elbows to prevent them from collapsing in on me, but am informed by the bartender that they don’t take cards, so my cashless love and I are resigned to finding a cash point in this strange city.

We make a large, fifteen-minute circuit around the Green, which takes us all the way back to the tube stop. We find no banks, no nothing–until at long last, a lonely little cashpoint in a crumbling bit of wall which promises to charge us £1.50 for the use of its services. Desperate, we collapse upon the machine like pigs to the trough. I say, “Why is it that whatever you need in this city–an open bar, a bit of food, some cash–is never anywhere near where you are?” And he says, “I think it’s because, despite it’s size–London still has a village mentality.”

I think he couldn’t be more right. As we get back to the pub, which has, if possible, become even more densely populated, we join a crowd of people milling about outside. One of them is saying, “…and I thought, if it weren’t for the noise and the smell, we needn’t have been in London at all!”

It’s true. We could have been roasting that pig out in the sticks; we could have, except. Except for that nagging feeling of stress and doubt deep in the pit of my belly: discomfort of a strange sort. Is this how city-people feel all the time, I wonder? Is this why New Yorkers are so notoriously rude? I certainly become ruder in the city. When the Oxford Tube driver stops the coach somewhere near Notting Hill, slamming on his breaks just beside a rubbish bin on the sidewalk (must be the only one in the whole damn city, I think) and tells me that I can either throw my pasty away or wait for the next damn ride back home, because he isn’t moving another inch until that hot food is removed from his bus, because it smells bad, I get up, stand on the steps of the coach, and toss the pasty (one bite in, it hurts to throw it away) into the bin. “Oh,” I say. “You poor, poor thing.” And then I don’t even give him the courtesy of listening to his response, I am so rude. I would never do a thing like that if I wasn’t in the city. I am only rude because I the bit of me I think got left behind in Oxford in the rush was the bit of me that keeps me sane.

So London is really just a huge conglomeration of smaller areas with a village mentality. Everyone thinks their village is the only one; and everyone knows the rules of that village, but the rules change when you cross lines. It oughtn’t have seemed incongruous at all, that illicit city pig-roast, those strange Renaissance dancers (who set up shop outside the pub and played tunes standing atop wooden crates), the lack of anything necessary, like a cashpoint near a pub that takes nothing but cash. Upstairs in the pub, as the crowd thins out, we si
t and say that we are so glad we are struggling with our money because we are happier that way; we say it, and it’s true. I’d rather the uncertainty than be that woman on the platform looking all smoothed out and prim, who knows the rhythm of her life so well that it has ceased to sound interesting–I’d rather the civility of enjoying life and finding out what I really want.

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Fumio Kitaoka, Japan

Mehdi Qotbi, Morocco

Chéri Samba, Zaire

Robert Combas, France

Rivka Freidman, Israel

Laila Shawa, Palestine

Sandro Chia, Vatican City

Rima Farah, Jordan

Andrea Cristina Las, Brazil

John Piper, England

Robert Longo, USA

Dia Azzawi, Iraq

I have this fondness for the word juxtapositions. It appears to be constantly on the tip of my fingers, the edge of my tongue. I overuse it (we all have a few words we overuse–one of my favorite bits of Vanity Fair’s back page Proust Questionnaire was always the question “which word or phrase do you most overuse”, though most of the jaded celebrities the magazine chose to interview generally answered with something akin to “cuntsucker, of course”). So I’m going to use it again, and when I’m a famous and jaded person with enough wrinkles and sarcastic asides to warrant being featured on the last pages of magazines, I’ll tell them that the phrase I most overuse is “I’m sorry”, because I’m also going to apologize for using it, but…please note the fabulous, fantastic, phantasmagoric juxtapositions above (phantasmagoric: “characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions”–I checked!).

I think images have a tendency to be seen as what they are; but overlooked for what they represent. I don’t mean reading into the art of an image, like you would a book, and coming up with symbolism and metaphor. We do that readily enough; art historians make a career of it. But the amazing thing to me about the prints above, though I find them striking and some of them even beautiful, is their story, their placement, and the fact that they all live within one international art portfolio: so that a piece of work from Iraq is literally sandwiched between one from the USA and one from England, while a print from Israel rests peacefully next to one from Palestine.

The images are all from something called the Hope & Optimism Portfolio, which was set up by a friend of ours early, early in the 1990′s as a charity to benefit the arts in young Namibia. A number of identical portfolios, each composed of about 90 original, signed, and numbered prints from nearly as many nations, were produced; but it’s been practically 20 years since it all happened, and still a few complete portfolios remain in storage. Selling them is hard work, mainly because of the sheer scope of the project: it’s difficult for a gallery to justify purchasing 90+ prints when they don’t have space to display them all. But I’m attracted to the project for what it proves: nations at odds can still be part of something greater than themselves, can still cooperate, can still, rather crucially, create rather than destruct (or do I just like the whole
thing because it gives me a valid excuse to say “juxtapositions” ten times daily?). I’m both hopeful and optimistic that the right people will see that as well, and give the prints a home.

All of the prints are for sale; email info@hopeandoptimism.com for more information…

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In East Oxford, disco balls are playing in a window display, dappling a dirty sidewalk, while around the corner, a Dickensian tower pierces a raincloud and sets a drizzle on the city; and on the movie poster hanging outside a bus stop on the Iffley road, someone in the night has written:

There is no Shakespeare sonnet
or Beethoven quartet
that is easier to love than you, or harder to forget

If you think that sounds extravagant

I haven’t finished yet

I like you more than I would like to have a cigarette

The initials after the rhyme (are they the poet’s or the graffiti artist’s?) are smudged and someone else has drawn a moustache on Uma Thurman’s face with a bubble that says, “I like men”; and Colin Firth is, according to the crudely scrawled pen marks, calling passers-by “wankers!”

But the rhyme is big: it speaks volumes, and each letter is clearly defined in black marker, and the saddest thing about it all is that it will probably be gone by tomorrow (it is probably already gone) and I will probably never know why, why was it there, what soul, in deepest late winter Oxford night, stood and put it there for me to find on a morning run.

Some digging reveals that it was originally written by Wendy Cope, once a history student at St. Hilda’s college, Oxford (if you look hard enough at things, they are all connected, and just before your head gets woozy holding all that knowledge, it all makes sense). In a romantic vision, I picture a lover’s tiff, an addicted man scrawling the biggest promise of love he can think of on a forgiving plastic surface and hoping, hoping for his love to come walking by in morning light; but I know it didn’t go that way, probably, and that maybe it was just a drunken gaggle of St. Hilda’s students paying homage to a poet, or a lone, mercenary soul looking to change the city, quietly, overnight.

The city lives and breathes at the hand of the impromptu graffiti artist: like the girls who decorated the loo in the King’s Arms one summer with the names and colleges of good local fucks; like the hand that drew the sign “make tea, not war” on the winding grey walls of Queen’s Lane. I walk around here in a perpetual state of wondering: who are you? I whisper at everyone I see, wanting so desperately to know; and sometimes I try to imagine, and picture elaborate lives for the prim girls in skinny jeans and metallic ballet flats and thin, shiny blonde hair unloading cartons of gin and tonic water outside Christ Church one sparkling Saturday afternoon, but my imagination is always limited by my own experiences, and I come up short.

If you go up the oldest tower in Oxford, you will see a city that is made entirely of twisting spires and thick stone walls; and you will also see a horde of ultramodern pedestrians trotting up and down Cornmarket street past Gap and HMV, passing from medieval buildings to the twisted intestines of cavernous Tescos and Primarks and back again. A patch of green, a tender hill, is just visible past the outermost University buildings. The notes of a bagpipe player reach you, but it is not the ancient sounds of the city calling out to you in a dream, but a man in shorts and Birkenstocks, red in the face and blowing hard for extra cash—a twist on prostitution, perhaps; a sultry occupation, an existence on the fringes of the world.

Sometimes, I wonder what the city would be like if I wrote things for people to find. Is it disgraceful to decorate one’s own surroundings, to embody the arrogance inherent in placing one’s own mark on something so daringly public? Or is it merely the way people find to communicate to one another when all else seems to be failing?

The great mystery of a piece of graffiti is its origin; but there is beauty in this, and the huge liberty to interpret. I walk around wondering who people are and why they’re here, and trying to understand by their glances if they can guess my story and if I wear it on my sleeve or hide myself well (and can never decide which I’d rather do, frankly); but I do not think so much of my own freedom to imagine lives for them, and sometimes I forget that those lives which I imagine are coloured as much by what I have experienced as by what I have read. I say to my mother when she comes to visit, and we stand beside the Bridge of Sighs, “this is where Peter Wimsey proposed to Harriet Vane!” as if they are old family friends; I tell myself, over and over again, that the dreamy spires are but a piece of something larger. I let the messages I find written on the walls prove it.

And the city goes on evolving, and each evolutionary step is an act of faith on the part of its people. We allow the disco balls to shimmer beside Dickensian-era towers: what else can we do? And I do not write cunning messages or tales of cunnilingus anywhere but in the privacy of my own home, and yet I play such a part anyway, because I am another audience. A city is merely the sum of its inhabitants’ experiences, individual and collective. It is what we make it; and what we interpret it to be. Cycling home in the rain, I am one huge bundle of contradictions and juxtapositions: my glistening Apple laptop nestled in a Moroccan bag that smells like the pigeon shit they use at the tanneries to treat the leather; the way I whiz past students in flapping gowns and red carnations who are braced against the wind and yelling into mobile phones; the way I carry my duel knowledges of this city—my literary knowledge, my actual knowledge—as if they do not contradict each other.

And they don’t. That is what I like best of all of this. There is color, black-and-white; things are vintage, futuristic; they are new, they are old, they are what I make them to be and what the man in the night has said they are: and all seamlessly.

If you think that sounds extravagant

I haven’t finished yet

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