Hiatus Hernia at Heathrow!

Dear Juliet

Hi! Are you okay?

It was a good couple of days, I'm glad to say, but the funny angle from which I'm going to view it is from the bus going back to Birmingham.

It went there via Heathrow's Central Bus Station, itself gainfully parked between the Hilton Garden Inn and Terminal 3 like a bulbous frog. But after we threw the air travellers off and sped out unto the M4 for to meet the oncoming roadworks, all the while singing manly songs like England's Coming Home and Jerusalem, I found my mind turning to other things.

I felt, not a hiatus hernia, nor even a simple hernia, but a small twinge of concern about you. This was not based on any material evidence (AI said only that you were having a good day) but just that old worry for your wellbeing which, as usual, had never been entirely absent.

I'd talked a lot about Dear Miss Landau at the book launch. In the end, the other guests tried manfully to throw me from the boat like an errant air traveller but I still gloried in the memories. I swam to shore, found a cocktail bar and when the bemused bartender asked me if I'd like anything else I enquired if they had any crisps...

I don't go to cocktail bars much. After that, they'll probably put out an APB...

But I got the shot I promised you, and all it cost me was a Pina Colada.

Red London brick and space age glass and tile were together bathed in summer sun, but biased against that were drooping trees, green as if they still stood on rolling hill and dale, not London's patchwork of pavement and tarmac. Rolling red buses passed idly by and townsfolk talked in many tongues, a modern bazaar replete with song and tale spoken soft in every nation's word and accent.

Such has always been the case:

"He paid at the desk and they went out into Piccadilly: Solomon's, the fruit and flower shop; the Ritz; the Berkeley; the Elysée restaurant downstairs; the Burlington Arcade; the Academy; the roar of the traffic; the women and girls, the men in khaki; red-capped, white-gloved and belted military police; the whole swirl and eddy of it; a current of humanity; buses, taxis, hansom cabs, horse-drawn delivery vans. This was the heart of the Empire; its greatest artery fed by side-street veins. All redolent of war, and love its by-product."

(Wartime London in 1918, from How Young They Died by Stuart Cloete)

2026, and the whole swirl and eddy of it went gaily on. I checked Henry Pordes to see if the Tartt was still on the premises, and she still stood statuesque upon the shelf like a stubborn fading queen from 1918 choosing not to fall away in dust and douleur.

As you know, I'm back in London on the 18th and 19th. Shall I separate the fading queen from her shelf?

And talking of separation, Parliament could indeed be decapitating Starmer on the 19th. It seems the result of the Makerfield by-election will actually be known by 6.00 am that day. The political bloodshed in the House of Commons should metaphorically equal a bad night on the Somme and once I've looked round Globe and Hinde on the Thames' south shore I'll pop across, walk down Whitehall, look sagely upon the media scrum and see if the piratical mutineers can make "off with his head."

I doubt his son will have to hide up the Royal Oak's daughter tree but I'm not totally ruling it out...

It should indeed be a historic day, and you may want to glue yourself to the TV as I might try to get myself interviewed before fading gently away while Parliament implodes behind me.

But if there must be a calm before the storm, I spent a good part of it in the Portrait Pavilion near the Garrick Theatre. It used to be a toilet block, it looks like a transparent TARDIS, and I took time not only to clear my head of the clamour of London's conduits but also get that second photo with the Dairy Milk chocolate bar.

God loves a tryer, I suppose...

And for 'a that, this flawed and hopeless tryer could hardly wait to get back up the M4 and M40 for to blog to you again.

You're not worthless. Would I still want to write to you after seventeen years if you were?

I wanted to write to you more than I was tempted by the siren song of London's streets, and I'm glad I got back in one piece so I could.

Love,

James