metrocentric | It's been a while (Reply)

The first day of the year, dusk, about three-thirty, near the top of Endell Street. At the foot of a tree, items recently discarded, including a colourful new and unopened pack of pastels. One object when disturbed proves to be a music box, already primed: it emits its tinny, sentimental chimes into the empty street. It feels like a set-up, a scene from a weak television drama; it isn't comforting.

I tell a friend about it by email. With Midland speech patterns in his response: 'Dystopian, is that!' He attaches to his reply a photograph purported to be recent and of a terrapin riding the bloated corpse of a dog or fox afloat on the Regent's Canal.

In previous years, Ramadan was the evening sound of people coming and going in this block and the one opposite. Shouts of their children in the stairwells and courtyards, instructions, directions, for parking arrangements and the burdens of pots and containers of food for Iftar. This last year the fasts were broken quietly and no-one came or went.

My favourite walk into town passes the railway arches containing taxi garages and dark kitchens. Beyond that and before Brick Lane, a short row of low-rise housing with front gardens. In one, a gazebo has been installed, sheltering a table set for a gathering: the chairs pulled up, glasses, etcetera. It was installed shortly before Eid, and whether for that purpose or another, it appears never to have been used. Six months on, the weather has dishevelled it, but the table seems otherwise untouched.

It's dystopian, is that. Or maybe it's hopeful: I saw a vaccine queue for the first time yesterday, in Lamb's Conduit Street, and I'm hopeful too.