NIGHT 14
Night 14. Thursday 1 December 2022
Today I flew the nest. 17 miles as the crow flies but as a non-avian it was a mixture of cycling, train and walking that got me to Twickenham with 21 students and colleague Jenny. The University had booked the train tickets – proof of our payment is a simple word document with the word ‘authorised’ that we brandished with confidence to get through the turnstiles. Our meeting place was the clock at Waterloo station. Our destination: Eel Pie Island – a tiny island in the Thames with a rock n roll history and a present trying to secure its future with Heritage England as the last working boatyard on the river and a community of artist’s studios.
My route there takes me through the City of London, a zone of security and surveillance and plentiful police vans. There is an expectation of disaster in the air, a premonition of destruction in a space secured or made paranoid by design. Traffic is dense. I’m on autopilot alert from two decades of cycling in this city –my street wise baptism as a courier racing packages from office to office or trades entrance to trades entrance – special doors for invisible labour. I must have been tougher back then as no hot baths or love greeted me at the end of non-stop navigation of the big city. I round the corner onto London Bridge. It’s satisfying going at speed in the opposite direction of the crowds of people moving towards the City. Looking out across polished water to Tower Bridge, London looks majestic. Sometimes, so grounded in the streets where we live, we forget we reside in this vast place so full of people, stuff, history.
The Eel Pie Island Museum is similarly full of stuff. Beginning as a pop-up exhibition, incorporating history gathered in order to fight a planning battle in the present, after determination and demand it now occupies a run-down former cinema. We buzz and are greeted by the knowledgeable founder Michelle and her team. I imagine a magical mystery tour of the obscure and fascinating museums of the world. Is there a museum for everything? A cherished archive of the obscure and under-valued? Yesterday, sitting around the kitchen table eating tiramisu, Gina and E share a love of lockpicking. We get down a tin of keys and locks we just happen to have and hear tales of hot wiring, safe cracking and the Willenhall Lock Museum. This museum we visit in the far west of London contains mud larked finds, trombones, guitars, wind up radios and piles of ephemera including a ‘Passport to Eelpiland.’ A record player turns and tunes from the island’s musical heyday play out. I search the vinyl for David Bowie who frequented the infamous Eel Pie Island Hotel before he became Bowie the icon. They have his 1973 album ‘Pin Ups’ with handwritten sleeve notes namechecking the island venue. He was more than my pinup - guiding light in an exodus into adulthood.
The students have set each other tasks working with the sites we’re exploring– objects as memory portals, patterns of found images and collage poems with lines like a ‘ziplock bag of rain’. We discuss these processes of cut and paste, of working with found text and images and again Bowie appears. I think of his Dadaist / Burrough’s inspired cut up technique but Miffy takes this further calling this his ‘dream machine’ of story ingredients – prompts to ignite the imagination. He spoke of cutting up journals that held things of the past whilst predicting the future like a very western tarot. We walk the dusk streets of Twickenham and it becomes hard to distinguish reality from fiction and past from present in this vision of an England that doesn’t exist. Or does it. Narnia lamp posts guide the way down lanes seemingly purpose made for either horror or historical drama or a combination of both. We take a badly timed short cut through a church yard just as a funeral hearse arrives. Fat squirrels line our route and the crows here are as big as ravens. With its passports and artist’s enclave the island we now leave behind has something of the utopian about it. When Helen, artist and resident leading the campaign to protect the boatyards, takes us over the rainbow arc bridge onto the island she says she’s been here 30 years but never tires of this view and that feeling of arrival.
It's dark by the time we enter Waterloo station. I almost forget to herd everyone together so we can all get through the barrier and disperse into the night. I cycle home via an attempt to get some Christmas presents as sleeping on the roof is inhibiting any kind of organised seasonal preparation. My initial childlike enjoyment of the twinkly lights of Oxford Street soon shifts to a need to get out of there - aware of the miles separating me and shelter and the clock counting down to bedtime on the roof. The route home is a memory portal. Kingsland Road and surprise that the bars I worked in 20 years ago are still going. Dalston. Ridley Road market packing up for the evening. The street cleaning teams out in force. In the early days of delivery apps this was my meeting point - the time my Deliveroo shift started and I entered the ‘zone’ in which I was activated for work, ready to take orders, relishing the smells of baking pizza whilst existing as a travelling ‘node’ on an app - route and speed tracked. Ghost riders living vividly. I’m losing energy. I reach the borders of Hackney. In summer I might make this last stretch with the help of a foraged blackberry. Now I just keep on pedalling, past the furniture warehouse with 24 hour illumination on plastic moulded swan beds and golden mirrors, through industrial estates, avoiding night walking hounds.
I write this in relief, back under the familiar tarp. Multiple sirens blaze. Fire work bangs go off with none of the oohs and aahs of pretty lights. My head is pumping. I don’t hear a big bang but I hear about it when I check the crowdfunder (around £66,000) burrowed down into the sleeping bag to avoid the freezing flurries of air. An unexploded bomb was found on the development site at the Town Hall and the whole area had to be evacuated. History does not sleep easy. Nor do I this advent night.
