Returning to Muswell Hill in North London after nearly four years, the force-multiplier impact of Brexit-Covid is very visible. This is the area around which I’ve stayed the most in the last twenty years of coming to London and it has always been a slightly upmarket, cheerful place. The spoke of roads from the main bus circle has a mix of shops and eateries, from the quaint and small to some of the big chains, such as Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer, Boots, and Costa and Nero. This time, I can see there are regular drop-outs in the storefronts; small restaurants and old shops have shuttered down, it seems for good; even the Pound Store, a warehouse-type joint where the penurious could pick up cheap products, has been evacuated, the main doors left ajar, letting in the rain. The number of people begging outside the stores seems to have increased; the shelves in Boots and the supermarkets have a tired, denuded feel — the slots are empty, goods are mislabelled in a way that indicates scarcity and short supply. For a Calcutta-programmed body, the late-March day is freezing cold, a faint but icy drizzle adding to the general atmosphere of grimness.
I go to one of the surviving cafes and get a coffee and croissant, just for old times’ sake. Although I’ve been in London for three days, the prices startle me yet again — even in this always expensive economy, everything seems to have shot up by 20% to 30%. Finishing my coffee, I notice something that warms my heart. As always, when you first see this, you think it’s some poor, homeless person, hunched up on the sidewalk under warm clothes. In this case, I spot the almost unmoving pile at the tree island on a promontory of the pavement. On a closer look, you see the open toolboxes and then the hand brings out a brush from under the jacket to peck at paint on a palette. I go up and say hello to Ben Wilson (picture), street painter and fixture of the Muswell Hill area. Wilson’s practice is about as radically opposite as you can get to exclusive art made for presentation in a white cube gallery. Winter or summer, Wilson takes his paints and set of brushes and goes around making tiny acrylic paintings on the pavements, on gutter grilles, on the little nooks in the walls, on lamp-posts. When you walk past, you might think something is a large blob of multicoloured chewing gum but on closer inspection you see it’s a tiny work by Wilson, a mix of still-life, figurative and portraits. The paintings stay for weeks or months, depending on the weather and the condensation, and then they disappear. You can’t buy them and Wilson doesn’t sell them. Small kids find them fascinating, this art made at their viewing level, while grown-ups like myself can’t help marvelling at the brilliant, quietly performative aspect of the process.
How has he been, Ben? Oh, not too bad. Covid was tricky. He’s been up in Scotland spending time with his partner, but now he’s back again, back to work. Yes, the weather’s not brilliant, is it? Well let’s give it a few weeks and it should warm up.
Travelling away from London, I go to stay with a friend whose suburban house overlooks a protected woodland. Whether I think of this as spring or the last vicious sting from the scorpion of a winter, the trees and birds have different ideas. Not having been here in spring for many years, I have forgotten what it’s like to get used to the spray of bare winter branches on a tree, only to wake up one morning and find the stark lines smudged with buds and then the next day find another tree suddenly crowded with fresh green leaves. For a traffic-battered hearing system to receive and decipher the many different bird calls lacing the ‘silence’ is a joy, no matter that the clouds above and the bitterly cold easterly wind still don’t want you to get too comfortable with this strange, wet, cold clump of islands.
On a Sunday morning, I find myself in Oxford wandering somewhat aimlessly and happily in newly-minted sunshine. Here, among the tourists and students, there seems to be no depression, no ill-effects of the country being stuck on the Brexit-ramp, no dearth of money or cheer. On the pedestrians-only streets, performers regale audiences with music and dancing, there are buskers from different parts of the world, complete with stuffed llamas, Greek costumes and medieval music boxes. At the Sunday fair in a square, various victual-wafts compete for your nose and your money: bhajis and samosas, Tibetan momos and thukpa, Greek gyros, Lebanese wraps, gyoza dumplings and more. The recently arrived trio of late teenage boys from Delhi argue as to which dessert stall has the best chocolate pastries, the dad from Milwaukee explains ramen to his 12-year-old, the Odia family of four capture a table and bench meant for eight people and keep telling everybody the places are occupied, three German girls do a Korean pop dance for the Korean food stallwallas, the pigeons prowl around for crumbs.
On High Street, I see a man in a baseball cap photographing buses with a proper camera and writing things down in a notebook. I ask him what he’s doing and he’s very happy to explain in his northern English accent: he’s a boos-enthusiast; he tracks booses all over the country; why just today, coming here from Victoria in Loondun, he spotted seventeen different boos numbers; here, too, it’s great, he’s got several different ones, plus their registration numbers as well! He photographs them, he writes down their details and timings, he puts it all in albums, and he posts on several Facebook groups, yes, different boos-groups for boos-enthusiasts like himself. My first reaction is to laugh and, then, just as with the bird song and Ben Wilson’s painting process, I shake my head in wonderment and appreciation at the gifts these mad islands can give you.
