To London today, to attend Linux World at Olympia for a useful hour spent as a visitor rather than as an exhibitor, and then, to my surprise, I had a free afternoon – no appointments, no ties, no responsibilities – the chance to reacquaint myself with our capital city and to see how it had changed in the eighteen-odd months that I had been away.
And, probably to the disappointment of my readers who sense a good rant a-coming, I didn’t mind the lady on the plinth at all. In fact I was curiously unaffected by her having spent a dizzy forty-five minutes reminding myself just what a great place The National Gallery is for Londoners and tourists alike. That ghostly Fighting Temeraire, the Monets and Van Goghs, the Constables and those Swimmers at Asnières; these and so many more world class paintings that I staggered out of the Sainsbury Wing exit in a bit of a daze.
I checked out the rest of Trafalgar Square and was slightly disappointed that, after so many years as a building site while the big pedestrian piazza project took shape, the Square is still a building site with large areas cordoned off. Leicester Square by contrast seemed, by day, a really pleasant, traffic-free place to stroll around. Tourist buses (the ones with open tops) have become much more modern; and there seem to be more pigeons than ever before.
And then to the bookshops. I did the mystery shopper thing in Waterstone’s, Piccadilly (which still seems more museum than bookshop, and which has lost the variety of little nookie snack areas which were a feature when it opened), to Hatchards (same, great shop for posh people and still not much good for computer books or graphic novels), and to the Charing Cross Road. Blackwell’s and Borders were pretty much unchanged, although the latter had a posse of managers arguing loudly about sight-lines. Foyles seems to improve all the time although the 20% off student promotion jarred slightly with this non-student. None of shops I visited, however, had copies on display of my test computer book (a current bestseller in a small way).
I found time to wander down Sicilian Avenue and to peer, nostalgically, through the bare windows of my still-unoccupied old store. I also had time to sit for a while on a bench on the South Bank near Waterloo Bridge. This is the place I have always gone to at moments of change in my working life. I’ll stare at the river and contemplate my most recent decision and hope I’ve chosen right. I didn’t stare at the river this time. I just reckoned that I need to find a new place to do my contemplation-thing now, as that stretch of river has never brought me much luck.
