#17: By the River Itchen I Sat Down and Wrote.

The Mighty Gareth; Eat fire. Take a bow! Leave a tip; Such sweet delight, such endless night; Ducklings! Once a upon a time in Winchester came a stream of consciousness. Will you take the plunge?

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

– Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, 1919.

Here I am outside a gorgeous 17th-century building near the medieval buttercross at the heart of Winchester - a small, posh town in the southeast of England. I sit here eating an aubergine burger, sipping fresh lemonade on a wobbly table outside an artisanal bakery. It’s as though Covid never happened, that climate change is a hoax and that Life, no matter what the great Meera Syal says, is in fact, all Ha Ha Hee Hee. The food, the drink, the spot of sun, and the cool breeze, all aid and abet me in this fantasy, but then, outside Boots (or maybe Specsavers) I see The Mighty Gareth.

There he is, making jokes, getting ready to juggle chainsaws, swallow swords and eat fire. He is mesmerising. My sons are gobsmacked. We giggle, we gasp, we clap. Gareth has distracted me from my bonny reverie, and does indeed entertain me - looked me in the eye even! - and now when I leave, I must give him some money. Not that I mind. But a disagreeable feeling has arisen in me. One I have in bourgeois Bombay. There, when we have a nice meal, we go inside. Out of the Heat and Dust. We do it to avoid being served with our dark roast and tofu roulade, the true surplus of industrialisation, colonialism and capitalism: a generous dollop of poverty. Is there anything that takes the fun out of a slice as fast as a street kid who wants a bite?

Here I am, sitting at a bakery, minding my own business, looking forward to a post-lunch stroll in the gardens by the River Itchen, where I will look at ducklings and slip into my very own stream of consciousness. But Gareth has yanked me out of the cobbled streets of Winchester, back to the bylanes of Bombay. Why am I conflating the two? His act, his hair, his straight teeth, and cute-uncle punk rock vibe are admirable. The Winchester Bakery fare is delicious. Shall I take this paper coaster as a keepsake? Isn’t it so nice when napkins, photographs, and visiting cards fall out of old books and take us to a time long gone? Do people print visiting cards anymore? The day is gorgeous and honestly, I should stop and just enjoy it. Gareth is a successful street artist, not an impoverished urchin. No need to go down this rabbit hole! But I hadn’t asked to be entertained, had I?

I head towards the river, everyone is white. I pass a group of pierced, vaping schoolgirls. They are vapid, animated. So young, with poreless skin and dark eyeliner. Are those junkies arguing outside M&S? And here’s the kid I saw yesterday, still under the same archway. He must be fifteen? Sixteen? My son yanks my arm and asks me for some money. I give him a couple of heavy coins which he drops into a paper cup that says Winchester Bakery on it. Cheers mate, said the boy, looking cheerful. Will he buy a coffee? My son says something back to him, but I cannot hear what it is. I am several paces ahead now, listening to violin music coming from near the Cathedral gates.

It is an old man, maybe eighty. He sits on a stool outside the city museum, opposite the pizza place. The violin case is open by his feet, glinting with coins. Oh, dear beautiful Ol’ Blighty! You stole all our stuff and then didn’t bother to distribute it among yourselves properly, did you? Top cathedral though. I walk in. A song plays in my head: And now I'm standing on the grave of a soldier that died in 1799, and the day he died, it was a birthday and I noticed it was mine, and my head didn't know just who I was and I went spinning back in time… I walk over graves. Here is Jane Austen. I feel cold and I have to get out into the sunshine.

I walk and walk and walk. All the way from the cathedral to the statue of Alfred the Great. In my hand is a leaflet I picked up at Tourist Information yesterday. It is a guide to the trees of Winchester. I see the yews, the magnificent copper beech. Lime, foxglove, holly. Finally, I sit down at a bench near that handkerchief tree at the Abbey Gardens. A sweet red-haired girl on a swing eats pink ice cream in a cone. It melts down her forearm. Two little blonde babies in a perambulator are pushed around by their tired mum. A bored-looking father circumnavigates the redhead girl on the swing, giving her a little push from time to time. A black and white Frenchie chases a ball through a picnic. The picnickers are not pleased and say so. Put him on a leash! The dog’s human apologises profusely.

I think about the feral children at the bus stop in Bombay at the end of the lane where I live. The ones who look like chocolate truffles - nut brown and coated in red dust. Their sunbleached hair you couldn’t achieve at the French Salon across their piece of pavement. A joie de vivre that doesn’t match the look on their mother’s face! I remember now that with a collection of overturned buckets and a puppy, they’d created a vertiginous tower and stood on it, paws and all. The smallest girl walked a rope fifteen feet high, the older one played a little drum and someone else collected the tossed change.

I think about the man I heard sing a Qawali in Jodhpur under the moon twenty years ago. I didn’t understand a word but it made my hair stand on end. I can see the face of the blue-eyed busker, the first one I ever met on The London Underground. I was sixteen and as I travelled up one of those long escalators his voice stabbed me in the heart before I ever set eyes on him.

All these years later I still can’t listen to I’m a Believer without feeling sentimental! What is it about street performers that elicit these sorts of emotions? Is it just me? I don’t think so. What was that passage, written a hundred years ago, about the old woman at Regent’s Park Tube station? The one whose voice came from a hole in the earth ‘leaving a damp stain’ as she held out her hand and pocketed shillings… Yes, I remember:

ee fah um so
foo swee too eem ooo,

As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regents Park Tube station still the earth seemed green and flowery; still though it issued from so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses, still the old bumbling burbling song, soaking the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed away in rivulets over the pavement and all along Marylebone road, and down towards Eustan, fertilising, leaving a damp stain… this battered old woman, with one hand exposed or coppers, the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter - he was a man oh yes, a man who loved her. But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of that ancient May day; the bright petalled flowers were hoar and silver frosted… and she smiled, pocketing her shilling, and all peering inquisitive eyes seemed blotted out, and the passing of generations - the pavement was crowded with bustling middle-class people - vanished, like leaves, to be trodden under, to be soaked and steepened and made mould of by that eternal spring -

ee fah um so
foo swee too eem ooo.

―Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Wolf, 1925

When I reach the water, there are ducklings. Melancholia slips right off their backs.

‘There is No Darkness But Ignorance’, W.S., Leister Square, London.

It’s been a few weeks since I met Gareth in Winchester. I’ve been up to St. Andrews and down to St. Ives. I saw the lighthouse that inspired the one in To the Lighthouse. And now here I am in Leicester Square, under a statue of William Shakespeare that declares: There is no darkness but ignorance. Who said that? Feste? Did Ms. Woolf gaze up at Will’s beard as I am now?

With the red lanterns of Soho behind me and Covent Garden before, I walk and walk till I come to a contortionist and a juggler, and a crowd of onlookers twenty times as large as the one I’d seen in Winchester. There are students and tourists, the rich and the not-so-rich. There is a near-sermon from the contortionist who just popped his shoulder out of its socket to squeeze himself through a tennis racket.

As the juggler (was he Korean? Japanese?) was preparing his act, the prophet-contortionist is telling us why we should give him our money. He is wearing nothing but underwear. It is hot. It is hotter than Bombay. I try not to think about Climate. The prophet is joking darkly about deep pockets and Scrooges, the redistribution of wealth, and the decentralisation of power. Did we not know the history of this place?

The scene is ancient and modern, crass and transcendent. The moment feels timeless, frozen in time. I have the sense that long ago before we were entangled in this Endgame, before Hello Kitty and Sketchers, when Nike was still a goddess and shoes were optional, this weird, rude man was there. And that despite the internet and AI and whatever else may come, he will always be here. That I will always be here too.

“For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas!

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Entertainers - if good - electrify the air and make us feel alive, connected. Un-dead. Through them, we can forget our real lives and live dangerously. We can juggle chainsaws. We can build our cities on the slopes of Vesuvius. We can feel our feelings and we can feel theirs. Cry, laugh, rejoice! We purge our emotions. Catharsis!

The acts are done and my eyes meet the eyes of the stranger next to me. We look at each other briefly, and intimately and laugh as though we knew each other. Which maybe we do. We were for a moment each other’s proof of life: I was there, she saw me. But there is something else. There is something about this that Beyoncé cannot deliver. Something that no tickets can buy. What is it?

I think it is the feeling that street performers come to us from the past. From a time before our every action was a transaction. From before our skin and bones were co-opted by the marketplace. Yes some of them, like the ones here in London, and those I suppose at the Edinburgh Fringe, are well-organised. Well-controlled. They pick lots to decide who gets to perform where and have card machines so we can tap to tip. Banks to rescue - those sticky fingers can enter any crevice.

A quick googling suggests The Mighty Gareth had a show in China. Everyone is entrapped. But still. I get the feeling he comes from far away. They all do. The contortionist, the buskers, the street children and their puppies. They emit a spark of anarchy, a rumbling of Marx. Might they be the keepers of the flame? Maybe, I’m overreaching! Maybe I’m not. Either way, if I see them, I will tip my hat. I will leave a tip.

Because they eat fire.

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Open up the gates of the church and let me out of here! Cathedral, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

“…The Winners Shout the Losers Curse 
Dance before dead Englands Hearse 
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born 
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight 
Some are Born to sweet delight 
Some are Born to Endless Night.”

- From Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

Sneak Peak: Telling Lies, Episode 3:

… She has good taste, got to give her that, Nayna said, raising her right eyebrow into a dramatic arc. Henry nodded in agreement. What the hell am I going to say to Aisha though? But before Henry could reply, she was off, speeding down the road. Henry had a sinking feeling, the one he always got when Nayna left the house alone. Why won’t she take a chauffeur? Did she put on her seatbelt? Will she find her way to the ferry at Mazagaon? But Nayna, gliding in a bubble above Bombay, her ‘pretty, shitty, city’, felt like the hood ornament on the bonnet of the car she was driving. The Spirit of Ecstasy, but with the face of a bird of prey… 

Telling Lies is a section on Wit’s End where I publish fiction. It is available to paid subscribers. You won’t need to read the episodes in order, they are a collection of interconnected stories, a tapestry. The principal cast of characters includes Aisha, Vishnu, Arjun and Nayna, and their lives unfold mostly in contemporary Bombay and Goa.

My love, why did you leave me on Lexington Avenue in the Ford that had no brakes? It stalled in the traffic and broke down outside her window.

- Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, 1945.