Farringdon is such a fun word to say.
Say it:
Farringdon.
It can also be a dramatic word to say, if you can pull together a partly hoarse voice filled with a jumble of recognition, remorse and wistfulness.
Farringdon.
It is after midnight and I'm not drinking nor drugging - neither myself nor someone else. So it is just me and the beige mist and the cotton touch of the sheets and the still, thick warmth trapped and left over in the room - even though the heat of a blazing afternoon has long set off and away. That balmy, floating atmosphere tangles and fights with the cool breeze entering in off the fly-screen door that opens out onto a timber-slat decked courtyard.
Except those slats ain't no timber.
They're plastic or resin or composite or something. I'm not exactly sure. I just know they are not timber. The landlord told me that. We were signing the lease and he hadn't said much and I'd asked even less. The questions usually come when one party doesn't pay the rent or another party doesn't fix the rusted hot water system. But I was just signing the lease and he was just giving me the keys. Neither of us had any need for questions. I just silently scribbled away and he spoke none.
Except for on his way out.
He picked up the papers and after putting a hand on the front door handle, he turned back around, pointed with his chin and said:
"You see the timber slats over there?"
"Uh, yeah."
"They're not timber."
"Ok."
"They are ..... (this is where he said what they were, but I wan't paying full attention at that exact moment. I was caught up in trying to work out why he had identified the slats as 'timber', only to immediately follow that up with a deceleration that they, in fact, weren't 'timber')"
"Um, ok..."
"The last tenant only realised after he'd put a BBQ out there and it melted the decking a little. So, if you want to use a BBQ or a heater or something like that out there, be aware that it may screw the decking up."
"Ok...um... I'm not really the BBQ-ing type, but I'll be careful."
I self-describe when I'm uncomfortable. It is a defense mechanism. It is also total bullshit. Both that I use the mechanism itself and also what I actually self-describe. Bullshit. In reality, I love a BBQ. To us Australians, The Big Backyard BBQ hangs as package of nostalgia, retreat and refreshment - there's so much to love in and about that.
But throughout the whole lease-signing-ceremony, The Landlord hadn't said anything to welcome or introduce or prepare me for the move in to the apartment. And then he added that Plastic Warning as an soft, half-forgotten, aside - as he was halfway out the door. It was such a anti-climatic way to deliver such a feeble warning of such low consequence.
It was the pure opposite of Melodrama.
You see, Melodrama makes me feel comfortable and the opposite makes me feel uncomfortable. So I went with the response I did and he nodded back at me and turned around and headed out the front door. We had briefly passed information onto each other and neither of us were the richer for it. This sorta thing happens a lot in this town.
But now it is later and a hint of Melodrama has returned and I sit here in the silence, typing and announcing:
Farringdon.
Say it.
Do it again - this time with an an edge or allusion of your choosing:
Farringdon.
Fun, hey?
There is several little Greens and Gardens in Farringdon. Most people - myself included - would identify them as 'Parks'. In London they like to call them 'Greens' or 'Gardens'. They sometimes use the word 'Commons' as well.
Oh - did I mention that Farringdon is in London? I didn't? Well, it is. Farringdon is in London's inner-North.
I met her for a drink there. There was a pub right next to a Green, that stretched out from an low-slung, blue-stone church. You could buy a drink in that pub and then wander across and into the Green with your pint in hand. The people who ran the pub just sorta trusted you would bring back their glassware. And the people who ran the Liquor Licensing Regulations in Farringdon just sorta pretended you were still inside the pub when you were lounging back on a park-bench in the Green. It was at the same time a both convivial and confusing state of affairs. That sorta thing happens a lot in that town.
We had only ever hung out once before. There was the first time we had met, of course. But after that, I had only hung out with her one time. In New York. Here in Farringdon - this mid-week evening in the Green - was the second time we hung out.
I had landed in town that very morning. From New York. I was tired and jet-lagged with heavy eyes and slow breath. In the early afternoon I slouched and napped for an hour or so on a soft, red chair in a cinema in The West End. The movie played on whilst I slept and I did not get find out how the life and times of Coco Channel played out - or at least the way the screenwriter had imagined her days to have played out. After the credits rolled and the lights came up, I took my snoozing haze north to Farrington.
Though the nap had not put a meaningful dent in my sleep-debt, seeing her again, this Filipino from Queens, served to perk me back up. Wake me back up. She was there to greet me as I came out of the Tube Stop and stepped into the brilliant and bright early evening sun. It wasn't warm, but the air hung golden and made all around your eyes reflect a pulsing, straw-coloured glow back at you. London gets a bad rap for its weather and that may be fair. But only if your expectations are of another. You should always expect what you get, before you get what you are given. I always knew of those shining late afternoons and expected them and got them. Summer afternoons and evenings is how I choose to remember London.
She instantly made me feel welcome. I'm not sure if this was her way - if she made everyone she came into contact with feel welcome. I just know she always made me feel that way first thing. Straight off the cuff. She was open and available and ready to listen or talk or give or guide and she conveyed all that with a softness to the way she first looked at you with an arch to her eyebrows that said "Well...?". Her opening presentation was the same look an old friend gives you after all the beans have been spilled and all that is left is a resolution to fate and acceptance.
We had a few pints and talked of London and what it had once meant to me and what it now meant to her. She told me of design and of advertising and tried to describe the restrictions of university life in a dense and expensive town. I told her of writing styles and of searching for them and why people believed I could fix bad service in old restaurants.
Then I said:
"I love your shoes, by the way."
They were paper-white stilettos, set with water-colour prints of opaque, red flowers. They were lovely and suited her delicate, pale ankles, but that wasn't really what I meant to say. As I have come to see it, a guy mainly only compliments a girl when he wants her to know that he likes her. That perhaps he even wants her. It is a code. Code for attraction and a hope for a summons of a type in return.
And so it went on from there. Played out as it does when codes are passed between consenting parties. And we hung out more times after that. Enough to build stories with endings and pauses and regret. And the specifics of that doesn't really matter, cause that's not what I'm thinking about tonight. Sure, I have thought about and felt for those stories since, but not now.
Now, as the weight of a certain Melodrama fades out of my life - after it played heavy and light, before serving up its very own ending in the night - I'm thinking only of that Green sitting alongside a church in Farringdon. And of the groups of people gathered around on its lawn, connecting with booze held in glass and friends sat on grass. And there, on that late summer's eve, the glass was not plastic and the grass was not composite and those that came together, left together and that sometimes people from the last place are in the next town and sometimes others are best left behind.
And that Farringdon is so much fun to say.
