Lockdown London

Lockdown has not been so bad for me. I live with two brothers, both of whom tolerate my ups and downs – mainly ups to be honest, shouting at films and munching crisps and drinking wine. They let me come and intrude on their peace, which I am grateful for because it would be less entertaining living alone through isolation. Although I find I have begun to miss the oddest things during my waking hours, while in my dreams I have a very busy schedule these days, like managing a successful touring band.

During my one piece of exercise allowed per day, I began to miss King’s Cross. Not anywhere in particular but the concept of King’s Cross (the sensation of being in it.) There’s this pub I like called King Charles I which used to be more of a dive if you can imagine it - only enforcing the smoking ban about a year or ago, from what I recall. The pub has these stuffed proud-looking animals nailed to its wood panelling, like little deer and stoat, and the beers are really cheap. They put on these mad drag pub quizzes that descend into mayhem whenever we’re there, usually after a poetry and music night at Housmans, the radical booksellers down the road. The member of staff there, I think her name is Luna or Lyra, or neither, chills at the back of the shop not really into whatever’s going on on stage, but overseeing the crowd, in case they fancy buying a humanist badge, or a manifesto on something very important.

I used to work at a venue that’s changed hands many times over because they over-spent on branding and not enough on selling tickets, but it was fun and I’d get to see shows for free on my way back from flyering. I used to flyer-drop places all around King’s Cross, cafes, kebab shops, hair salons. They’d let me stick posters of comedians across their windows, which I thought was dumb because surely, you’d prefer natural light to seeing a scruffy poster every day. I traipsed over the streets with a rucksack full of A5s and poster tubes and blue tac. I would end up walking from King’s Cross through Somerstown, across the tow paths to Camden Lock and Kentish Town. I’m not a North Londoner, so I’m not sure why I feel such nostalgia for these places, or even this time of life because I was broke and living on a boat. Yet, I miss it. I miss it because it reminds me of the hubbub and what it isn’t anymore. You can’t walk from shop to pub to club. You can’t knock into people like billiard balls on a table and have awkward chit-chat.

But. That is not the whole story. Because there are some things I have done for the first time ever during isolation and these things have been good and cannot be overlooked just because they are slightly less exciting than going to the pub. No. So here they are, in no particular order:

·      Watched a MET Opera production of Sigfried from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Phooey that’s some intense singing (4.5 hours of it) and the production value was heinously high. You can stream a show every day for free.

·      Roasted a butternut squash! I have never roasted a squash before. I had assumed that they were a legume but they’re not – they’re their own class of plant and actually a courgette is a squash, how about that? Also, what was fun was after the squash had been roasted to a pulp, it sat in the oven squeaking for a few minutes like a mouse until I took it out to film, then it shut-up.

·      Getting engrossed in a terrible overly technical low-budget film about time-travelling called Primer, which by the way, won the Sundance Festival in 2004 beating Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite to the title, which let’s admit are very Sundance-y films. I watched this bad sci-fi film and then spent the next 3 hours reading all the forums and watching a 20-minute explanation video about what happened in the film, and now I am wondering when I can watch it again, to look more closely at the wardrobe changes.