m4 dreaming

driving through neasden the other day, on my way onto the M4 returning to heathrow after barely enough days to feel ‘home’, I realised that despite previous enthusiasm for the perverse fantasy of sexy urban programme in the most drab and grey uneventful zones of London, it could indeed just perhaps be a fantasy. or at any rate, it requires delving around in far-fetched ideas about the ordinary. having got used to the tragedy and decay of a metropolis engaged in its own urban civil war in caracas, i am going to have to relearn the beauty and the subtlety of the mediocre. I have always treasured it as a quite specific english quality. it is something I yearn for, again quite perversely, whilst living in the tropics….and on return feels just a little absurd. an excuse for the fact that we don’t live with real sun to burn our urban chaos. or indeed that our chaos is rather ordered.
the fact that I was on my way to pick up a friend similarly trapped in the ccs-ldn time-warp, about to crash into all the same turbulences of living in these two cities, made neasden a little prettier.