3 June 2022
I spent the first year or so at home and most of it in my underwear. I shuffled up and down the stairs a couple of times and we had breakfast in front of the telly. We watched people decked out in their flags and hats and bunting, already installed on The Mall for the parade. One of them told the reporter that “the colours of our country are red, white and blue” and she had made friends with some people who had come all the way from America, including a woman who was cooing “we love you” into the camera, perhaps in the hope that she was watching.
It took a couple of months to get up the garden to the shed, to feed the fish and watch them come up to the surface, grateful aquatic subjects, and several weeks were spent ferrying Heather’s paraphernalia to the car. We drove to Springfield Park, where she was setting up a photo portrait booth for the Springfield Park Celebration. When the hi-viz woman at the gate told us to put the hazard warning lights on to drive through to the bowling green, I almost casually decided to walk the few hundred yards, knowing that I could easily burn up another year or so, and by the time the gazebo arrived and the pushy woman with the kids’ activity stall (“it’s not games at all, it’s activities”) started on about the chairs, I was already well into 1955, the year Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the bus and she had already been on the throne three years.
I had wanted to mark something. I don’t even really know what, but something that made sense to me, something that made the whole thing relevant to me, and never mind that the Platinum Jubilee is a complete bodge because she came to the throne in February 1952 but was coronated (yes I know) in June 1953—so the 70 years bit is 69 years from the coronation plus the extra bit at the beginning that I did in my pants from when George VI died; and I am not a fan of the royal family, nor very many of the institutions and traditions they uphold or represent, and that keep them in corgis and tweed and yachts. But I quite like numbers, and I really like walking, and once I had helped Heather set up her backdrop and sandwich board, I saw a day of steps lying temptingly ahead. For no especially good reason, I thought I’d like to walk one for every day of the reign, which is around 25,000. You have to factor in leap years and the first bit in my boxers, but anyway it’s a bit over ten miles. One of Heather’s students was supposed to be assisting her, but she was running late so I stayed for a while, holding the reflector for the first few pundits and coaxing the shy kids into a gurning smile like you see in those old Victorian photos of Bedlam inmates.
I didn’t get so much as a fortnight in at the photo booth, but Rod turned up and thankfully took over with the gurn-making, so I cast myself free of the park and spent the rest of the ’50s walking up Cazenove Road and, somewhere up Church Street I guess, I passed the date of Andrew’s birth and then my own. By the time I picked up my restrung racket from Frank at Clissold Park I’d gone clear past the Profumo affair and at about Sergeant Pepper I bumped into Ray, now retired and suddenly a tennis nut, grinning under his bucket hat and gushing forth on the merits on a single-handed backhand and what league am I in? He would make an excellent model over at Springfield Park. I spent the remainder of the ’60s walking down the A10, coaxing dim memories—a card on the mantlepiece in Basildon wishing a us happy 1970; visiting da Vinci’s home, where we were shown round by a very old man with a beard who I long believed to have been the polymath himself; camping in La Rochelle and catching crickets with my hands under the pine needles—and got home in 1974 for a sandwich, a cup of tea, and, predictably enough with the cricket on, forty winks.
Back to Springfield, but I was hoping to arrive sometime around the Millennium, so a detour down to Millfields (1984, which I did read in 1984, busking in Stuttgart) and the long, quiet path along the River Lea, through the reed beds at the top of Hackney Marshes and up the hill by the tennis courts. I found Heather in 1998, flaked out on the grass with 100 families done and cameras packed away. I was set to work turning away newcomers. “I’m afraid we’ve run out of film”.
H took Rod to Liverpool Street, and I walked with Kasia, Heather’s student, to the railway station. We talked about ponds. Once more down the A10 in the early evening, bars buzzing, restaurants starting to fill. Two older women stopped me. They were looking for the Earth venue and had been given the wrong directions. They were from Sutton (“Sutton is just a shithole”) and had come up to Dalston to see a candlelit tribute to Meat Loaf by the London Symphonic Rock Quartet. They had seen him the night before he died “but that doesn’t mean you’re in any danger”. They knew all his songs and they knew all sorts of things about Mr Loaf. They were very funny, and I expect they had a great night. I popped into the grocer’s next to the Ali Baba kebab shop around 2008 to buy beer, and back on the street I came across a couple who looked utterly bewildered. Dalston was clearly beyond them. They were each clutching a printed A4 sheet and slowly spinning around outside the Nando’s on the corner by Shacklewell Lane, gazing into the middle distance, all hope gone from their eyes. “Are you lost?” I offered. They were. They had been looking for the Earth venue for ages and had been going up and down Kingsland High Street, up and down, but it literally wasn’t there. “Ooh, you’re off to the Meat Loaf tribute, aren’t you? I’ll show you, it’s only a couple of months from here”. Their little faces.
I was still a decade short at dinner, but H and I struck out for Hackney Downs together at sunset. I photographed a beautiful sycamore under the beginnings of a mackerel sky in 2017. Somewhere between Heather’s favourite spruce and the park entrance on Downs Park Road, my watch ticked over 25683, and I guess the rest of it, crossing the road to look for Zoe’s Bengal cats, smelling the roses in the dusk and walking back to our front door, is some sort of future. 897 extras, which by my reckoning means we’ll have another long weekend in mid-November 2024.