New Old Faces

When you plunge deep down in to a well. 
Submerge then emerge out like a newborn.
Old friends fall in to tread, on Hampstead.

Today’s Saturday is the first day I felt like embracing this new year thing. Waking up confused on the first of January swathed in an inflatable mattress on a floor surrounded by children is odd, and, so is moving in to a Mews as a place of work (our doorway is used as a thoroughfare for odd-lost tech-types and illustrators with fanciful turns into journalism - all very charming). 

Getting back in to the rhythm, picking up the stride, and clipping the straggles or at least neatly patting them down so that the threads don’t pull and leave you with holes in your cardigan, or whatever. It’s not that I don’t like to get back in to the old familiar lifestyle, it’s… that change of mindset where you begin to think nostalgically about a time when you were being yourself, say, walking in the woods or the seaside or a high street that you returned to potter about through during the slow slow yule.

A jumper was given in exchange for DVDs made of threads that protect the wearer, or so the people say. A chocolate rabbit was undressed from it’s golden paper and eaten. I’ve got a new walk to work where every day I pass a wall smashed wide open, one dead flat pigeon, I think. 

NOTE: The days are still short and the shadows are runic in their spindly length and starkness in that dusky orange hue.

I met a friend off the train at Paddington, he’s passing through to get back to the States, and he wears glasses now that make him look more Englishman-In-New-York. Today he flies on an aeroplane heading in the direction of the Atlantic Seaboard; and another friend coincidentally leaves on a Eurostar heading south to return to another type of school where they learn to clown. Simultaneously, one other goes skiing.

Have you ever stolen time?
It feels great. 
It’s like cheating but without consequence, 
it’s like finding a loop-hole. 

When I woke up today on yet another floor, but in a duvet this time so that’s fine, I remembered something but wasn’t sure what. There were slats over the windows that were failing to keep out the lilac light and I heard hushed sounds of birds, cars, people traipsing. I was in the house of an old friend who’d moved to Hampstead. Small fixtures from our shared house together last year featured in his living room; though I’d never stepped foot in it - a lightbulb here, a ceramic cup there. When the three of us ventured out it was snowing for no reason, so I said Merry Christmas, which felt natural or “natch” as the twats say up here. 

The walk over the heath was where I could do my dog-browsing, and where the two best-friends of old with nothing so noteworthy to share apart from time could do their walking. We walked and as we did we talked less until just our treads fell in to a pattern and then home. 

And then bye. 

And now back south of the river where I belong and happier for it but also lost in the midst of memory, that morning of today’s where I thought, I am certain - we skipped out time and made some up where it didn’t belong.