River Ride

I no longer find it difficult to get out of bed and three or four hours sleep will do me and it may be that I'm not tiring myself out enough but that's a good thing for this morning because my happy brood is in town with a friend and a mother in tow and these things have been in the planning for a week or more and I thought I'd take them down to the south bank because it's my cultural hub in this city and she can take in the second hand book stalls because she could browse books all day and she's started getting a thing for old old books and I'll throw in a lunch at the BFI restaurant 'round the back which is as fine a meeting point as any and a pretty decent office for writing away from home and at this hour of the day there's not much traffic.The tourist season is well and truly upon us not that this part of the city is ever truly without visitors but on this sun-splashed Saturday the place is full of stalls selling everything from old photographs to German sausages and the books and the skateboarders are the only constant feature from just under two decades of coming to this place and we order from an array of nationalities posing as waiters and pass the time reading the national film theatre's line up of movies for April and May.There are boat rides by the pier and we wait for one for ages but the weather's good enough to ignore the wait and I can see now that the human traffic is largely families and babies in buggies and the odd busker and there are seasonal ice cream vans everywhere and this is it, this is normal life as experienced by many people and it has a sticky familiarity to it and the visitor says hey how about a picture of all of four of you and we indulge her and the adults feel uneasy with such a pose and I find that funny and I think we're going to go on those boats and the Thames looks greasy brown and filthy and I tell him it wouldn't be a good idea to fall in that centuries old dirt.

For once we play the tourists traveling on a river cruise listening to some wide cockney boy explaining the wonders of London to the flock of sightseers clicking their cameras all around us and once we pass the South Bank all concrete exteriors like the set of a concrete jungle and the voice crackles on the loudspeakers now ladies and gentlemen, on the left of the boat is the south bank where you will find the national theatre and this whole set of buildings has caused quite a stir in the national life because prince charles, the prince of wales, who knows a thing or two about ugliness, called these buildings ugly. Laughter in different accents comes back to him in the bright spring sunshine and I wonder why I haven't done this before it's cheaper than the travel card and not a bad day out with the right company but I know why - it took me twenty five years to see the Victoria Falls I just don't do tourist. And on and on he spins his alternative tourists guide yarns and the children are not much bothered and they watch the tourists instead a cross section of the world on a boat and over there is a man wearing a t-shirt with the words never has so much been taken from so many by so few get rid of the top 5% and within a year the rest of us will be four times better off. This is the world they'll grow in and it's like being back in the seventies with the socialist workers on every street in every newspaper and now on every boat. The way the world was is the way it will be some people believe and I don't know what the story is with my boy but I think he's feeling the pressure of being dragged here and there to see stuff and so what have you been up to all week oh well we've been seeing stuff like we're seeing stuff now s'ok it will soon be over play nice and I see sudden changes of mood he could only have got from my genetic makeup and he'll need watching and we look at the skateboarders practising their flips on the river sand before they try them out on the concrete above their heads. The tourists click at everything like the herds you sometimes spot on safari but the weather's good enough for all of us and our visitor asks me where's London Bridge and I don't know so I say it's fallen down and the the cockney guide reckons when the Americans bought London Bridge they thought they were buying Tower Bridge because London bridge is not all that and that's it there behind us but here ladies and gentlemen is Tower Bridge one the most enduring symbols of the city. My kids get off at the enduring symbol so they can show their friend that famous home of beheaded kings and queens and then back to the train station before the evening rush back west while I make my way back onto dry land and the FA Cup semi-final and we've long dispensed with sentimental good byes and I are for one am grateful for a pleasant day and we'll see each other week's end no doubt. The last person to be held prisoner in the tower of london, the guide whispers in dread, was rudolf hess, hitler's deputy.A man from the Indian sub continent hands me his phone and asks me to take a picture of him in front of that river land mark or that London symbol and it must all be to show the folks at home that he's been there and that's him in front of Big Ben and the thing with photographs is that they age with age so much so that when I look at photographs of dead folk it's as if I'm staring at a page from a history book now out of print and no longer read whose pages are faded and devoid of air as if the colours have followed them to the other side and my melancholy chore sees this man in front of Big Ben with all the colours drained out of man and symbol and this 30 second old picture looking as if it's from a decade or so in the past. I don't know where these thoughts come from and I hear a voice in my head calling me a weirdo.

I wander down the embankment to meet a mate in o'neils off kingsway by holborn an old favourite haunt near an old job and I pass the piazza with it's jugglers and singers attached to amplifiers and the bar is a sea of blue and red and it's packed and Arsenal lose the FA semi-final to a Didier Drogba goal and our flapping Polish goalkeeper. Damn fine day and I shall sleep like a log and dream of future victories which have nothing to do with football.