A View From the Steps

There’s a concrete staircase on the Thames riverwalk in the Bermondsey section of London that I probably sat on 200 times or more when we lived over there. The staircase is divided into two sets of steps. The longer one leads down to the riverbank. The shorter one, my preferred perch, leads from the riverwalk to a small platform that lets you access the river when the tide is low.

The steps are located about 30 yards from our old London townhouse, and to my mind they give you the best view of the city anywhere. You look west to the Tower Bridge, with the Shard (London’s tallest building) on the left and the City of London district across the river on the right, with its odd and distinctive office buildings and their funny nicknames (the Walkie Talkie, the Gherkin).

I never tired of that view during our 5.5 years in London. I tired of other things — the damp weather, the crowded tube system, the undersalted food and dog crap on the sidewalks — but I never tired of that view.

In many ways that view was London to me. It captured the ancient and the modern, the elegance and grit, the dynamism of the city and its occasional tedium, all those cars poking along the bridge, day after day, night after night, beeping their bloody horns at the bloody tossers who bloody well need to drive bloody faster.

I sat on those steps and soaked in the view again last week, for the first time in nearly a year. We took a family vacation to London for a week. For much of it I felt like any other tourist during a time of year when London is lousy with tourists, hundreds of thousands of them, from all over the world, scattered all over the city. That’s what happens when you move out of a city you once lived in. You’re just another visitor now, passing through.

We stayed in a nice hotel near London Bridge station and hit some of the old haunts. A couple family members met up with London friends and colleagues during the trip, their time filled with social outings or business (or both) in different areas of the city.

Me? I mostly shuffled around the London Bridge area and parts east. I carried my laptop with me so I could work, and spent quite a few hours in the hotel room filing news content. (There was a lot of U.S. news involving the president, the vice president, and a former president. But that’s another blog for another day).

I got a bikeshare app and took a couple rides along some of my old routes. I hit some favorite restaurants and shops. But that was about it. No sightseeing, no long excursions to the far corners of Old Blighty.

I hadn’t been away long enough for the vacation to feel like an adventure, but I had been away long enough that it was hard to spark the old connection I had with London when we lived there. This seemed both sad and inevitable. London represented a major life experience for us, but that experience was over. You can’t recapture it just because you’re in town for a week.

Still, I had an ace in the hole – at least in terms of re-establishing a personal connection with London, however fleeting. Those steps in Bermondsey.

There is nothing special about those steps. They are nondescript and physically unattractive, with decades of stains and smudges, and usually a little trash strewn here and there. They are situated beside an old brick wall, in a fairly quiet residential area, many blocks away from the thrum of the city. You wouldn’t think twice about them if you wandered past them. But every time I sat on them and took in the view, they reminded me of how far I had traveled in life, both literally and metaphorically.

*****

I am nigh on the winter of my years, with its promises of old age and all that entails. Maybe it makes sense that I would seek out old haunts and marinate in a little well-earned nostalgia, try to recapture moments from a younger life. But really, age has nothing to do with it. The truth is, I’ve always done it.

When I was barely out of childhood I had this habit of trying to freeze images in my brain that I could refer to much later in life. It usually happened when I moved into a new home, whether it was a dorm room or an apartment.

The moment I stepped inside a new home, I paused just inside the door and took a long, long look, trying to soak it all in. I wanted to establish a picture in my mind of what it looked like before it became my home, when it was still new, fresh, and unfamiliar. Because it would never be that way again. The days and weeks and months and years would change every inch and image and memory of the place.

Once I froze the image, I stored it in the deeper recesses of my mind. Then, years later, when I left the home for the final time, I took a single last look before heading outside and closing the door, trying to remember that first, long-ago image, and what I was feeling at the time, and how life had evolved since then. In some cases it only covered a few months. In others, it covered years and years.

I don’t know what this says about me. Maybe others do it, too. I guess I knew at a young age that the experiences we collect along the way eventually become nothing more than snapshots in your head, fading at the edges, and you need to soak them up to keep them from fading into nothing.

I was never a big one for taking photos as a young man. Do I wish I had? Ah, I don’t know. Let the memories tell their own story. Probably a lot more interesting that way.

*****

So, the Bermondsey steps by the Thames…

I knew when we traveled back to London I would make my way to those steps. It would happen on a Daddy’s Night Out, just like when we lived there. I would buy a beer and sip it slowly as I walked the couple of miles from our hotel in London Bridge to the steps in Bermondsey. I would not tube around the city or go see a jazz show. I wanted to travel by foot, zigging and zagging from pub to pub, just like the old days, just the way I remembered it, because that’s the best way to see a city, hands down.

I hoped for decent weather, and for once those hopes got the thumbs up from the climate gods. The weather was brilliant during our trip. Very unLondon, meaning it didn’t rain all the time, and temps were moderate to warm, and the sun came out for more than a couple ticks of the clock.

So, the Bermondsey steps by the Thames…

When I reached them they were empty, Dieu merci. It used to bother me no end when I started on my nightly journeys, hoping to sit on the steps and soak in the view, only to find them occupied by some random somebody who had the gall – the sheer, unmitigated gall – to sit on my GD steps. The nerve!

Not this time, though.

Oh, there were a couple young gents standing a few meters away and jabbering on about this or that, one getting into the other’s grill a little bit, his speech peppered with about 147 different mentions of “not right, bruv, not right,” in the space of about three minutes.

I thought maybe they’d have it out in front of me, start throwing hands, which would have been unfortunate, but also kinda cool. But nah. They were just a couple dudes talking trash to each other, as dudes will do. They eventually wandered off, laughing, leaving me alone with the steps and the view and the memories.

And for the first and really only time during our vacation in London, I felt the old connection. For just a few moments it was my city again, the place I remember from before, the one that I froze in my mind and kept for a later date.

That was a righteous feeling, folks. A real righteous feeling.