THE LEDGE

9 July 2006

London is a place I have never wanted to live in. I’ve held fast to a theory over the last 30 years that all the best bands/artists/writers have come out of the provinces. The thinking is that young people in the provinces who are drawn to creativity have less to distract their imaginations. In London there is too much on offer; in the provinces they have more time and space to evolve whatever it is they are doing before the spotlight of the media finds them and uses them up and spits them out.  This holds true whether it is Shakespeare, the Beatles or the band being championed for the particular month you are reading this.

I have always been proud of the fact that I’ve never felt the need to live in London. So it was with reluctance and even shame that I gave in and moved to London. The reasons why are not relevant here.

A flat was found that suited my needs. It’s in the borough of Hackney and I moved in 1 April. I had been living in the flat for a couple of months before I wondered if the large frosted window half way up the stairs could be opened. It could. I opened it as wide as it would go. What I found outside the window was a ledge about two by three meters. I climbed out. This ledge is two and a half floors above back-garden level.

It has been a warm evening. I went and got a deck chair and a bottle of beer and I have been sitting out here for the last three hours. Well, not all the time. I climbed back in a few times to get another and another and maybe another bottle of beer from the fridge.

While sitting out here I have done sod all but listen to the distant sounds of the city, watched the sky darken and the lights of the planes cross it and take in my new surroundings. I feel like a tomcat perched up on some high wall surveying his kingdom. The view is not panoramic and is in no way picturesque, even in an urban sense. From up here I can see no more than four unkempt back gardens (not being in a ground-floor flat I don’t have one); the roof of a small factory; the back of a street of three-storey Victorian town houses; and one distant tower block. What I can’t see are any cars or buses because I can’t even see a road. I can’t see any people because nobody is out in the unkempt gardens.

Maybe it is the gentle fug brought on by the bottles of beer but I get the feeling I’m going to be spending many an evening out here by myself, just sitting, looking and listening.

Although I am in a city of some 7 million people, out and up here I feel distant from it. Not part of it. Free from it. Like when I climbed a tree as a kid and would sit up there in the branches, hiding from the world and at the same time watching it all go by. With this comes a sense of freedom, which we can only ever experience when we are on our own.

Do we ever tire of watching a plane cross a night sky wondering where those people, 30,000 feet above us, are off to, about the lives they are leading, the mistakes they have made, their futures unfolding?

I’m listening to the sounds of the city again, the distant sirens, children playing out late a few streets away, the bus pulling up at the other side of my flat, the far-off hum of traffic. But for some reason up here tonight I don’t feel hemmed in and trapped the sounds of the city. There are days when I’m in the middle of London, when I can sense I am about to have some sort of claustrophobic panic attack. I get overcome with this desperate need for the open space of the countryside or the woodland glade, the bank of a brook. I know it sounds like I am coming on all Wordsworth in the Lakes, but that is the way I feel.

But right now, up here on this ledge, I am getting what I need. This is now my favourite place in all of London. Official.