Dear London

By Dominic Collingridge

Dear London,

It has been three months now to the day since we last saw each other. It seems hard to believe that we are already here… June, and what a lot has happened; too much almost to say in a letter, but you feel it too I’m sure.

My main cause for writing is to tell you how much I miss you.

I wonder what you have been doing with your time since we last saw each other… How are you feeling about everything that is going on? Myself… Well, Monday to Friday I’m working at home, and it feels in many respects normal, although oddly enough work has never been so busy.

I suppose I should be grateful that I still have a job, alas that fear of ‘what if this continues,’ lingers overhead like a cloud one can’t quite decide if it is worth taking the umbrella out for, the risk of potential rain a palpable threat cutting through the air. Before starting work I leave the house early and go for a walk on Hampstead Heath. I start down through the shaded seclusion of Fitzroy Park with its vast and mysterious gated houses, past the allotments, and on to the expanse of open landscape. Here I feel our separation most palpably, for this landscape could not be more different to you. For you are a violent jolt, a ceaseless, dazzling spark of energy, which enters the body and lives within the cells for hours afterwards.

You fill one with a longing for more, for a desire to be in it, a part of it, at one with it. The Heath, beautiful in its own comparatively opposite way has a practically meditative effect, soothing the soul and slowing one down. It is a pastoral world, I half expect to see cows or hear the galloping of horses behind me. When there are no people to date the space it seems timeless, I look up occasionally and expect to see Keats and Brawne, strolling together in search of the Nightingale.

In the mornings there are of course many dogs, of such a variety that over the past few weeks alone I have witnessed species I had never previously seen. Second to the dogs are the dashing, panting, glistening bodies in lycra, who weave through the gaps between myself and my fellow walkers, they seemingly have their own rules for social distancing. Others, the slower species of human manoeuvre themselves softly, languorously through the dappled pathways, under the trees, past the lakes, over the meadows, stopping to take it all in…Perhaps I look like one of them

My favourite part of this journey is walking through the woodland towards Kenwood, which was to my dismay closed until the beginning of June, the glorious splash of colour from the rhododendrons was nothing more than a smudge of green and brown when the gates opened once again, but at least I was able to see the glittering white magnolia at its best in March. I sit a while by the Henry Moore statue, making the most of the fresh air and silence, before I have to return home to my dining table and lock myself into back-to-back Zoom calls for the day. As I leave the grounds and walk up towards the Kitchen Garden I see a flash, a cameo of a lost and forgotten landscape, jagged and varied… it is you London. I wonder, do you see me? What have your mornings been like over the last few months?

I think back to the last full day I spent with you, it was March 15th, a Sunday, and I walked from Highgate down through the Heath, through Kentish Town and Camden, taking a detour through Regents Park before passing back over Euston Road and into the calm squares of Bloomsbury.

I went searching for books on Lambs Conduit Street, then coffee in Seven Dials, before visiting Beaton at the National Portrait Gallery; then through the pulsing artery of Trafalgar Square before cutting across Pall Mall and up to St James’s Square for the London Library, simply to meander through the stacks and bask in the sillage of the brilliant minds trapped between the clothbound pages.

Oh, how I think of you longingly now, and everything I miss about you… a Fortnum’s Scotch egg, gazing hungrily through the windows of Piccadilly and Burlington Arcade, making lists in my head of things I will buy in a few years. I miss haunting softly through Savile Row, fantasising over a time when my name will be sealed in the ledgers which follow the year 2020, a year to end familiarity and routine. I miss the bars and the restaurants, the cafe’s and even the commute… but, most of all I miss you.

I have come to realise that of course nothing is certain, and that change throughout life is inevitable. I hope we make it through this change for the better London, and regardless, no matter what happens, I love you, and I can’t wait for the day when I can tell you so in person.

Until then,