We walked alongside the Thames, from Westminster Bridge down along the South Bank as far as the National Theatre. The evening was balmy, the day, I’m loath to report to you wind-whipped, rain-soaked natives, had been positively hot.
London was awash with tourists, myself included, I suppose, although I married a native of that city, so maybe I get some dispensation.
We walked along the riverbank, sidestepping legions of Italian teenagers in tight, tight denim, peering at the sights through designer optical-wear, gaggling like leather-jacketed geese, oblivious, it seemed, to the heat.
We walked past scores of glossy-lipped women in hijabs, with beautiful teeth and precision-drawn eyeliner, shiny gold and silver footwear peeping out from under their black drapery.
We tottered through the swarm, past buxom Americans in knee-length shorts and flak jackets stuffed with maps and guides and timetables; past belly-heavy tattooed German men with socks and sandals and handlebars on their moustaches; past young girls in saris, darting like scattered birds; past a tiny Asian bride in white lace, each of her six tiny, smiling bridesmaids dressed in pink satin.
The London Eye twirled in a high arc above the river, casting its cyclopean gaze over empty McDonald’s cartons and discarded flyers for a cut-price dungeon experience or an aquarium adventure.
I always forget that London requires an ambulatory adjustment; it is the city that dictates the pace. If it is telling you to crawl along littered pavements, your face crushed up against some humid bloke from Arkansas whose T-shirt reads, “I make beer disappear, what’s your superpower?”, then crawl you do.
Glum triumvirate
We were heading towards the theatre as we had tickets booked to see a new production of Everyman, a late 15th-century morality play featuring the familiar glum triumvirate of God, man and death.
The plot is nice and straightforward: man blithely goes about the business of his tiny life, unaware that God and his overworked sidekick, Death, have pulled up ringside seats and that any minute now (given that one never does know the day nor the hour) those boyos will be tapping him on the shoulder and looking for an account, a reckoning, a tallying of his legacy.
Whatever about the play’s efficaciousness on its original warty, toothless audience, sweating uncomfortably into their doublets and hoses, wondering if they’d done enough ye olde goode deedies to be spared a date with the devil, this tract on the perils and pitfalls of a hedonistic existence seemed to go down like a gratefully received ice-cold gin with the Saturday-night audience at the Olivier Theatre.
Adapted by the poet Carol Ann Duffy, with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the title role and an ultra-contemporary setting – a cocaine-fuelled 40th birthday party and a very literal fall from grace – the play was nicely realised in a loud, techie, enthusiastically applauded production.
I enjoyed Death, who was, much to the amusement of the audience, Irish. Played with weary malevolence by the Irish actor Dermot Crowley, this grim reaper was like a lot of Dublin taxi drivers you’ll have met in your lifetime; one of those who arrives 10 minutes early and waits impatiently outside the front door with the meter running while bottles are drained and bleary goodbyes are kissed and shouted.
No matter how sweet the parting pavlova, you’re going to have to face the fare in the end.
At the end of Everyman, Death played eeny-meeny-miney-moe, pointing a solemn finger at some poor sod in the middle of row M, and we all clapped and then spilled out into the liquid London night.
Tremendous plans
We went to an outdoor bar, an encampment of bars, in fact, underneath a big white moon and some insanely high-flying chair-o-planes, twirling their screaming, overly optimistic occupants around and around with little regard to death or destruction or any kind of reckoning at all, beyond maybe losing a flip-flop during some wild rotation over the crowds below.
The joint was heaving, as they say: couples doing lingering kissing under fairy lights, young girls squealing into their selfie sticks, blokes with demanding torsos shouldering around their plastic beakers of warm beer.
Everymans, Everymen, each and every one of us, enjoying the ride while it lasted, twirling and twirling around in our tenuously held chair-o-planes, making our tremendous plans underneath a big white moon, a breeze from the wide river just beginning to blow.