Blue Night of London - blurry eyed on blog budday

i've started to wear my glasses only at work, even though they're for myopia, or near sightedness. when i'm not looking at a computer screen or shooting daggers into a client's eyes, i prefer to be a bit blurry eyed. soft round the egdes, so to speak. it helps nerves to loosen and the mind to unfurl its tight little quotidian bundles. after work, as it was another crisp autumn evening, with a magic blue sky, i decided to wander the back alleys of Westminster, down to the bridge. red brick buildings hiding cunning narrow streetways that quickly find a vanishing perspective point, turrets and chimneys contrasting with indigo sky, now changing fast to true blackness. a snippet of Cambridge, with backlit stained glass windows and a dressed stone wall, a lightless passage and sculptural gates of wrought iron, with the Houses of Parliament peeking over - a rarely seen angle. an inner corner of the Abbey, a rarely used parklet, you turn a corner and London's back on the road. in red buses, in demonstrators' placards, in Big Ben blandly chiming seven hours, and ugly black bullet barriers.
i went to the strangely quiet spot on Westminster Bridge, where the beams of two floodlights don't intersect, but leave a wendigo-sized gap in the darkness. the inky black swirls of the water were somehow different today. they sighed longingly for me to fall into them. we are warm, they chanted, fall in and our temperate sweetness will smother you, but gently, washing over you in sweeps of clean pure black, reflecting the moonless sky. they were like deep heavy waves, not river swells, they called from the weird currents that warm the cold and wild north sea. i didn't fall for it, it was a trick. magnetically, the river pulled me to the bridge parapets, the concrete took all my weight as i pressed sensuously into it, but i didn't fall in. i smiled back at the wicked black waters and went onwards to find my way home.
this involved crossing the bridge past the point where the southwest river embankment (albert embankment?) starts and snakes away towards Vauxhall. the riverside walkway looked suddenly wintry, with a light grey walking path and black overcoats, top hats, even umbrellas, walking under the pale off-white light globes. the globes reflected as a silvery smear in the sharp river water. a picture of 'London'... foreign and cold, truly thrilling. a vision i don't associate any more with my embankment and daily tramps through the city. this was like a vision out of 'the enigma of arrival' by V S Naipaul, a vision of an alien culture seen perhaps by true children of the subcontinent (like Ramanujam!) when they first set foot in the mighty sooty London of the Industrial age. strangely, this sudden glimpse of an unfamiliar interpretation of my familiar adopted home made me even happier than my walk had already made me, and i boarded the 211 bus, glad and wise and mellow.

i'm going to post a picture soon that will explain why i'm calling this series of posts Blue Nights of London. besides the fact that, um.. these were very beautifully blue nights. of London.

blog turns 3 in 48 minutes. happy birthday, love.