From Bob's archive: South London pastoral

For mid-winter, the last in 2024's monthly series of posts from the archive. Today, a cold day in February 2009

Photo: Keith Hudson, 2010
Sunday. I am in my front room doing some decorating. I hear horse hooves. I look out the window. The first light flakes of snow are fluttering down. Into view, on my quiet Victorian terraced street in London SE4, come two horses, both dappled grey. On their backs, two white youth in hooded tops. Five minutes afterwards, I wonder if it happened or if I imagined it.

On to my music player comes Caetano Veloso singing "London, London", written when he was in chilly exile from the right-wing military dictatorship in Brazil. The eight words at the heart of the song sum up so perfectly what England is like: "Green grass, blue eyes, gray sky, God bless."*

Monday morning. The snow has settled. The schools are closed, the roads are still, many workplaces are shut. Blythe Hill park is clogged with kids on sledges, dads who have taken the day off. A sense of timelessness: could be a hundred years ago. It's a cliche to talk of London's villages, to talk about community spirit, but it was palpable. The TV talked about the billions lost to industry due to the snow, but how does that compare to families actually spending time together? To adults - and teenagers - remembering how to be children?

A carnival feel. In carnival, there is a taste of a different life, the sense another world is possible. Not governed by the rhythms of labour and consumption. Beneath the snow, as the helicopter ambulance man on the news said last night, the definition disappears. The grid is whited out.

 

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