You are visiting London for the first time. You wear your best dress. You are day tripping, taking an early train and returning home later the same day. It doesn’t give you much time to take a look around, so you wander through Fitzrovia, passing the pubs where Dylan Thomas and Julian MacLaren-Ross had drank away their days, casting your eager eyes over the Fitzroy Tavern and The Wheatsheaf, hoping to catch a glimpse of the inside through a window or an opening door and wishing: Oh to be old enough to enter those cathedrals of alcohol, to sink in a drunken stupor on the arm of a poet, into the arms of an absinthe drinker. He has to be an absinthe drinker doesn’t he, after all absinthe is so romantic isn’t it? You can think of the two poet lovers Verlaine and Rimbaud (you are well read for your age aren’t you) in their Parisian Left Bank cafes supping the green liquid in place of food. Bickering and fighting (including assault with a wet fish in this very city you are standing in) until the staggeringly ugly Verlaine shoots the future slaver Rimbaud with a pistol in far off Brussels. Kind of romantic isn’t it all, you think. Reckon it would be a good way to go – death by a bullet fired by a genius. You had always wanted to be a muse, and if a William S. Burroughs type wanted to put one through your skull, trying a William Tell trick, why who were you to argue? One time you had dreamed you were Thomas De Quincey’s lost Ann (surely one of the most painful episodes in English literature), seeking that future god of opium through the endless labyrinth of London. A ‘not yet fifteen’ year old prostitute (almost the same age as you) who had befriended the teenage runaway De Quincey, she was lost to him when he returned to his world of well off family and friends, seeking money. But just as the child prostitute of Oxford Street had haunted the opium eaters adult dreams, so he had haunted yours: ‘Thomas!’ you would cry out in your sleep, ‘you have forgotten me!’ Later, on waking, you wondered if it could be memories of a past life, which could explain your liking for these bohemian types, but then again, maybe it was all wishful thinking. The Romantic in you.
But times have changed in London, things ain’t what they used to be; roaming, you pass shop after shop with household names that could be found in any high street. There are no ghosts from the past. Where have all the bohemians gone? Where are the Welsh poets with flame haired wives? Where are the homosexual painters yearning for the brutish arms of burly workmen? Where are the McLaren-Ross’s stalking their Sonia Orwell’s, plotting murder?
No Augustus John is waiting to bed you, no Nina Hamnett sits on a urine-soaked barstool now.
Come down off the mountain, Star Gazer, you wanderer above a sea of mist. The modern city waits, eager to absorb you as it did Ann.
It was thus ever so.