I’d like to send lots of love to anyone who’s struggling right now or feeling powerless as those they’re close to - or would like to be close to - are struggling. But life still kept on churning and some of its worst inevitabilities - death, taxes, a brittle cold winter - are coming ever clearer into focus. I naively felt as if when the lockdown was announced, everything was on pause and we could resume things once the big cogs of industry eased back into their normal rhythms. The leaves on the trees (if not the weather, right?) and the doom-y news cycle all feels quite back to school right now, and there’s a subtle terror to the churn of life. Making London look like any other high street in the country is not. You know how each French village has the butchers’ and the boulangerie and the Hotel de Ville? That’s classy. I know there’s been a big push for the UK’s workers to get back to their desks, but I think we’re going to need our city centres to have an iota of the soul, joy and familiarity that the hypergentrification of the past few years/decades of homogenisation have stripped out. The city is never going to be Milan (built on a grid as one huge extension of a pentagonal castle!) but it could do well to stop being the same formula of chain stores over and over again.
#Sidenotes message history full
All I know is that everyone was shopping again, everyone was wearing masks - young guys full of bravado wear them on their biceps, as if to say ‘I’m not wearing one, but I still care xx’ - temperature checks upon entry to shops…and the most delicious food. A lot of guide books describe it as ‘industrial’ and so maybe pre-Covid it was Canary Wharf on mopeds. I don’t know what Milan is like during normal times but a few weeks back it was a lovely city. This edition of Sidenotes is quite bumper, though, so hopefully I’m making up for lost time. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I was on holiday for a bit then quarantining for a while and got a bit out of step.
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