Saturday
mornings I eat breakfast at a diner just off the King’s
Road in Chelsea. It's like home from home. A cosmopolitan place;
you see an interesting cross-section of people there, Europeans,
locals, musicians, actors, families, the occasional star. Nobody
pays much attention to anybody, yet the ambience is great. The
superb food is inexpensive; portions are excellent. The manager
and waitresses greet me like an old friend. They are mostly
Hungarian. I like them so much.
Just up the way and round the corner, at that stretch of the
King’s Road, there are large London Plane trees every
twenty feet. Perhaps a lifetime ago those saplings should have
been planted further apart. Now the confident branches grow
into each other, overhang the road and scrape the buses and
tops of lorries. I always park my bike in the same place, chained
to a tall iron post, between two of the huge interlocking trees.
Today there is an open-backed lorry parked in the road, which
has been sectioned off by bollards down to one lane. There are
two guys on the ground and two harnessed in the trees, all with
sound-proof headphones. Chainsaws are screaming, bits of wood
flying, branches tumbling, sawdust in the air. I go to lock
the bike - they haven’t cordoned off the pavement. One
of the guys on the ground looks at me through sawdust-covered
goggles and shakes his head, as if to say, “That is not
a good idea.” The men in the trees stop sawing, glance
down, then at each other and also shake their heads. I’m
not about to move the bike, although it is brand-new. Something
defiant makes me just lock it and walk away, since I have been
doing that with various bikes for years before they got here.
The chainsaws start buzzing and snarling again. The traffic
is backed up; by now the men have moved further out along the
overhanging branches and the ground crew have to close the road
altogether. Cars are hooting angry horns; traffic coming the
other way has stopped. As I leave the pavement is immediately
cordoned off. Then a wood-chipping machine in the back of the
truck is switched on, and the noise of the branches being processed
adds to the cacophony.
Walking down the side road I conclude it was stupid and dangerous
of me to act as I did. By the time I get to the diner I’ve
resolved that small dilemma by deciding it would be even dafter
to return and go through the cordon to move the bike. I have
a great breakfast, read the Saturday papers, chimp through a
week’s photos on the digital camera, then over coffee
talk philosophy with the manager. Coming out of the restaurant
an hour and a half later I realize I don’t have McGuffin,
my old Scottish scarf, which is forever being lost and found
again - once it was gone for ten months. I return to the diner,
but it’s not there. I walk up to the main road, having
forgotten the entire tree-trimming event. Turning the corner
I stop. The trees look stark and bare, like giant shorn-shocked
kids just out of a Leviathan barber shop. The road is so peaceful
now, there is no traffic. The cutters are nowhere to be seen;
they have gathered up the severed branches and have moved the
bollards and cordons. The lorry has travelled elsewhere, along
with all the apparatus. I stand and stare, just gazing in the
silence, then experience an acutely strange sense of being in
this world, of perfect place and composure, of complete belonging
on this earth. I’m on my way to somewhere, but I am also
exquisitely balanced in a timeless moment. My new aqua blue
bicycle, upright, equidistant between two clean bare London
Plane trees in a pearly October light. A soft woody fragrance
pervades the autumn air; a fine film of sawdust coats the empty
pavement and the bike. There on the saddle, neatly folded, McGuffin,
the missing scarf. Perhaps the tree-cutters put it there. Who
else would have known it was mine? I am humbled by the kindness
of those to whom I was indifferent. The realization is obvious
but somehow profoundly reassuring: events unfold when we are
not here. They’ve always done so and always will. The
camera is over my shoulder, yet the shutter can be but mute
and blind to such a mysterious sensation, this mis-en-scene.
Skyward, the light clouds darken in the west to charcoal grey.
Pausing, I decide to leave the bike and catch a big red double-decker
bus all the way up to Trafalgar Square. It’s dark when
I return under a new compact umbrella in the last of a Saturday’s
rain. All the sawdust has been washed away, the city lights
and bare trees reflecting in puddles. The pavement, the road,
a sparkling bicycle - everything looks wet and shiny in my freshly-minted
world. The night chill is setting in, but the old Caledonian
scarf, still peppered in wood-dust, is doing its job well.
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