Bright light, big city

Confinement of course mines a rich seam in films and literature. "The Birdman of Alcatraz" was on TV recently, also "The Martian" featuring Matt Damon's unscheduled solitude on the Red Planet. And in Ayn Rand's book "We the Living" set in Stalinist Russia, there's a tragic scene in which a pair of lovers say a final farewell before their train divides into two on the way to their respective labour camps.

BUT.....by late May there are some green shoots of revival. The coffee stallholder in Kennington Cross has opened after over 2 months and because so many people are WFH (working from home) in this residential area, he's doing a roaring trade. Some pubs are starting to sell takeaway drinks and one of my locals, the Black Prince, is doing Portobello IPA to lubricate the Saturday Zoom quiz. Another bloodbath of course!

The month of May continues to be cloudless and with two bank holidays, it's instructive to find out how central London is shaping up. So I cross another frontier, the Thames, to visit Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus. The answer is that because entertainment is shut down and tourism is almost zero, they are still like ghost towns. Many people have migrated to the South Coast beaches with pictures of lemming-like behaviour ignoring social distancing. Nice to have the West End pavements to myself but it's quite uncanny.

Apart from the faithful bus services, the City is also deserted. Just away from it, there are more small gardens and the final image in Postman's Park is the work of the painter G.F. Watts' Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice.Read more