Fear and Loafing in London
Carl reflects at the bar. He’s got my hat on his head, a cigarette in one hand, an almost-empty bottle of Corona in the other. His chest towers over me like a personal guardian. Charlotte is standing next to him, beaming in her freckled fashion. I met Charlotte in Peru, traveled with her for a week, and last saw her about 16 months ago on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia.
“London is bittersweet,” says Carl. He’s had a rough couple of years, made all the more harder simply because he has chosen to live in London in the first place.
“Life is bittersweet,” I follow, which is the kind of thing you say after a hard day of drinking under the hot sun of a summer festival.
“London is life,” says Charlotte, or me - it didn’t really matter.
“It’s been emotional,” concludes Carl, and that was that.
Between four days on a stopover in London, and a few days in Vancouver, this was supposed to be my week off. No reports, no gallery, just catching up with friends and family, finding my breath before Montreal breaks my liver, and the West Coast Trail breaks everything else. I lived in London for two years, so writing about my time here would be like writing about my life in general, transforming Modern Gonzo into a personal diary, which quite frankly, isn’t very interesting. So why are you reading this? Well, Minesh remarked that he’d love to read my thoughts on the weekend, even if it consisted largely of sitting in a park surrounded by 30,000 people drinking from a fountain of Pimms and lemonade. London was “emotional” for a number of reasons, and I’ll gladly spare you the drama (or “draamar” as a London drama student might say) suffice to say that I saw friends and family I had not seen for many, many years, visited old haunts to see the ghosts of my past, and met three dozen new friends who I quickly annoyed by asking them to finish my three sentences.
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