They slip through an inbetween region, just below the sound of the traffic and buildings. A strange place - or non-place - urban and rural simultaneously.
We leave London for the Grand Union Canal near Paddington Station, slip over bridges and under flyovers, take photographs of slightly sinister sculptures of life-size men facing each other across car-park style paving stones. The curve of bridges across cold water, leaves on skin and in the translucent body that skin covers the ghosts of objects and more leaves. A thousand remnants for a thousand past autumns. Seagulls. Pigeons.
Old and rich houses. Postcard-pretty boats with handmade home-printed posters in their windows 'SAVE LONDON'S BOATING COMMUNITY'. There are a lot of cyclists. Most have that lean, wiry air that cyclists tend to have as if they have left themselves hanging upside down in a particularly bitter wind for three days. Unlike Odin, who did similar, and gained knowledge of the runes, these cyclists gain a the power to never appear to be tired, even when cycling up steep inclines, and to make the 'ting-ting' of their bell at once both a plaintive, strangely cold sound.
The canal seems cut deep into the ground, so the landscape outside the canal remains unreachable and unknown. Gradually the canal changes, decays from a pleasant Sunday-walk place (even though it is a Thursday) to something less trustworthy, and certainly not safe, though it is hard to determine why.
There is a gasworks to our left, over a fence taller than me. The skeleton of the gasworks looks like a nightmare of a rollercoaster ride, all prison-camp aesthetic and spiky iron angles. Across the alarmingly still water (I am used to the sea remember) a large and overflowing cemetery slipped and overflowed, half hidden by trees and bushes.
I suppose it was the sight of the man burning bits of paper in a fire by the side of the canal that first began to change the atmosphere. He looked intent and did not look up as we passed by. 'It feels like we're in the middle of nowhere' Em said. After we passed another man who was gesticulating wildly to himself (though Em said he was on a hands free mobile phone) we decided to take the next bridge up 'to some shops'. By this time the canal had descended almost entirely into a sinister and unsettling region - slough-white skies reflected in cold drown-water, factory drift, murder echoes. As we climbed up the bridge to the shops, two older characters, looking like they were on the run from knife crimes in a Glasgow estate, watched us ascend. Greying temples, hard eyes, like little bits of perfectly rounded stone.
We ended up in an industrial estate. In the industrial estate there was a restaurant which was appetisingly called the 'Chinese Food Manufacturing Centre'. Hmm. Think I'll give that a miss.
It felt like we were in some kind of limbo, or maybe purgatory.
We finally made it to some shops, but these shops felt like they were the last remnants of a dying town. A little string of stores that seemed somehow to be infected with the downbeat faltering rhythm of the area. Brazilian hairdressers, Portugese newsagents. Welcome to Kensal Green. Across the road a group of puffa-jacketed hulking youths, all gangling limbs and skulking heads managed to saunter up the street in a somehow sinister fashion. 'It's just depressing' Em said. I was having visions of tourists wondering naively into knife crime areas, and was very glad when we caught the bus back to Paddington Station.
We took the canal to Camden instead. This canal, branching off from the Grand Union that took us into the sinister gasworks sector, was again set into a deep-ish cutting. Across the water this time, huge mansions, elaborate as temples, austere as mausolea, stared down at us. In the gathering twilight, I watched a gardener on one of the grassed slopes mow the lawn. The yellow lights that spilled dully from windows reminded me how late in the day and year we were.
The canal took us through the centre of London Zoo. To our left strange birds flew around a huge enclosure. People on walkways looked at Em and myself as if we were exhibits. On the other side one door on a low building had one sign saying 'GIRAFFES' and another saying 'WOMEN'.
We soon made it to Camden, and it started raining. Looking back on the canal, now deep in twilight- just verging on night - it seemed hard to believe we had just come from there, and impossible to think we would take that way back. As I said in another post, always something odd about canals.
Too much chance of wandering into the sinister enclaves of a gasworks sector.
