When you wake up, it’s a new mornin’
The sun is shinin’, it’s a new mornin’
And you’re going home…
– Gerry Rafferty, Baker Street
Morning in London. Under a sky of cerulean blue, Baker Street is awakening. It is early when I climb from the tunnels of the Bakerloo Line, pass beneath the WW2 tiles, clock, and Art Deco lettering — Wembley, Harrow, Uxbridge, Amersham — of the concourse archway, and out through the ticket gate with an electronic wrist-flick of my watch. A few commuters are on the go; the pigeons are busy. But it is too early for most people. Even the Knights of the Pavement are still asleep in their newspaper and cardboard castles. I step from the station and out into my first day in England.
Travel is a vanishing act: a transition through time from the familiar and the mundane to the unfamiliar, the striking and the extraordinary. Forty hours before, we had left behind the freezing fog of a New Zealand winter and flown to summer on the opposite side of the world. Now, here I am, back in London after an absence of 12 years. The city is older; so am I. But it retains the same patina of age, history, bustle, and grime that I am so familiar with. It feels at once like home and totally alien.
Beside the station, a Black Sheep Coffee outlet is open. I step in and order an oat milk latte: my first London coffee. Everything is automated, from the ordering screen to the contactless paywave. Outside the small, square window, Old London is coming to life. Here in the coffee shop, 21st-century digital technology holds sway as it does throughout the city. My journey from our hotel in Lambeth to the Black Sheep Coffee shop had been undertaken entirely digitally. The only thing that seemed the same was the hot air and rumble of the tubes as I crossed the city on The Underground.
My coffee is ready. It tastes delicious. Outside, the traffic on Baker Street is building: red buses, black cabs, office workers in their summer suits, and floral frocks. A drunk shambles past and sits down against a mailbox, pauses to light the remains of a found cigarette, then sags slowly to sleep on the pavement: a gentleman in repose. The sun creases the Georgian and Victorian facades of the buildings overlooking the intersection of Baker Street and Marylebone Road. I step from the coffee shop, out into the labyrinth of London, and wind my way down Baker Street.
TravelWriterLife 