River Thames and St Paul's Cathedral, London. Saturday 15 November 2025
There was this time I walked into a room and there was nothing in it except a comfortable bed with pillows and covers and a Cornish ware blue and white striped jug on the window sill holding red and purple black centred anemones.
It was warm, the winter sun streaming through the glass.
The room was plain, dowdy, an ordinary size double bedroom (a single next door, holding a drawing board and a rack of overcoats) in a modern townhouse, set near the city boundary, in a quiet cul-de-sac built on top of the council estate.
There was a break-in once, the murdered step ladders flung on the lawn, the shovel used to prise open the lounge windows dead on the patio.
What did they want to steal? The battered brown leather nineteen thirties suite? The Raoul Dufy poster of a cart horse and farm worker? Ah, the television, those old heavy things with a tube in the back.
Anyway, that's just me explaining context to you.
It was the room, walking into that room with nothing but a bed and a vase of anemones in the sunshine, that changed things.
I went back home to my house filled with necessary things - things I thought were necessary to have in a house. I had a secondhand mentality about the way to acquire things, South London working class, wartime generations of deprivation and old no-money ways.
Ugly double wardrobes, ugly upholstered chairs, a heavy dining table with barley twist legs, stained George Orwell spitting tobacco dark brown, in a clumsy mish-mash of a room.
And I left the man I was with.
Lol, this sounds almost too devastating.
That was the first clearing out, though even the second-hand wheeler dealers with the lot by the Underground station refused the wardrobes.
I remember the storage place with my few bits and bobs. The stand alone gas cooker with the eye level grill and plate warming racks, given by my mother's aunt, a New World model, inexpensive then, a luxury brand now.
A sturdy ancient upright Hoover gleaned from a junk shop, the wooden carver chair from Deptford market (not actually for sale but he said, "make me an offer"), still with the adhesive label with my name on it, standing in my bedroom. There were more things: my grandfather's army trunk, although that has gone now. One of those things you lose the run of. Maybe it was annihilated in a later purge.
That's the thing about minimalism: there's a cost. It's not an easy add-on, a style, pick the bits you like, buy the latest perfectly made, impossible to use, real pig's bristle, vegetable scrubber. It's real life wounds, tearing away from detritus, your skin, and heart, raw and bleeding.
Now I wander the world in a carefully authored carapace of old and new and new to me, layered, unhurried, notebook and pen in hand.
Buying a Sunday newspaper I've run out to get, all the sections and the supplement, staying with my lover in a place with no internet, reading every page.
Later, going to the gallery, hanging over the escalator, watching the tiny people below, looking at Tracey's Bed, and thinking, thank goodness that's over, although, of course, I never smoked. Afternoon tea on the edge of Green Park, the slight chill in the air as the temperature drops, a faint autumnal mist starting to form.
Supper in Chinatown.
Above: Looking east to the City of London and 20 Fenchurch St, the Walkie-Talkie building.
Below: View from The Corner Bar, Tate Modern.
Saturday 15 November 2025