echoes of the summer when i knew no fear
(london, spring 2024 & summer 2021)
About a week ago I started wearing summer clothes and have refused to go back, even though it’s got cold again.
When Josie and I meet our 60-something-year-old friends in the pub before a gig they all say, “Aren’t you freezing??” “That’s not the point,” we tell them.
The past week has been a strange combination of joyous and melancholic.
I gather my friends together for the launch of the tenth issue of Cult at The Corner Bar. There are (somewhat unexpectedly) so many people in one room that we’re shouting all night. I am flushed and flustered from running around talking to everyone, but I feel on top of the world. Ruairi has made a viciously green cocktail which I have named The Cyclone, to match the stormy weather and the cyclical theme. Everyone refers to it as swamp water. It’s delicious and sells out almost immediately. I burn citronella incense because it reminds me of summer, and the windows fog up. Our musicians have to fight to be heard against a drunken rabble (affectionate), but it lends an atmosphere of chaos and imperfection which I’ve always associated with the zine, and they’re happy, so I’m happy. Bella, who performs last in a blue silk dress dripping with tiny jewels, looks like a beautiful siren freshly dragged out of the sea and thrown onto stage in a pub full of rowdy sailors. Everyone keeps holding each other’s hands and saying how glad they are to be here.
The next day is grey and I’ve almost lost my voice. Josie and I go and see the Amy Winehouse biopic at the cinema in the middle of the afternoon and I cry, despite knowing that I am being emotionally manipulated. The film pisses me off and we watch the 2015 documentary in the evening as an antidote. The whole thing makes us both sad. I start thinking about Amy all the time again, which has happened to me periodically since about 2009.
On Wednesday evening we go to a gig in Camden Town. I haven’t seen live music there in an age. As we’re leaving the pub to go to KOKO, my best friend’s ex-boyfriend who I haven’t seen in three years (whose flat I lived in rent free until they broke up…) runs after me. It is quite an awkward interaction, but it sends me spiralling into a bizarre nostalgia for summer 2021, which I spent drunkenly rampaging the streets of Camden and making all kinds of stupid decisions.
Josie and I sweat out (most of) our demons at the Lynks gig, then walk to Amy’s tree, where I leave a palm leaf I picked up off the floor at KOKO, sticky with spilled drinks, but intact. We smoke with her. I wait for one of the signs I’ve seen when I’ve visited her before, expecting another ring of silent foxes or sudden flurry of birds, but there is only the light rainfall and gentle breeze. We watch the lights of the Camden Square houses turn off one by one, and say goodnight to the old men silhouetted in their windows.
On Thursday afternoon we end up in Camden Town again. I think that in the winter it always has a vaguely threatening and foreboding feeling, but when the sun comes out the atmosphere completely changes. I buy a Black Sabbath T-shirt with smoking nuns on it at Rock ‘N’ Roll Rescue (Scott later asks me how much irony it takes to wear a Black Sabbath T-shirt in the year 2024, to which I don’t have an answer). We drink half pints in The Dublin Castle, which is empty and sunlit. Josie saves a busker’s £5 note from blowing away down the high street and almost gets run over by a bus in the process. In return he dances to Britney for us, losing an entire crowd of Dutch teenagers who wanted him to play One Direction. Standing there in the sun, I have a glimmer of how I felt in summer 2021.
At the end of that summer, during a brief period of quarantine for Covid (which I didn’t have), I made a zine featuring some film photographs and writing. I remember being so proud of it. It was stocked in Rock ‘N’ Roll Rescue for a while, and there was one behind the bar in The Hawley Arms. A few even made it to the libraries of bars and cafes in St. Petersburg. I found it on my bookshelf the other day and viscerally cringed, before reminding myself how it felt to be young in London back then.
It was the first summer after the peak of the pandemic. Everything was opening up, there were always crowds of people in the street, and everyone was saying yes to everything because fuck it, we’d been shut up our bedrooms for long enough, and it felt like anything was possible. I remember I barely slept. Isa and I were sharing a bed in her boyfriend-at-the-time’s studio apartment and we barely even saw each other because we were out all the time, making new friends, doing inadvisable things, in my case going out alone with my grandad’s old camera and talking to literally anyone on the streets of Camden Town without a care in the world. It was the summer when I felt little to no anxiety. Probably because I was constantly drunk, but also because I felt like I’d consciously let go of my inhibitions, and because I was (for the most part) surrounded by the right people. I remember feeling literally untouchable, running around deserted back streets past junkyards and train tracks at four in the morning, sitting on the lock and shouting at men on the towpath because I knew they wouldn’t be able to get to us, saying yes to anything that anyone offered me.
So in an effort to embrace ‘cringe’ and wild naivety, because I think it has a place in literature, I want to share some of my photographs and scrawls from that summer. It wasn’t all like this. Some dark things happened, and some of the situations we were in were just purely dangerous, but this is how I wanted to portray it back then.
I.
This summer I am breaking in new Doc Martens. They have platform soles, and the leather is thick and plasticky. The day I buy them I wear them to a pub in Clapham to watch England play Denmark in the Euros, with a new dress that is made of burnt orange mesh and patterned with cursive flowers. Drops of beer spatter onto the tops of the boots and stay there, glinting in the fluorescent light of the toilet. There is a breathlessness about the evening; fervent hope and a glimmer of dread.
Kirsty and I don’t know what colour England is, and have to ask a guy at the table next to us, quietly so no one knows we’re imposters. She is wearing all blue, with big rings and a silky charity shop dress, and the snatch of light from the window illuminates her blonde curls. We don’t understand the game but we can see when the ball approaches the goal, and grip each other’s hands desperately. We don’t want to have to experience the journey home if England loses.
Vintage ephemera hangs from the pub ceiling dangerously close to our raised hands: taxidermy, model ships, bird cages and underground signs. When England scores for the first time, a nervous bartender rushes over and begs us to stop the objects swinging — if one thing falls down, they all will, she says. At halftime we wolf down sandwiches from the Sainsbury’s across the road and chug pints. The guys in football shirts start to argue with the referee through the screen, crowded around the TV like moths to a flame. At the winning goal, a roar goes up and salt and tequila hit the back of my throat, the slice of lime bursting in my mouth as we throw ourselves into jagged embraces. Polly’s little brother rolls me a limp cigarette and tells me it’s one of his first. We smoke it leaning against the wall outside, giddy and relieved, the air thick with tobacco and sweat and car horns.
II.
Isa and I take the nightbus from Lewisham to Moorgate. It’s midnight, and sitting on the top deck watching the streets blur past on either side of us feels like flying. Our legs are stretched out in front of us and our boots rattle against the windowpane. Isa asks me, mockingly, if I want to listen to Don’t Delete the Kisses. Behind us, a group of teenagers in leather jackets and white shirts with flowy sleeves talk about suffering.
Later, two women leave a pub smoking area and run across the road to catch the bus. They sit down across the aisle, all good posture and self-importance. The louder one is from a farming village in Germany. She talks about belonging in London; about how some people think they have more right to the city than others. It’s nothing to do with whether you were born here, she says, defensively, it’s about whether you’re searching for something. She reminds me a lot of a friend of mine, who is obsessed with the idea of belonging. I think someone probably once implied to her she will never truly know what it is to be a Londoner, and now she’ll be bitter about that forever. As Isa and I get off the bus, she is musing about the temporality of space.
We sit in an empty tube at Moorgate for an hour. Someone on the intercom is making a valiant effort to tell us why it’s not moving, but the voice splinters and fractures and I can only catch the names of stations. I hang off the overhead railings, like I did when I was younger and it was much easier to pull myself up. We play I Spy, and I read the internet discourse about Cat Person on dwindling 3G. My thoughts are lagging as the yellow light needles its way into my brain and I abandon trying to figure out my opinion on the morality of it all. My 3G gives up.
The train on the opposite platform is also going to King’s Cross and we hop back and forth between the two of them, wondering which will leave first. There’s a couple of guys and a girl who seem to know each other, but didn’t arrive together, doing the same. They’re not wearing masks and their smiles are broad and open. They remind me of the cast of Victoria. Every so often they beckon us frantically, but we’re so hung up on the idea of watching the other train slip away that we ignore them. They keep beckoning, and suddenly their train shudders and leaves. The last I see of them is one of the guys throwing up his arms in victory, laughing at us. We give up on our train and run up the stairs, unable to look back in case it leaves without us on it. The metal gates are closing as we leave the station. The night is humid and smells like hops and the last breaths of underground air. My card is rejected on the 214 but the driver ushers me on with a nod. My ankles are bleeding.
III.
Two of my friends break up. H cries to me down the phone, and my heart aches. We invite him over for dinner and he brings a bottle of wine they bought together, which we get rid of ceremonially over a stirfry I’ve made, swallowing down the memories for him. Later we walk down the canal to get some air, vaccine arms throbbing. We stare into the windows of houseboats and catch glimpses of leather sofas and smokey altars and steaming saucepans. The water is so still around them.
IV.
The streets of Camden Town smell like burnt sugar and rotting vegetables. Week after week we sit in The Hawley Arms, dishevelled and sweaty with cold pints on our pulse points and stolen rings on our fingers, or in the middle of Camden Lock, safe from the guys who yell at us from the towpath. “He knows your desires, he knows what you desire, the devil wants you to be like him,” the preacher at the crossroads cries. Everyone who walks past looks vaguely embarrassed.
V.
Bill is sitting on a bench outside Namaste in the blistering heat. I take his portrait and we talk about religion. He tells me he has given up on tattooing images. Now he only wants information inked on his skin.
VI.
In a cemetery somewhere near Marylebone after a blood test I sit on the arm of a bench and play a game with myself to outlast the rain. The sky gets darker and darker until it almost feels like night, and something tells me to leave. As soon as I get to the platform at Baker Street a torrential downpour ensues, spattering against the plastic roof and hitting the tracks. The water falls in a crisp, perfect rectangle. First the plague and now floods — I wonder what will come next.
I read the first pages of Year of the Monkey on the platform, and in the train, and at King’s Cross where I stand just inside the underground entrance and feel the rain on my bare arm, along with everyone else who didn’t think to bring an umbrella during a London summer. Over-caffeination makes everything fascinating, and I watch the blinking lights of construction vans and the waves crashing onto the curbside as buses drive through puddles for almost an hour, before I finally cave and buy an umbrella from the chemist.
VII.
In Camberwell on a hot Tuesday afternoon I duck into a pub to use the toilet. They’re playing Jolene, and snatches of it make their way underneath the bathroom door. In the cubicle next to me, a woman half-heartedly sings along. Her voice is hauntingly beautiful. At the sink we laugh with each other over nothing.
VIII.
I go to Camberwell often, for the churches and the green and the strange peace of the roof terrace of The Joiners Arms. Hunting for a camera battery, Tamzyn and I find ourselves in Butterfly Pharmacy which, according to its owner, Cash, is the oldest shop in the area. He tells us we have pretty eyes, shows us his collection of spiced rum and attempts to fix Tamzyn’s camera. His stories seem to have no end, and it feels as if we might never escape.
IX.
On my 21st everyone on the second floor of Hawley sings Happy Birthday, and a man whose face I never see brings me three drinks, kisses my head, then disappears, with the parting words, “I just really like birthdays.”
X.
This summer tastes like Hells lager, cigarettes and buttered toast, and feels like leaning backwards off the balcony as a freight train chugs past.
XI.
Judith was named after St Jude, she tells me, the patron saint of hopeless cases. She looks as delicate as she is fierce, but between her mask and the noise of the road her words get lost. She says something about skateboarders showing off; about a grandson in America who she’s never met; about throwing stones into the sea.
SONGS THAT WERE ON REPEAT, SUMMER 2021:
The whole of Blue Weekend by Wolf Alice, but especially Delicious Things
Crowded City by Black Honey
Born Slippy (Nuxx) by Underworld
Valerie by The Zutons
South London Forever by Florence + The Machine
Dreams by The Cranberries
The Downtown Lights by The Blue Nile
Drive That Fast by Kitchens Of Distinction
Just Like Heaven by The Cure
The Promise by When In Rome
Love Is A Losing Game by Amy Winehouse
Summertime by Lucia & The Best Boys
This is so beautiful, you have such a way with words and such talent for photography. I really loved this rich portrait of your life, thank you for welcoming me in ❤️
You write so beautifully ✨