20. London Love Affair

Heidelberg, Sunday 7th April 1985

Soon as I arrived I realised how much of a European I am. How I’ll never come to terms with America, California-style at least. I feel more at home in Germany, where I hardly speak the language, than I did in LA or San Diego. Cobbled streets, tramcars, narrow bridges, barges on the river, people walking from place to place. I love all that. And air that you can breathe. In LA the air was so bad I found myself trying not to take deep breaths. I sort of sucked it in between my teeth. The locals talked about haze but my lungs screamed smog.

 

London, 8th May 1985, 50th Anniversary of VE Day
Went walkabout to the Cenotaph where there was a VE ceremony conducted by the United Nations Association, children in their national costumes putting flowers on the monument. A ceremony of reconciliation. Sweet, but you couldn’t hear the speakers above the traffic noise. On the way back here I was solicited by a gorgeous young lady outside the Cumberland Hotel – my God, do I look that desperate?!! I always think of great ripostes afterwards to the question “Do you want a girl?” but at the time I was so surprised I put my head down and walked on. It made me feel quite strange.

Thursday May 9th 1985

Last night I headed for the Greater London Council HQ by the Thames to watch the VE Day fireworks display. Fantastic. £50,000 worth of fireworks and it looked like it, the bangs reverberating round the central city and the fireworks reflected in the glass of the high-rise office blocks. Very spectacular.

I have been re-acquainting myself, when work pressure allows, with the sights, sounds and smells of London. Long walks through favourite places. The central city parks – St James’, Green Park, Hyde Park - are beautiful in the spring. Full of tourists and locals enjoying being out in the fresh air. And all the time so many memories and echoes from the past and such a familiarity with this city, bred of twenty years of living here and loving the place. Nothing much has changed physically, but I am so changed it is disconcerting. I can see the whiz-kid that I was in the sixties, part of Harold Wilson’s white-hot technological revolution, commuting to work in my company car, staff and budgets and contracts to manage, expense account lunches, hospitality allowance, a long-legged, mini-skirted personal secretary to lust after, all the goodies of the corporate life. So up myself it wasn’t true. Can feel in myself the continuity of the person I was then as though thirteen years away count for nothing. Up with the latest trends, avidly reading the newspapers and journals (God, it’s nice to have intelligent reading material so readily to hand), seeing the latest plays and films, all those heady things that great cities like this have to offer. Plus that unspoken understanding that you are at the centre of the universe. And yet I can also see that my intellectuality covered an emotional sterility, a lack of emotional development, of growing up. I needed New Zealand for that. Perhaps Mary's death even. The intellectual in me is a product of Europe but the humanity in me comes from my experience in the South Pacific. I suppose that's what I was looking for, was programmed for, in seeing the Pacific as a place where I could free myself from the status-conscious class-ridden crap of Europe and find a rich sensual emotionally-charged life. So, whereas my head can enjoy what is here, my heart and my soul are in New Zealand.