“A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many…”

T.S Eliot, Unreal City, The Waste Land, 1922.

Heads down. Eyes down. Heart down. Mood down. Its always down, here. Buckling down to work – the 8 til 8 – heading down underground, Day after day. Eyes fixed before our feet, feet fixed to the pavement as concrete step, by concrete step we trudge. Slipping past people with the outside turned down and inside turned up, tinny pulsing beats seeping out through ear canals the only clue of their desperate attempt to escape the brown fog. So many of us undone. So many….

In out. In out. Each nostril flare a tactic to avoid the inevitable sigh. Keep it short, shallow and sharp. Shallow and sharp. That always helps here.

Winter. Noon. The throbbing taxi carries me down Cannon Street. Down Walbrook, down King William. It’s a meeting I don’t want, with a trader looking to gamble on me. Clasping documents I shouldn’t see. Because they’ll let the fog seep in further, stop me getting out.

Saint Mary Walnooth looks over us as we shake hands courteously, both holding our breath, both biting our tongues. In the shadow of her cornices, her heavy eaves – we sit – the cold forcing its way through my clothes to bite at my skin.

That’s when I see. As, with a dead sound, she chimes the final stroke of nine. We are all corpses here. Rooted hard and fast. Stunted by the greasy air, the barren soil. And men like him, they plant us early, plant us deep. Reap and sow. But not me. This unreal city will not see me bloom another year.