On being someone who does not know where her towel is.
3rd October 2005
I lost my towel. I also lost my voice, but that was less of an impediment to going swimming. For 24 hours I joined the ranks of the mentally confused, adrift in life, floating around London like an autumn leaf in a pond. I think that I left the towel (the only one that I brought with me) at a rowing club in Hammersmith, but how can you be sure?
It matched my feelings about London in general. This morning I flowed over the Thames in a thin black one-way stream on London Bridge. Hundreds of people, converging for part of their morning journey to work, only to diverge again on the other side. One women, dressed in white with a pale face to match, faced the flow and took one slow deliberate step forward every few seconds, defying the stream to drown her. They ignored her, this island of independence. I don't know why she was there.
I don't really know why I'm here. It's sufficiently alien and yet similar enough to my previous life to make me question my existence in this city. I don't want to be a journalist. It's reasonably interesting, and not particularly hard, but it's really short term. I've passed the steep learning curve of the first week and the only lessons left are those of experience and time. If they don't fit into the next three weeks I'll never know. But I want to be back in the lab. Even if I have my reservations about my lab project, at least it's fulfilling a longer-term aim. And I know what I'm doing and why. And it does have longer-term significance. Journalism seems so transient, here today and gone next week, so superficial. And yet it is the glue that holds society together. Somebody reads this stuff. I know, because apparently in a table of about 75 universities that I compiled last week, I left out Swansea. And Somebody from Swansea noticed. Now I have to explain why their university did not merit being in my table. Probably it was because I thought it insignificant. But apparently it's not insignificant to Somebody. I was probably bored, fed up of numbers, and I judged that it hadn't justified its existence on the page. And now I have to justify myself. To sit in the centre ground, edges perfectly symmetrical and matching, neat and tidy, explaining why I omitted Swansea.
I know few people here. Those that I do I've spent some time with. But they're busy, established. And I would like to spend my evenings doing sport, anyway, meeting new people. That's harder written than done though - there are few clubs within a reasonable distance and those that there are mostly play or train on weekends. There's only really the swimming pool, and for that you need a towel.
I decided not to tolerate this state of affairs and so at 7pm today, just beneath the London Eye, I chose my mission for the evening. To buy a towel. Mostly, this proved to be a test of my knowledge of London and mostly, I passed. Only consulting the A to Z once, I went over the Golden Jubilee Bridge, past Trafalgar Square and towards Leicester Square, performing an intricate pirouette via Covent Garden and the Strand to arrive back at the base of Nelson's column and then out up to Tottenham Court Road on to Oxford Street. I nearly succeeded twice. On Longacre, there was a Marks and Spencer, open still at 8pm but it was one without a household department. In Covent Garden there was a Disney store, but they had apparently sold their last towel a month before. A towel may say a lot about a person. An M&S towel would have been a mark of respectability, and the Disney towel would have conveyed the character of the cartoon on it. Luckily, all the overdone British souvenir shops lacked towels, otherwise I would have been drying myself off with a Union Jack for the next few weeks, probably glowing pink at embarrassment at the crudity of the statement. But there were no towels to be had. At last, on Oxford Street I thought that I would have my chance, but discovered that all the major department stores had closed at about the time the search was initiated. Abandoning all hope of restoring my mental state to equilibrium, to a condition of stability in life, organised and in control, I wandered along to Bond Street station. But, just before I got there, there was a Boots, open until 9pm. A last chance then? So I wandered in and around, past Christmas gifts (already!), low calorie sweets, past shop assistants restocking the shelves, chatting with accents so strong that I could only just understand them… but no towels… I can't see them anywhere and they're over there. With glee I ogled the choice of "bales" of towels, and picked the blue ones.
So now, I have not one towel, but three. Is that safer or more complicated? To prove my ability to be in control of my life, do I just have to know where one is at any given moment? Or do I have to be able to follow all three in their wanderings around my life and my swimming kit bag?
On a practical level, I'm sure that it doesn't matter. I can once again go swimming, although I still don't have any particular aim (apart from staying fit) and I'm still very much on my own as a piece of flotsam. But at least this piece of flotsam can dry itself off when it finds a way out of the pond and a more settled existence.
