Greek Affairs of the Heart. Travellers in Greece. An Occasional Series 4. Dilys Powell

Dilys Powell

I made a mess of getting to know Dilys Powell (1901-1995). I encountered her first through the book she published last about Greece, Villa Ariadne (1973), and then read forward in time, with An Affair of the Heart (1957). I found both of these books beguiling, but also problematical and even, in places, off-putting. Villa Ariadne was written during the Colonels’ dictatorship but doesn’t even allude to the political travails of the country. An Affair of the Heart covers Greek politics in the immediate aftermath of the Dekemvriana, the Communist uprising in Athens in December 1944, but does so from a surprisingly angular, partisan and emotional point of view. From these two books, I gained the impression of a writer who could live only in a classicist-idealist’s view of what Greece was and is.

Nevertheless, I persisted and am glad I did. Early on in my time as ambassador in Greece, I read The Traveller’s Journey is Done (published 1943, but written in 1939); more recently, I’ve tackled Remember Greece (1941). This last book has particularly caused me to rethink my views on Powell’s writing about Greece and, indeed, to re-read all of the books, taking them in the order in which she wrote them. This I strongly recommend to anyone who wants to see Greece through Powell’s eyes. It sets this, in some ways, eccentric writer about Greece in a more sympathetic perspective.

 

Humfry Payne

Dilys Powell had a rich, long-lasting and complex relationship with Greece. She encountered the country first in 1926, on honeymoon after marrying the classical archaeologist Humfry Payne (1902-1936), whom she had met at Oxford where she was reading modern languages. Payne held a studentship at Christ Church Oxford, and from April 1926 was also the assistant curator of coins at the Ashmolean Museum. After their marriage Powell worked as a journalist in London. In the summers of 1927, 1928 and 1929, Payne excavated on Crete, with a base at the Villa Ariadne, the house built at Knossos by its famous excavator Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941). Powell spent some part of those summers with him, getting to know Greece and absorbing fragments of its language and customs. In 1929, at what would now be thought an astonishingly young age, Payne was appointed as Director of the British School at Athens. Powell joined him for some part of every year of his directorship, not least at the dig for which he is most famous. From 1930 to 1933, across four summer campaigns, Payne led the British School’s excavations at the sanctuaries of Hera Akraia and Limenia at Perachora, not far from Loutraki to the north-west of the Corinth Canal. The finds were of great importance, but Payne would not live to see their full publication; he died in Athens in 1936 of septicaemia, spread from a small wound on the knee, at the age of just 34.  Powell buried him at the cemetery of Mycenae, where his body remains today.

Sanctuary of Hera, Perachora

Powell was not a classicist and had not learned modern Greek at university. But the years spent with Payne in Greece had made an irrepressible mark on her: she returned independently to the country every year from 1937 to 1939, when the first signs of war appeared in Europe. During the war, she was recruited to the Political Warfare Executive in London: part of the British Government’s propaganda effort; there her expert knowledge of Greece involved her in Greek affairs. She returned to the liberated country in 1945, and made further journeys subsequently in 1953, 1954, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1962, 1966 and 1971. She was undoubtedly well travelled in Greece and got to know much of the country well; she formed friendships with the ‘ordinary’ Greek people she met, with archaeologists of several nationalities, including Greek archaeologists, and with some of the British expat community, including the diplomatic community.

 

John Pendlebury

The books reflect the long evolution of her experiences and knowledge of Greece. The Traveller’s Journey is Done is an account of her life in Greece with Humfry Payne, centring on the time spent at the British School at Athens and at Perachora. Remember Greece was part of the war effort; it not only reflects lyrically on Powell’s knowledge of Greece, but also offers a primer of the geography of Greece and its politics since 1922, calling on Brits not to forget Greek heroism in the 1940-1 war with Italy and looking forward to the country’s liberation from Nazi Occupation. An Affair of the Heart replays some of the moments of the earlier books, but tells more specifically of Powell’s estrangement from Greece in 1945, when she revisited the country in the closing stages of the war and found it hard to deal with the sharp polarisations of political opinion in the country; she found it even harder to handle the blame that many attached to Britain’s role in the civil strife. She stayed out of Greece for the best part of the following decade, until in 1953 she was invited to join a delegation to negotiate in Athens an Anglo-Greek Cultural Convention. That visit rekindled her love affair with Greece, and she started visiting regularly again. In 1954, the Sunday Times sent her to cover the pioneering maritime archaeology being conducted offshore of Chios. In her last book, Villa Ariadne, Powell returned to what was always the core of her encounters with Greece: the world of British archaeologists. Payne had dug on Crete, at Eleftherna and Knossos, and knew Sir Arthur Evans well. Villa Ariadne is in part a biography of Evans, at home in Oxford and on Crete, in part an account of his pioneering work at Knossos. But the second major figure of the work is John Pendlebury (1904-1941), one time curator of Knossos, expert in the general archaeology of Crete, and war hero, who was executed by the Nazis during their invasion of Crete in 1941. The book tells his story in detail, but also provides a broader account of the Resistance on Crete and of Powell’s subsequent efforts to meet the key figures in the Greek Resistance.

 

Each of the four books has high value, even if for me the first two are the best. Although written in the third person with Powell appearing as ‘Elizabeth’ and her husband as ‘Payne’ – an odd attempt to achieve, perhaps, a detached narrative voice in what is a very personal memoir, The Traveller’s Journey is Done is in essence a story of two love affairs: one between Powell and Payne, and the other between Powell, Payne and Greece. Here and in Remember Greece Powell gives a compelling, often lyrical account of interwar Greece. She captures brilliantly, I think, Athens in its seasons:

 

In winter Athens withdraws into itself; wind shouts down the dark hilly streets, restaurants open doors to show bright lights, cafés are snug and full of smoke. But on summer evenings the city puts out blossoms. The men, in summers before the war, left off their black felt hats and their dark suits (made, if they were well-to-do, of English cloth); everybody wore a linen or a raw silk suit, and even the taxi-drivers fanned themselves with boaters. At midday the sunlight was white-hot; screwing up their eyes behind dark glasses, the Athenians walked on the shady side of the street. In the afternoon the place was asleep. The shops put down their shutters for three hours. The conductor snored in his bus at the terminus. The masons, the carpenters, the plasterers left their tools lest they should be summonsed for breaking the peace of the siesta. Rich and poor sprawled on their beds in darkened rooms. Even the society busybody barred her house to callers, even her servants could rest. But as the sun slanted down towards Salamis, and Hymettos turned to rose-colour, young men and girls sauntered out of their homes to take the air…[1]

 

But she is also alert to the changes that she witnessed in the capital during the interwar years:

 

Athens…has always since I have known it been a city with the air of a capital, gay, easy, prosperous-looking. But in 1926 the transformation from a nineteenth-century Balkan town to a modern European city was still in progress. Occasional horse-cabs still shambled through the streets, the horses wearing a necklace of blue beads against the evil eye, and taxis were still not a matter of course. There were few and poor buses; the centre of Athens was served, as much of it still is, by trams. The streets and pavements, except in the middle of the city, were full of pot-holes. There was no adequate water supply, and the best drinking-water was sold by the jar, brought in carts from springs outside Athens.[2]

 

She writes lyrically about life in the countryside, recognising the hardship and isolation of peasant lives and the challenge of travel in such a mountainous country. The patterns of agricultural life had not changed for centuries:

 

The life of the countryside flows on, rhythmic, measured, tranquil. In autumn and in spring the earth is sown. Already in May in the lowlands the corn is yellow, and men and women, girls and boys, reap the fields. If they have far to go from the village, they may camp out for days. In the summers when the British School was excavating the Heraeum of Perachora on the point opposite Corinth, we would sometimes hear voices at dusk murmuring in the fields behind our tents: a family from the village six miles away, tethering the mules, and lighting a fire, and settling down to sleep. The corn is threshed on the circular stone threshing-floors beside the fields; the Greeks give to these threshing-floors the name that they give also to a halo round the moon. The sheaves are strewn thickly over the floor, a pair of mules are harnessed and driven round and round it; behind them, like a surf-rider, bumps the driver, poised on his foothold. Sometimes a woman takes charge; and then, perhaps, a tiny child will be whirled round, standing between her ankles and gripping her bare legs.[3]

 

She was aware of extensive poverty and hunger in the countryside and of their impact on the lives and expectations of villagers. Outsiders, like the British School, might bring employment to such communities and, as local villagers hoped, transform their longer-term economic prospects. This certainly seemed true of the hoteliers at a popular site like Mycenae; Powell kept track of the progress of one particular family there across the decades. But even at isolated Perachora, the community was able to build a small museum (hoping that the Heraion finds would be repatriated from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens) and roads were eventually built, to bring tourists and scholars to the site (I myself revisited the site a couple of weeks ago - see my photo above). 

 

Powell’s eye and sympathies have a wide angle to them. At the same time, she learnt about Greece and Greeks from the very particular and specialised milieu of classical archaeology. This was a milieu focused on pre-Christian antiquity. She learnt and absorbed a lot: stratigraphy, pots, tools, votive offerings, the lay-out of ancient shrines, the settlements around them, and so on. She was, however, more aware than her husband appears to have been that this was a narrow world, and not the world in which contemporary Greeks actually lived. She knew that contemporary classicists could be condescending about the Christian, Byzantine centuries and their impact on mores, values, beliefs; the shape and architecture of settlements and of lives. But despite this, she never really learned very much about Byzantium or had much interest in it (she acknowledges this as a failing in An Affair of the Heart), and seems to have understood little or nothing about Orthodoxy (though she does cover the basic rhythms of a Greek Easter in Remember Greece, p.114f.); she appears to have had no religion of her own. 

 

She did, however, learn something of the febrile vibrancy of Greek politics. Her first visit to Greece took place under the Pangalos dictatorship: she noted with some irony the excellent road he had built from Athens to Eleusis, where he ‘had a villa’, and described the absurdity of the dictatorship as far from ‘reassuring’:

 

Next the Dictator busied himself with public morality. It was the time of short skirts. In Greece at least, he declared, no woman should walk about with a skirt more than a regulation number of inches above the ground. The police were instructed to measure any doubtful legs; one day, unfortunately, they investigated the skirts of a young lady of good family, and amid the uproar the decree was noiselessly withdrawn.[4]

 

She was present for the failed Plastiras coup of 1933 and the failed Venizelos coup of 1935. In Remember Greece, she sets out a brief summary of political events from 1922 until the outbreak of the Greco-Italian War in 1940. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she had an ambivalent view of Metaxas, whom, on the positive side, she saw as responsible for the rearmament programme that enabled the Greeks to resist Mussolini. Remember Greece closes with a chapter summarising how Greeks regained their freedom from Ottoman hands and went on to create a modern state.  About 1940, she has this to say:

 

The national identity which had been preserved through centuries with so much tribulation was threatened again, the liberty which had been won was again in danger. For the Greeks this was indeed ‘total’ war: the total war of the free people of mountain and sea, the shepherds and fishermen, the men who work in fields and vineyards and olive-groves, against the men of steel and fire: the creators against the destroyers; life against death. They chose life. We need not fear, any more than they feared, the extinction of the vital spirit. Their country will live again, and they with it. In the words of Pericles: ‘Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, escaped not from their fear, but from their glory.’[5]

 

Heady words, written when Powell was working in London for the Political Warfare Executive (the first part of the quotation reminds me vaguely of Ritsos’s The Lady of the Vineyard). And yet, war and the heroism it brought forth was an evidently unwelcome intrusion of the political into Powell’s world. She generally avoided politics and wanted to play no part in them. After the war, she hoped to escape from political issues. This is very clear from the book she published in 1957, An Affair of the Heart. Her visit to Athens and Thessaloniki in 1945 was, for her, a disaster: an ‘estrangement’; she found herself ‘quite unprepared’ for the mood of the country: ‘a country full of rage’.[6] She found herself arguing vehemently – in the cities and in the villages – with liberals, conservatives and communists alike about responsibility for the civil war, and was clearly shocked that all sides tended to blame the British (though for different reasons). Perhaps this reaction of hers was inevitable. She had spent the wartime years writing propaganda for the wartime effort; the country she loved had been liberated and, as she saw it, properly kept out of communist hands. She was not in the least prepared for the reality of civil discord and the strong and hostile emotions aroused on all sides. She decided that it was ‘time for me to get Greece out of my blood’.[7] 

 

But, as already mentioned, she was called back to Greece eight years later and, the civil war decisively won, restarted her ‘affair of the heart’. From this point on, her relationship with Greece became a non-political affair: the final two parts of An Affair of the Heart and the whole of Villa Ariadne are, in effect, exercises of nostalgia, tempered and disciplined by Powell’s continuing contacts with the country and its people. During the mid-1950s, she re-established contacts with her friends in Perachora; from 1958 onwards, she returned to Crete and renewed her connexions with the British School at Knossos. On Crete, she became increasingly keen to tell the story of the Fall of Crete in 1941 and the subsequent Resistance in the mountains, led by the Greeks themselves and the British Special Operations Executive. In both cases, Powell’s efforts to re-engage with Greece took the form, not just of enquiry and research, but also of empathetic association through hard physical effort. Inspired by the walks that she and Payne had made in the 1920s and 1930s, Powell took to her feet, becoming one of England’s legendary Greek mountain-walkers.

 

In September 1953, she walked a third of the way from Lidoriki in Phokis to Nafpaktos on the Gulf of Corinth; and the following month, she walked much of the way – often in the rain – from Ioannina to Metsovo across the Pindus.[8] In 1959 on Crete, she decided to walk over Mt Ida (‘Psiloreitis’) from Nithavris to Anoyeia, in loose emulation of the route taken by the British kidnappers of General Kreipe, the Nazi commander of Crete:

 

One wants, of course, to find out for oneself. One is curious to know what the terrain is really like – how desperate the distances, how steep the ascents and descents. Imagination alone can never conjure up the sensation of the mountains; you need the aching thighs, the thinning air, the stones under your feet.[9]

 

For me this intrepid mountain-hiking is one of the reasons to love Dilys Powell and to give her, as I did in a talk to the Benaki Museum in 2016, her due place in the pantheon of true British travellers in Greece.[10] She was gutsy and unyielding (she was 57 when she tackled Mt Ida), and she responded with raw honesty and deeply lyrical sensibility to the harshness and beauty of the Greek landscape:

 

I staggered on, zigzagging upwards, gasping for breath. When I was allowed a rest I dropped to the ground without the energy to take off my knapsack. No water, no springs anywhere, only ridge upon ridge. The cliff was behind us now, but in front I saw only the surge of the mountains, like a sea of petrified waves. Yet, in this wilderness, arid, trackless – without a guide one would be irretrievably lost – there were obstinate blossoms: pale dwarf tulips flushed with pink, their petals curling open to show a golden heart; and, its greenish-white trumpet crumpling round the yellow pistil, the tiny arum which grows on Mount Ida.[11]

 

Powell’s love affair with Greece was a long affair, which had tempestuous moments and moments of unhappiness, doubt and despair. But it was undoubtedly an affair of the heart, an affair of total surrender. For all their unevenness these four books count; they should be read and re-read, not just for what they tell us about philhellenic sentiments of the past but also for their inspiration to pick up the rucksack, to tie up the bootlaces and to walk today in Greece.

 

John

10 July 2022

 

[1] The Traveller’s Journey is Done (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1943), p.38. 

[2] Remember Greece (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1941), p.66

[3] op.cit., 111.

[4] Traveller’s Journey, p.23f.

[5] Remember Greece, p.181f.

[6] An Affair of the Heart (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957), p.28f.

[7] op.cit., 55.

[8] op.cit., p.79-84; p.110-120.

[9] Villa Ariadne (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), p.181.

[10] J. Kittmer, ‘Περπατώντας στην Ελλάδα: Τοπία / Αφηγήματα’, in M. Diamanti (ed.), Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ: Και το ταξίδι συνεχίζεται (Athens: Μουσείο Μπενάκη, 2017): p.71

[11] Villa Ariadne, p.193f.

Recovering a Whole Life

Here on the Yorkshire coast conditions are changeable. The wind strikes up suddenly, in urgent gusts. Clouds appear, as if from nowhere, and scud. A sky that only a few minutes ago was lustrously blue is now turbulent. The temperature drops. Out in the garden, the reader shrugs his shoulders. It may change again in a few minutes. Perseverance! A drop of rain? Τίποτα! So what? After a while, the goose flesh calms and the sun shines once more. The al fresco book regains its attraction. Concentration returns.

These mutable, unsettled weather patterns can be frustrating, but there is a vitality here to the climate that isn’t true of London, where low, grey clouds hang over the Thames Valley for weeks, causing Londoners the sort of mental depression that may lock itself in for whole seasons of the year. In the summer, our days are longer here than in the south, but our temperatures are lower. After twenty years of nurturing plants in my small garden in Tooting, I am adapting my expectations to later and less dramatic growth. Here my paeonies are yet to open; the delphiniums edge very slowly to the sky: a northern hesitation perhaps about the unfettered skyscraper, the ostentatiously showy.

 

****

 

Twenty minutes’ brisk walk to the edge of the village and across the fields brings one to land’s end. The sky opens like a clam. The sea too is changeable here. Some days, the walker feels its anger and strength, even from the cliffs. But on a calm day, whether the tide is in or out, the dark surface is glassy: in no way like the Aegean, but still surprisingly at rest, ostensibly innocent. North of Scalby Ness the beaches are rocky, the cliffs – while less friable than those below Flamborough – are prone to dramatic erosion. This is a Jurassic coastline, good for fossil hunters. 

Crook Ness toward Scarborough headland

At Crook Ness, a rough path, leading through an ancient ravine to a tight and steep concrete staircase, takes the walker down to the beach. At this time of the year, the path is flanked with a riot of red campion and cow parsley. The air buzzes with bees and is thick with flying insects of all shapes and sizes. Keep your mouth closed! Still, it’s a great relief for one who worries about the absence today of the flies, bees, wasps and daddy-longlegs of childhood. The view on the beach is majestic. On one side the restless sea rising to the horizon; on the other, the indentations of the coastline – jagging in and out all the way to the dramatic headland on which the great keep of Scarborough Castle keeps watch over us all.

 

****

 

The outer bailey at Scarborough Castle

That keep is particularly spectacular at this time of year because, in its immediate vicinity, it looks over a swaying field of wildflowers, stretching from the curtain wall that encloses the inner bailey all the way to the cliff edge and the Roman signal station. Springtime brings great joy in the countryside, and here wherever plants are allowed to grow wild they do so with abandon: on cliff edge, on the wayside, along the old railway track and, most attractively, in the castle’s outer bailey. 

 

Since the flowering started in February, it has been a pleasure to reacquaint myself with names lost since childhood: viper’s bugloss, birdsfoot trefoil, herb Robert, cornflower, cow slip, red campion, to say nothing of the ubiquitous cow parsley, dandelion, celandine, wild garlic, buttercup, red clover, forget-me-not. The castle grounds are a tangle of white, yellow, red and blue wildflowers, jostling alongside elegant and wispy grasses – all of them seemingly impervious to salty sea air. My task for the next few weeks is to learn the typology of those grasses and to put names to the wildflowers I don’t recognise. 

Scarborough harbour and town; the South Bay

Beneath Henry II’s great keep, in a grid plan that arcs gently along the contour, down to the South Bay, stretches the settlement he founded: Scarborough itself. This is, in origin, a great mediaeval port-town: one that has seen countless reinventions over the years. We will return there in subsequent blogs.

 

****

 

At the end of the month, it will be five years since my professional career ended. In June 2017, I was unhappy in my job in the Foreign Office and needed to finish my PhD (the clock was running away from me). The Foreign Office, however, refused my application for special unpaid leave and I had no option but to resign. But I didn’t intend to leave the civil service for good. When I finished my PhD, I knocked at the Foreign Office’s door to examine the possibility of return, only to discover not only that that return would be next to impossible, but that my own life had moved on. Compromises I made throughout my professional career no longer seemed wise or achievable. 

Outside the straitjacket, it has become possible to think again and to engage in the real stuff of a lifetime, what the Benedictine writer Dom. David Foster calls ‘a recovery of our whole lives and a reorientation of our way of looking at them and living them’. Now in my mid-fifties, I have this exciting task ahead of me. My return in January to Yorkshire, my πατρίδα / patrida, is at the heart of that. It has been a good start.

 

John

9 June 2022

On Leaving London

We are always leaving London. It’s a cosmopolitan and restless place. It sucks us in - from the English shires, from the other nations of the UK, from countries overseas - and, when it has turned us into Londoners, releases us to spread Londonism - a loose creed of heart and mind - into the furthest reaches of the globe. We may later return, we may not; but we will have been stamped with the seal of this vast, busy metropolis, that stretches on either bank of the Thames beyond where the unaided eye can see, and London will have changed us. 

I first left London five years after coming here. I was 31 and full of the knowledge and experience I had gained. In those five years, I had learned about labour-market economics, aspects of British social security, departmental budgeting, and how social and employment policy was done across the European Union. I felt quite the expert. And I had worked hard on my French and my Greek. Perhaps even more formatively, I had learned how to co-operate with others in a complex administrative system. I had been a junior Minister’s private secretary, finessing his speeches, checking the work coming to him from the department, communicating back what the Minister wanted, sitting late hours in the civil servants’ box in the Commons at adjournment debates, carrying his bags on overseas visits. I had listened, absorbed and learned. I had discovered how to work ferociously hard and to move things on, while also enjoying what London had to offer culturally and socially. And in 1997, I witnessed the change of Government, from Conservative to Labour, from the privileged vantage of the Minister’s private office. In the first week of the Blair Administration, I came out at work, confident that London’s liberal cosmopolitanism was now politically endorsed, at one with the mood of the whole country, and that the lives of gay people really would now change. In London - a city where one can be both anonymous and gregarious - I had finally become me.

 

Four years as a negotiator for the UK in Brussels followed. This was the happiest time in my professional career. I loved negotiations and, if I may boast a little, was pretty good at them. I met my husband. I had a religious experience and started to regain my Christian faith. When I returned to London at the end of my posting, I understood that my Londonism was now thoroughly Europeanised. This did not set me at odds with London but was perfectly complementary to it - indeed, was, as I now realised, an essential aspect of Londonism. London, on behalf of the UK as a whole, was playing a global game, open to ideas and peoples from across the world, not least those in its hugely important European hinterland. 

 

I spent the next few years angling for and doing European jobs in the home and diplomatic services in London, while broadening my policy knowledge into global peacekeeping, environmental, agricultural and regulatory matters. I served as the Principal Private Secretary for a Cabinet Minister, and in 2010 watched, from a vantage even more privileged than in 1997, a reversal of the political change that had happened thirteen years earlier. In London in these years, I plugged away at my French, learned some Russian and undertook serious study in modern Greek literature. I didn’t feel like a ‘rootless’ cosmopolitan, a person of nowhere: I felt like a cosmopolitan Londoner, an Englishman, a Brit, a European, proud of where I had come from (my roots in the north of England have never withered), who I was and had become, and what I was contributing, however modestly, to national life. After a while, I wondered where I might head next. 

 

So I left London again. This time, January 2013, I headed to Greece. I had had a long love affair with Greece, since my teenage years, and had long wanted to live there. Of course, my posting was not primarily (or even secondarily) an opportunity to deepen my own love of Greece, though it did present that opportunity, but was a demanding, public, representational job, leading a large, dispersed embassy in an era of austere budgetary restraint. It would be a challenge to identify, protect and advance the interests of my own country at a time of political and financial crisis in Greece. After what was nearly twenty years in London, I felt I knew my country very well and was confident in my own patriotism and in my ability to project Britain constructively in Athens and across Greece. I wanted Greek and British relations to flourish, hoping to bring Greeks and Britons into closer friendship and mutual understanding. I set to it with enthusiasm.

 

Nothing prepared me for the shock of what happened in June 2016. When I returned to London five months later, at the end of my posting, I realised that London was in convulsion. London itself had not understood, until June 2016, that it had significantly parted company from much of the rest of the country. Londonism was a creed with an apparently more enthusiastic constituency in Berlin or Paris or Athens than in Yorkshire or Cornwall or Wales. I found myself doing a job I didn’t much like (at the fag-end of empire) in a political environment that had become profoundly hostile, and which now - in the mean spirit of the times - allowed me no viable concession for the overdue completion of my academic studies. It was a vortex of misery. So I left government service and broke the first of the links that had so attached me to London. The successful end of my studies broke another. Finding a position in a Greek shipping business yet another still. The pandemic which confined us all to our homes in March 2020 was the final severing of a sense of real connexion with London. I fell ill (not from Covid) and had to concentrate on regaining my health. In lockdown and subsequently, the city seemed to recede out of sight and mind. As we start (if we are now starting) to emerge from this two-year crisis, London seems to have shrunk, to have lost its way, to have been robbed of its creed, its sources of dynamism and to have found, as yet, no new role.

 

All this said, I am not deeply pessimistic about London or about the country. We clearly need time to work out again who we are as a people and where we want to head. That seems to me to be likely the work of the next generation. All the signs are that this Government and this governing party are not up to the job. The disrupters turn out to be mere wreckers. This task of rebuilding will require new people, new ideas, new ideals. But I bet that it will really happen, really take hold, in London, when the right people find themselves drawn to this place and create a convincing new dynamic between them. 

 

In the meantime, I am leaving London once more. This time, I’m returning home: to Yorkshire. I need to find myself again. And my country. In my roots. And I need to think hard about Londonism, its right and wrongs, its past mistakes and future trajectory. One thing is clear. I will not lose sight of all that nearly thirty years in London have meant to me. The friendships I have found here, the lessons London has taught me, the shining opportunities it has given me. In this restless, if now diminished, city the tides of the Thames ever rise and fall, shifting direction, now heading inland, now heading out to sea. I hope I leave one or two small footprints behind me, above the waterline.

 

John

13 January 2022