London Tourist

NFA Day 54

...and so I find myself back in London, currently gigless.....well, aside from a three-dayer with another show in Germany in December. It was all politics, my friends, which resulted in the two weeks notice given....yep, was well looking forward to six months of steady work next year, but after five months and with merely three weeks to go before the winter break, not even memorising the pad and playing it better than the guy who wrote it, nor my impeccable professionalism and conduct, could keep me in the keys 1 chair of 'Dancing In The Streets'. And so last Saturday it was farewell to my newfound friends, the company I felt I'd only just gelled with, the people I was looking forward to working with for a while yet, for another itinerant return to London for a while.
The last couple of visits I've felt like a real tourist, compelled to take photographs of stuff I come across - a church with a dragon windvane, or a pedestal with a golden eagle on it on the other side of the river.
About a fortnight ago the show was in Dartford, about a forty-five minute train ride away, and on a particular commute around dusk, the train trundled over Charing Cross bridge, the sun was at just about the right level and there it was, the semi-fabled Waterloo Sunset, where the pallid grey gloom of the buildings that face the river were suddenly awash with pink. In three years, London had never appeared so beautiful.
But like most things in this town, blink and you miss it...that late summer sweetness has given way to the cold and gloom, when this place becomes real depressing, and I'm enjoying being a visitor once again, especially in recent times keeping company with a certain pale-skinned, freckled girl with a mop of black curly hair and shimmering green eyes. We're off somewhere totally new this Thursday, somewhere I've always wanted to go, and if you're lucky, noble reader, I may even write here about it!...