Was I hallucinating? It was late Monday night and I was on the top deck of a No 277 London bus from Islington to Limehouse. As we rounded a junction I saw beneath us what looked like a sea of orange plastic. I blinked and pressed nose to window. Like a Chinese terracotta army, DayGlo plastic barriers — 6ft long and 3ft high, on black plastic legs — marched in all directions.
Some were wrapped round poles, barrels and temporary traffic lights. Some had formed themselves into an extensive island in the middle. Some had fallen over and been crushed beneath the wheels of passing traffic. Others lined sections of the intersecting roads or formed passageways leading nowhere, while in patches over the road and pavement, big square yellow plastic plates had been laid down as paving. Everywhere, orange traffic cones peppered the landscape.
The best sense I could make of this plastic cacophony in orange was that some public works were going on, and that a council health-and-safety officer had suffered some kind of mental breakdown on site. I made a note of the location: the junction of Dalston Lane and Graham Road, E8.
Yesterday I returned on foot, to make sure I hadn’t been dreaming. Indeed not. I counted. There are 187 orange plastic screens, 41 traffic cones, 35 yellow plastic paving slabs, approximately 17 painted tin signs, one mysterious yellow container and a Portaloo. So far as I can find any logic at all in this aesthetic carnage, it is that someone has decided that if you locate a pole or post, concrete- filled drum, temporary traffic light or even a pile of breeze-blocks, in a place accessible to the public, it must be ringed by DayGlo orange plastic screens — which serve only to double the size of obstructions so blindingly obvious that nobody unable to see them would be without a guide dog and white stick.
I shall never forget that midnight vision on a 277 bus. I sensed that it might be a metaphor for something, a parable. I wonder how close our civilisation is to losing itself within the maze of its own precautions?
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Show and tell
Discussing, on Sunday, a mutual acquaintance whose cosmetic surgery has become too noticeable, I was astonished by one friend’s response. “You’re out of date,” she said. “There’s no shame in it any more. Cosmetic surgery is a status symbol, an accessory. Some women would want you to notice.”
A friend who knows Iran chipped in: “In Tehran, one of the world’s cosmetic-surgery capitals, women sometimes sport a hint of bandage over the bridge of their nose, above the veil. They could hide it with the veil but, like a little lace lingerie, they want it to peep out.”
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All washed up
My washing machine is trying to get me. I caught it, just in time, last week. Having piled the laundry into the front-loader, put in the detergent and pressed Start, I though I’d just watch through the glass porthole for a moment, to check that all systems were go. Buzz. Slosh. Whirr. And that lovely grrrrrr sound. Round and round my clothes tumbled, bright colours swirling, a trouser-leg carouselling by, water swishing in the tubes, and the end of a white hankie waving, not drowning, as it passed.
Fifteen minutes later some internal warning mechanism jogged me. I was still squatting on my haunches, staring into the Hotpoint abyss, totally absorbed as the clothes churned around. A feeling of deep, deep calm had stolen over me. Nothing seemed to matter. And it was all just so ... interesting.
Thank heaven I surfaced. That thing was trying to hypnotise me, then (who knows?) spirit me away. It nearly happened once before, in a laundromat. Never again.
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Deathly hush
Charging along the pavement in Notting Hill the other evening, I was stopped by a stranger. Of mixed race, she was a little dishevelled and something in her demeanour spoke not of dull-wittedness but of personal dislocation. “Aren’t you Matthew Parris?” she asked, with a penetrating glance. I nodded. “I used to see you on television, years ago,” she said, “but I haven’t seen you since.” Then she stared hard at me, in silence for a beat. She had beautiful eyes. “How old you look now.” She smiled, not having meant this unkindly. “Goodbye,” she said.
I walked on, and she off into the night. It was like meeting Death, hurrying by, in the market place.