Mes Dépêches

London’s skies these days are full of color.

Grey, black, ash, gunmetal, charcoal, stone. Generally wet, occasionally soaked, at times sopped with bouts of full-on ground saturation.

We don’t pay the license for the tele, and so are stuck with what the rabbit ears will pick up. Today, and usually for me, that means reruns of Columbo on some service of Channel Five.

Lounging as gracefully as a walrus on the furnished apartment’s trademark undersized couch, several episodes in, suddenly my sweat glands are pulsing to life. It couldn’t be… the sun?

Out the window, Notting Hill’s houses of mauve and mint and pink and powder bathe in light, the trees flush with green as God himself swipes the clouds clear to Scotland to reveal the continued existence of Toy Story skies over the King’s town.

I still opt for a raincoat as I gallop down four flights of stairs, desperate to catch what few precious moments sans rain this day may bring. The coat doesn’t help to calm the sweat glands, but we’ll be drowning again shortly so it’s a sacrifice worth making. Hopefully no one gets too close.

Somehow the crowd has beaten me to Portobello Road and it’s slammed, the line from Gail’s stretching to the pay toilets. Londoners are now fully Pavlovian, any hint of even 15 minutes of pleasant weather bringing out the crowds for a full, if accelerated, Sunday roast in the park. Or, today, a £6 coffee at a chain coffee shop to accompany a walk through the Julia Roberts-inspired tourist trappings of this eclectic strip.

Here in Notting Hill, along the Kings Road or down the Piccadilly to the walls of the City, the weight of 1966 is heavy, the burden of great memories and days past, when perhaps the sun shone a little more. A mildew spreads, in a literal sense coating so many of the dated structures from that grand era, but also on the mood of the town, as folks are worn down by months-long waits at the National Health Service, universally piss-poor customer service, American work hours for Salvadoran salaries and zero optimism that this could ever be better.

Some of this was predictable, sure. That a quirky North Sea island spent a couple of centuries ruling the world seems nonsensical now, and the transition from unlikely world-ruler back to quirky North Sea island was both ugly and somehow surprising to those who should’ve always known that showing up to foreign lands, extracting their wealth and waving goodbye was hardly sustainable. At some point, people shoot back.

A lady is hawking rubber ducks at the Portobello market, one in regal red with a crown, ostensibly a little quacking King Charles III.

I suppose in the tumult of the prior two Charleses there was a bit of doubt in the country’s prospects, as well, and the country’s best days were certainly ahead of those.

Similarly there was burned crust in the halcyon days of 1966, as the Beatles and Three Lions reigned supreme, where even this fashionable road was dumpy enough to attract the counter-culture. Not until David Cameron and Hugh Grant deigned it worthy of their respective presences did the tone of the neighborhood’s colorful houses shift from free spirit to Frieze.

So we shan’t give up hope, nor bet against the Brits. But someone needs to find a hell of a scrub brush. And pray for sun.

Labour appears poised to come to power with an empty purse and full mandate, a castrated economy and a brutal cost of living crisis. The Tories certainly were not bereft of skilled leadership, but own-goals to lock in populist votes – neatly falling in three B’s: Brexit, Boris and the “mini” Budget – turned a competent Britain into a global hoot.

God help the French and Americans, who have yet to find a sufficiently milquetoast Keir Starmer to start the shift back to normalcy.

Actually, however unsatisfying it may be for the rest of the world, maybe that’s the salve to what ails this soggy isle. Donald Trump came to power months after the Brexit referendum and promptly blew up the notion of globalism, perhaps softening Brexit’s short-term blow at least a touch as the UK was hardly the only country rapidly put into a defensive position on trade.

Another Trump election feels imminent, as does Madame Le Pen’s rise in France, which may well doom cooperation between the two predominant powers of the European Union. Could Germany be put into a position of needing an establishment ally in London? Or could an independent Britain be thrust right back into its comfortable postwar throne as the sober, well-dressed mutual friend sitting between belligerent drunks in America and Europe?

I’ve wandered the length of the narrow road, up the hill and past the pub and to the point where it narrows to barely a driveway as it approaches Notting Hill Gate. I’m an outsider, admittedly, but it’s impossible to not love this place, its vine-choked doorways and bright, well-watered blooms.

The sun attempts to set but is willed to hold in place an extra minute or two today, as though it realizes it’s been lazy lately, or at least spending too much time elsewhere.

It’s been a rainy, cold winter in London. Is Thursday’s election the start of spring?