Rain, and other recent events [ FREE ]

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When the rain finally came, it was too late for some. And I was not ready for it.

A glance out of the window tells me that - thank goodness - the enormous zinnia that has been threatening to topple over under its own weight (despite my best efforts at staking) is still (just) standing.

London is wet. An alien view. Indeed, the tales of ‘it rained last night’ had seemed a optimistic myth to me over the last couple of weeks. By the time I was up and out and looking hopefully around at my thirsting garden there was no evidence of dampness, save on the leaves of an alchemilla mollis. Alchemilla - with raindrops hung around the edges of her crimped leaves like a string of diamonds - was the only witness. This morning though, it has rained. Beyond a reasonable doubt.

Proper, proper rain.

Once I can draw myself away from the window and this wet and welcome sight, I turn to the question: what did we used to wear when it rained? I cast about. I have nothing - no memory of how to dress for wet, and no clothes to hand that seem practical under the circumstances. It has been nothing but sack dresses and Birks for months now.

I dig out a pair of battered leggings and a long-sleeve tee pushed to the back of a drawer. Oh yes, I think, I remember now. I put on trainers and a jacket - remember those? - and head out with the dogs.

‘Head out’. Like it’s so easy. But I can only get Bella to go out onto a damp pavement (let alone into an ‘active rain’ situation) if I concoct an elaborate ruse. If I put them in the car and drive them - even two blocks - somewhere beyond our usual route, they will bound out of the car as if we have travelled through time and space and (rain or not) they need to explore this new land.

This suits me particularly well today. Can something be a routine if you have only done it three times? You tell me: for the last three mornings, Leo has been getting me up early. I don’t like this, but I have been making the most of it by taking the dogs, my laptop, and my appetite to a nearby bakery, and settling at a corner table tucked behind the giant Monstera.

Here I write - focused, diligent, incessant - until a nearby table annoys me enough to leave (current front runners: three gorgeous, blonde, Australian girls in lycra shorts. A close second: the little boy refusing to eat his croissant while his father continues to stress that time is short and they need to leave any moment, to which the little boy simply mutters over and over “not yet, not yet, not yet” before shouting “BOTTOM!” and laughing uproariously).

I realise that perhaps it is not only the dogs who are subject to an elaborate ruse. I have found a way to trick myself into focusing, and now I want to do the same thing every day.

The only difficulty with this new ‘routine’, if that’s what we’re calling it, is that I can’t afford the pastries. I mean not only that they expensive (worth every penny if you ask me) but that I so badly want to return to the waistline of my youth. If I could make peace with my expanding frame, then I could enjoy this hazelnut Pain Suisse even more. Which, as I write the words, seems impossible.

But then I have finally - finally - started to write (actually write) the introduction to a book.

You have heard it said by so many people before, all of them a damnsight more significant than I, but I have one of those brains that either does nothing at all, or - given the right conditions - could write a book in a day.

I have not written a whole book, though. It wouldn’t really be on to take up one of the few precious bakery tables for that amount of time. This is one of the last remaining cafes in London that allows both dogs and laptops.

Yesterday morning, with a few thousands words gathered up into a word count, I practically skipped home to keep writing.

But you try writing when seven men are hammering, drilling, yelling, clanging, clanking, and wrecking at the rice-paper-thin wall between them and you.

Do they work in ‘construction’? Destruction seems more apt. Over two days they have ripped out every part of the house - sacks and sacks and sacks and sacks of rubble, insulation, and rubbish. Doors, planks, enough piled up in the front garden that it seems a miracle the building is still standing. And yet today they begin again. Smash, rip, tear, chuck, bang, drill, shout.

I told you about my neighbour’s death last autumn, and then about the house clearance that followed. I didn’t tell you about the house coming up for auction several months later, and the many letters I subsequently received (and ignored) from the property developer purchaser about a party. Walls, I think? Party walls?

The same developer (or perhaps different ones, though you wouldn’t be able to tell from the end product) buys up these Peabody properties for little, rips out every inch of what is there, and replaces it with grey tile, wet room showers, and more spot lights than you would think could fit into a two-up-two-down. They pop another floor on top, and push out the sides into the garden. They chuck in Crittal doors and characterless chrome, and then the houses sit empty again until someone with a million plus pounds and no taste comes by and tries to make it ‘a home’.

For the last couple of years every Peabody-owned house on the estate (about 50% of the 1,200 properties) had scaffolding put up, solar panels installed, and scaffolding taken down, so I have considerable experience with the discordant percussion of nearby building works. But I have never lived immediately beside the process before. It feels a lot like being inside the process.

Living on a terraced street, in very old properties, I suppose this is all to be expected. I know I should try to be friendly to the several men who now peer into every window in my house (even the upstairs bathrooms!) and over the garden wall, but I am not inclined to treat them well. Not least because yesterday morning they PICKED UP AND MOVED my moped in order to park their scaffolding lorry.

This is a complete outrage, and not something I am prepared to forgive at this time. Admittedly it was only a few feet. But still. How dare they.

And how dare they come along and destroy my sense of peace. Are there worse things going on in the world? Yes, all the time and on a scale that the human mind could not fathom without scrambling like an egg and then dripping off the plate. But this is my world - where I eat, sleep, live, garden and supposedly work.

By mid-morning yesterday I was driven out of the house by the noise and my rage at the complete destruction - in just two days and with no end in sight - of my place of peace. I climbed onto my poor moped (soothing it after its earlier ordeal) and went off. I ended up (as usual) walking for hours, and ended up at the Chelsea Physic Garden.

Still steaming, I stormed through the cafe, grabbed a Diet Coke (no Coke Zero, alas) and then looked for a shady spot to sit. I found a chair - a single chair so that a friendly tourist would not ask to join me on a bench and disturb my spoiling fury - and sat.

It only took about a minute. I opened my very cold Diet Coke, took a sip, and looked around. To my left I noticed globular, glossy fruits hanging from the tree like lanterns. There could be no mistaking them from their singular silhouette - pomegranates. On my right, along the old brick wall, was a vine, with clusters of hairy, brown, testicle-shaped fruits. I had to double check on my plant ID app because surely here in Chelsea we are not growing kiwi fruits. But we are!

And in just a moment, all was well again.

I cannot control the gutting, smashing, genericizing, gentrifying, brutalising, peace-shattering, unending ‘construction’. Every other house in London is under construction at any given moment. You might think that there could be an end to it. A time when we’re all just content with where we live, and not trying to improve it, alter it, expand it. But no. The whole city of London is one, large building site, at all times, and in all places. Kitchens installed five minutes ago are in a skip (all wrong for how we live), bathroom fittings appear on the curb as talismans to progress (I just always wanted a walk-in shower).

The ironing-out has been going on for decades already, and there is no end in sight.

But I can be at the Chelsea Physic Garden in under 15 minutes on a good run, even with the bridge closed.

Chelsea Physic Garden, still occupying the very same site since 1673. A secret garden full of the magic and science of medicinal plants. A garden of healing.