Brownian Motion

Published by Like The Wind (Print: bit.ly/ltw-sub)

Two kingfishers fly low over the Men’s Pond in Hampstead Heath. Small blue wings catch the light.

From my flat in Tufnell Park I pass the butcher, baker, fishmonger. Beyond the Hellenic bookshop to Kentish Town.
My grandparents lived here after they married. In a block of flats with Russian neighbours from the trade delegation in Highgate. Ken made furniture from old vodka crates. They got along well.

Lady Somerset Road is blocked. Bunting up, projector whirring, glasses of Prosecco on the pavement. An old cartoon. A man with a microphone announces over the credits:
“That’s what Popeye’s all about!” 
Their 21st anniversary street party.

Uphill to Gospel Oak where, in 1884, four circus elephants arrived by train. Two escaped, ran amok through Upper Holloway, fell into cellars. The others hauled them out. All paraded back.

Skirt paths now to Hampstead - where Waugh was born, Keats lived, Orwell sold books. Look up at the twelve storeys of the Royal Free Hospital. I often see morning break from the eleventh floor, or the eighth. I have seen the flags of Zippo’s circus waving on the Heath. You cannot idle long though. Questions dart, punctuate the air. Pay attention.

Run past shops of expensive knives and copper-bottomed pans. At Clarendon’s gallery a double take: there’s a Picasso for sale. Next door a man prepares oysters.

Cut back into the Heath. Move swiftly now down the wide and matted paths, past snarled and folded trees. Acorns thick on the ground.

Up Parliament Hill, where paths converge on a view of the city: St Paul’s, Tower Bridge, Canary Wharf, the Shard. One way takes you to the lido - lined with stainless steel, open year-round, always cold.

My route takes me forward, down through Highgate where Marx is buried. Where, also, my paternal grandfather was a child. Of him I know nothing, save that he was an epileptic and died on a hill.

Gather speed now past the final coach stop on the northbound route out of 18th century London - an inn called the Bull. The driver’s call would sound: “The Bull…and last!” Miss this, tough luck.
Find your own way back from Leeds.

Lucretius fathomed in motes of dust caught in sunbeams that atoms moved ‘by blows that remain invisible.’  Eighteen hundred years later, Robert Brown saw in the movement of pollen in water that particles incessantly swarm, unbidden and irregular. These erratical fluctuations, Brownian motion, are among the order of things.
The other term is pedesis - from the Ancient Greek for leaping.  

My friend Nick has made this remark of me, of my life, as I have moved from place to place: Melrose, Edinburgh, Inverness, Kirkwall, Moshi, Kampala, Fajara, Inverness again, now London.
“Looks like Brownian motion to me."

Perhaps he’s right. Our motives remain obscure to us. Even to those who believe they know. That does not mean we are always lost. Simple things are good. A pair of shoes, a vest, wool socks.
Attach them to the will - mud-flecked, wind-battered, spirited. Your arms windmill in the long descent off Dunain hill. Leap across the bed of a pickup truck in Ugandan traffic. Hurdle the last fat barricade at the Scottish Universities steeplechase. Carry your whole body forward into the sea at Rackwick Bay in February, or March.
Movement yields this private geography of footwork and form.

Now the light comes low into the room. My feet rest on a pillow. I see a long pale scar, the arch and tendons, the careful toes. I feel a creak and ache in my Achilles’ on the right. I will rest it.
Let the storm outside pass.

Illustration by Grace Russell (https://gracerussell.co.uk)