The book is in a white padded envelope. At one end there is a thin red tape and when that’s pulled it rips through the outer shell and the book can be pulled out. There is now a layer of clear plastic bubble wrap. Perhaps it’s that sort of day.
I peel away the sellotape slowly and deliberately. There’s no need to rush.
The book is now in my hands. I’m sitting on the wooden stairs and carefully put the wrapping to one side and open the book.
142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London by Rosemary Ashton. She is an erudite writer with a quirky edge; there are a lot of ideas presented with a light touch and scatterings of personal vignettes and entertainments across the pages.
I enjoyed her book Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian London.
At the collection office I wait behind an elderly man who is asked to pay an excess of £2.50. He shows me a large yellow envelope with a red stamp without a bar code.
‘They never rang the bell’, he explains.
It looks as if it might be a birthday card, sent from an address in London thirty years ago by someone who has remained the same while the world has grown old around them. In that house where the card came from, there is no internet or mobile phones and it would be impossible to know that the stamps have changed and are now required to have a bar code.
A bottle top comes out of his pocket with his wallet.
‘I collect these’, he turns to tell me.
Then it’s my turn and I show my driving licence and the delivery card.
‘That’s the one’, I say to the worker in the red polo shirt who hands me the parcel.
‘You been waiting for this one?’
‘I certainly have’
Everything is slow and deliberate, partly the after wash of a night of insomnia, interspersed with brilliantly coloured cinematic dreams with intricate plots and those people that one meets in dreams. They have no physical presence of weight and height but they have shape and move and speak and stand so close but only occasionally can the feel of their touch be sensed.
In my dream I met a friend who died some years ago. Still missed; an indomitable spirit. He’s sitting on a bench. I join him and we talk. Then we are in a market buying tomatoes, the most red, fresh and shiny looking tomatoes I can ever remember finding in a market. I take some and put them in a bag for him. He is smiling and cheerful and no longer full of the pain he experienced towards the end of his life.
The elderly man is now outside and in a casual, simple and easy way we exchange a few words, and then begin to talk. He casually describes a magnificent panorama.
He tells me about a visit to Lossiemouth and Elgin and how he saw silver sand for the first time and that the sea was so clear and blue he stripped off and ran into it to swim. He explained that he originally came from Nepal and had been a Gurkha soldier. The mountains of Nepal are revealed as he speaks. The rubbish in the street, the woman in the car with the engine idling, the drizzling rain; these disappear.
The sun rising across the far away mountains turns the sky red and orange, pushing the darkness of the night into the tree tops, into the edges of the rivers and the lush under shade of the forests, pushes the darkness of the sky away, into the edges of the horizon until its gone.
He talks of Darjeeling and Mahatma Gandhi and Indian independence from the British Empire. He tells me how he was nearly killed by electric shock when working as an apprentice. He describes being a crane driver on the docks and how potatoes were in the holds of the ships without any form of packaging.
‘It’s a good life if you can sort it in the right way’.
We stand in each other’s company not speaking and then shake hands and tell each other our names. He holds my hand for a long time and leans his head to one side as he looks at me. Sparkling eyes and fiery life and harmonious spirit.
‘I think this is from my sister’, he says, referring to the envelope. ‘She’s over ninety’.
Commodity Fetishism 
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