Bridge Walking, The New Social Passtime

London is big, i was trying to describe it to a friend yesterday who has never been. i think the best i could summerise was that it was 'Like an old jigsaw that you thought you could finish in a day but then never really got around to it', but somehow that didnt really work. How best to describe a city such as london? If i was asked to describe Paris i would find it easy, i have been there countless times and ive 'done Paris' as it were and think i would be in a position to give a pretty good verdict (it's more like a Rubix Cube!) but seriously i dont think i would be as stumped for ideas and it would probably be able to find favor with the guidebook crowd and sound quite impressive at a dinner party full of socialites and people who study 'art and design' at university (who all seem to look and dress the same).

Sadly, when you come to know a place too well, when you actually live in a city you become immune to the tourist ideals andguided walks and the concrete and steel become less of a destination and more part of yourself, so describing it, especially on demand, becomes rather difficult, there is just too much and it becomes a blurry soup of sights, sounds, ideas and emotion that one cannot really put onto paper.

Angry, or perhaps encouraged by my failure to describe the city i love i decided to go for a walk in the over lunch and see if i could find things to talk about, perhaps a monument to describe or some history to re-tell, something to spark off some resemblance of a discussion. I found none of those, despite looking in the right places, everything was just, well just London! From St Pauls i decided to cross the Thames in the hope that visiting the tate modern art gallery could inspire me. I dont really like the tate, its too white and usually makes me feel strangly sea sick, but still, as I could see its loom

ing structure in front of me over the Millenium Bridge I felt drawn enough to take a look, perhaps a shot of 'modern london' would help me in my quest.

Well it didnt, in fact i never made it into the gallery. The old, or rather new 'wobbly bridge' was packed and the hot sun made walkers lethargic as they walked up the narrow incline and out over the thames. There were hundreds of folk out enjoying the walk, tourists with cameras, students discussing political matters far too above my station to understand, women in Hijabs, white people, black people, businessmen, beggers and musicians, even former cabinet minister Micheal Portillo doing an interview in front of an anxious director and pretty film student all the things that are part of the city, happening in one small space. On the other side of the bridge people sat and talked in a thousand languages while a vocal group sat on the grass by Shakespere's globe theatre and practised a song, it really seemed that the whole world had come out for lunch in this small corner on the south bank.

But perhaps that is exactly what i was looking for. As i crossed the bridge back toward the city, St Pauls looming in front of me, tower bridge to my right, parlement deep in the distance to my left, i realised that i wished my friend was here with me, that this was indeed london. Forget the travel guides and countless stories, to experience london was to be here right now, the bridge was a microcosim of the city, all of its emotions and flavor in one ten-minute walk, it was like a 'london lite' a stress-free, bitesize london that told you exactly what the city was about. So i began to think if this might be true of other bridges in the city, other areas whereby you could 'sum up' london. What about other cities, other bridges, would it work for them too?

But then i stopped. It had taken me a lifetime to get this confused about describing my city, decades to see every sight, walk every tunnel and find every secret place, and here i am discovering a way to get that same sense for a place in just ten minutes? It seemed like a cheat, like a quick fix, ruining a fantastic book by revealing the ending to everyone who wanted to know and is that really the right thing to do?

Bridge walking, a new social passtime? Well, yes, but only if you want to know how the story turns out.