TSDK No. 60. Circling the Drain

Down we go

One of the joys of returning to Texas via Edinburgh Airport is getting up very early for a British Airways flight to Heathrow which is always delayed. As this is only the first leg of a long journey, these delays typically lead to missed connections and then further delays in assorted hellish American airports. On my most recent flight home it was only delayed by sixty minutes, which led me to hope I might still make it home at the expected time. No such luck: because I was departing from a different terminal, those sixty minutes were sufficient to cause me to miss my connecting flight.

Three BA employees were waiting at the end of the jet bridge. “Some of you have long delays and will be leaving two days from now,” declared a tall man in one of those reflective coats they wear when out on the tarmac. “Don’t call customer support and ask to change your flight, whatever date you are given is the soonest we can do.”

A sullen, preemptively defensive woman handed me a sheaf of print outs. Hotel voucher, food voucher, shuttle voucher, and the details of my next flight: Austin via Houston on Monday morning, in two days’ time. “Am I entitled to compensation for this?” I asked. “You’d have to go the website to find out about that,” she replied. Neither confirmation nor denial, although I knew that she knew the answer. But she left it at that.

It seemed very strange that there were no available seats on flights to Dallas, Houston, Austin nor any other major American airport for the next 48 hours. As you may have heard, people travel to and from America quite a lot, and there are many flights a day to its big cities. Yet the last couple of years have taught me that expecting anything but the shittiest service from the monumentally shitty companies that we pay thousands to fly us around the world is futile. Air travel is a dismal experience to be endured; the best you can do is submit to fate and hope that the suffering ends soon. In that regard, it is an object lesson in how our ancestors related to misfortune.

So I took my print outs and made my way to the shuttle, which transported me and the other passengers who had missed their connections to an immense, brutalist hotel a few miles from Heathrow.

There are, of course, worse places to be stranded for a few days than London. Last year I was stranded in Newark, New Jersey. I took an Uber into Manhattan, but I didn’t enjoy the “Big Apple” as much as I had on previous visits. It all seemed a bit squalid and run down, but not in an interesting, 1970s kind of way. Martin Scorcese was not about to make Taxi Driver, Blondie and Talking Heads were not going to emerge from CBGB. Instead, there was a guy on Times Square whose pitch to tourists was that guns were legal and weed was legal: “GET A GUN, GET A BLUNT, SMOKE, SMOKE, SMOKE!” he yelled. Twenty years ago I might have found this mildly amusing, but walking around with my kids, it seemed rather tawdry and pathetic. A week later I was in London which I enjoyed much more, for its extreme variety of cultures and languages, its layers of history, its juxtaposition of appalling architecture with historical monuments. On previous visits to the capital I was always broke and seething with provincial resentment. Now, I saw that London was mine too; the center of the shared history and culture I had grown up in.

And so, all inconveniences aside, I was perhaps slightly pleased to be back in London so soon after my last visit. I took a nap, then rode the bus and the Tube to Camden, where I met a friend from my Moscow days. Over Malaysian food, we discussed the state of the world, the fates of people we had known, the approach of death, and his plan to purchase a houseboat on which he would drift up and down the Thames in retirement. It was excellent craic.

For reasons BA did not explain, I had to return to Heathrow the next morning to get a hotel voucher for the second night. I then spent the rest of the morning in my room, watching airplanes take off from the runway of Terminal 3, while listening to the less frenetic works of Squarepusher and a new artist I had discovered, who goes by the name of “Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan”. His music is an evocation of the failed promise of British new towns, those low key utopias of roads, community hubs and mind-numbing boredom.

I thought about contacting an editor I had written for but never met, but decided against it. There was something good about being unknown and hidden from the world. Part of me wanted to stay in the room and stare at planes all day, but I knew I would regret it. A better option would be to dedicate the morning to planes and then, after lunch, go full Ballard and spend the rest of the day probing the hotel. I would stalk its corridors, scrutinizing the sterile, generic environment, analyzing the guests like an alien anthropologist, until at some point the calm, placid surface would erupt in violence. Roving bands of stranded passengers would assault the African and Middle Eastern airline crews who were staying in the hotel between flights; the crews would retaliate, stoving in the skulls of their assailants with their hard shell carry-ons. Meanwhile the multinational hotel staff would stage a drug-fueled cross-cultural orgy in the conference center.

But the real world is not like a Ballard novel, and I knew that no matter how long I spent in the hotel and its corridors, the dark, repressed desires of its transitory inhabitants would not be exposed. In fact, nothing at all would happen. Maybe if I spent three days in the hotel without going inside, that would make the boredom more provocative. But I only had half a day left, so I decided to go to Hyde park instead, and walk about beneath autumnal trees.

On the Tube, a lanky, bespectacled Indian boy was sitting across from me. Next to him was a pretty Indian girl who was obviously interested in him, though I couldn’t for the life of me understand why. All he wanted to talk about was mathematics and the special Rubik’s cube designed for speed that he was manipulating with one hand. She pretended to be interested in the Rubik’s cube, which led to ever more elaborate descriptions of his technique. Then, a brief moment of self awareness: “You’re probably not very interested in this,” he said. “Oh no,” she lied. “It’s interesting.” And he resumed talking about his Rubik’s cube, and mathematics. So epochal a lack of game deserves recognition, and so I honor it here.

The train rattled on, until I eventually arrived at Hyde Park. I got out expecting to see Speaker’s Corner, yet somehow I missed it. But that was OK, I had been there before, although I did wonder if it was quite as free as it used to be. In 21st century Britain it was all too easy to imagine the police arresting the type of eccentric we used to be proud of for hurty words that nobody would have blinked twice at 20 years ago.

I followed a pathway down towards what I thought might be Knightsbridge (I remembered buying some good SF classics in a bookshop there) but instead I found myself walking around an artificial lake that was home to ducks and swans, and then on to the “lido” where people went swimming in warmer seasons. There were lots of Russian speakers about, though I imagined some were Russians and some Ukrainians. Was it strange to wander calmly through a foreign city and constantly see and hear people you were at war with elsewhere? Or did you just accept it, and grow used to it, until you barely noticed at all?

I remembered a poem by the great Scottish miserabilist James Thomson, author of The City of Dreadful Night. Was there not, in his relentlessly bleak oeuvre of despair and suffering, a poem about a happy Sunday spent in Hyde Park with a lady on his arm? I thought so, but my copy was 5000 miles away so I couldn’t confirm. It seemed to me that the landscape must hardly have changed in the 150 years or so since he had taken his stroll. The Victorians built with the confidence of people who expected their civilization to endure. Except, as I learned from a plaque, the park was actually established by King Henry VIII in 1536, opened to the public by King Charles I a century later, and then re-landscaped by Queen Caroline, wife of King George II, in the 1700s. Since then, little had changed: it wasn’t just the Victorians who built things to last. Queen Caroline’s park had outlasted her own empire.

And then, I spotted a sign hanging from a fence:

QUEUE HERE

For safety reasons this area works to a maximum capacity. During peak hours, we operate on a one-out one-in basis.

Since there are no toilets here, please speak to a member of staff if you need to exit and return.

But there was no queue, and no staff. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything there at all: just some grass, and a bit of concrete. Another sign revealed that this was the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain. I vaguely recalled that there was some scandal or other related to the fountain, but couldn't remember the details. There was a bad statue, I had seen that. But I never got into the whole Diana thing, the feud with Charles, the boyfriends, the midnight visits to dying children, the weird friendship with Michael Jackson. That was somebody else’s fever dream, not mine.

In the interests of science, I decided to take a look. Stepping inside the enclosure, I immediately noticed something strange: there was no fountain. Instead there was a large, circular drain. Water bubbled up at the top of the drain and then ran down some concrete gutters until it disappeared into a hole at the bottom. At no point did the water jump into the air, frolic or dance, like every other fountain I had ever seen. It just dribbled down a circular incline and then disappeared.

The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain was shit; shit beyond language, shit beyond imagination. I remembered a chocolate fountain I had seen in a shopping mall in Istanbul: that was better than this. There had been a contest, there had been designs, and the winning design was a circular drain. This did not even rise to the level of kitsch; it was simply drab, like a discount supermarket car park on a Wednesday afternoon at 3:47pm, or a shopping trolley sinking into the mud of a northern canal, or a battered pigeon pecking at an empty crisp packet. Only it was much drabber than all that. I was accustomed to the feebleness of the British state, but this, this was a new, transcendent level of failure, an unforced humiliation, an immense haplessness. I had tumbled into the heart of a collapsed star.

Later I read that almost immediately after the grand opening they had to close it down because people kept stepping into the drain and slipping. How many hours I had spent sitting by fountains in Moscow, Almaty, Edinburgh! They invited you to linger. This drain had no benches; its builders were worried you would stay too long. You were encouraged to move on.

Way led on to way and Hyde Park became Kensington Gardens. I didn’t think I had been here before, though I had a vague feeling that the Queen Mother had occupied the palace, before she died. The path took me to the Serpentine Gallery; inside there was an installation by an LA artist inspired by the Afrofuturist aesthetic of Parliament Funkadelic. It wasn’t great art, but it was pleasing enough; the vibrant colors made a sharp contrast with the ebbing autumnal light of the park. And then in the distance, I saw a large, pointy Gothic structure in the high imperial style, rather like the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, only bigger, and more ornate, and with more gold.

From the back, I saw a seated stone figure at the base of the structure. Somehow, before I had even reached the front, I knew that it was Prince Albert. Of all the Victorians, he had received the most spectacular monuments, installed by a grieving Queen Victoria in his honor. Up in Scotland, she had erected a death pyramid, here she had built a Gothic space rocket, and, across the street, a concert hall. The rocket was surrounded by monumental figures representing idealized “types” of the British Empire: proud Arabs, somber Asiatics, noble, bare breasted women. This was a relic of a supremely self-confident nation, one that did not think of itself as a small island at all but rather as a grand civilizing force, capable of tackling all challenges.

It made for a striking contrast with the Princess Diana Memorial Drain. In a short walk, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, you could trace the arc of history from imperial grandeur to sad, small island; from center of the world to a place with so little vision, they couldn’t even build a proper fountain for a princess.

And yet, the Britain of twenty years ago, when the drain was first opened, was a much more hopeful place than the Britain of today. The Cool Britannia hype had faded, but there was still some energy, a measure of optimism, hope for the future. Today there is none of that. The culture is running on fumes, the country is run by nonentities, living standards are in decline, and every problem (and there are many) seems intractable. A strange, all-pervasive miasma of despair covers the land. In this context, parliament’s recent vote in favor of “assisted dying” feels profoundly existential. Exhausted, bereft of ideas, the best the nation’s leaders have to offer is a painless exit in a nice, cozy death pod. They yearn not for rejuvenation, but for sleep. In the past when I traveled back to Britain I would joke that I was checking in on the decline. These days, it doesn’t feel as though I am joking at all.