Day 44

Sunday April 4, 2021

We have to re-engage with time today because we have plans with Cris, and Maja’s going to have her first London car outing. This is a trip to Crystal Palace with two friends of Cris who I also have a great relationship with – Rob and Jade. Crystal Palace is an area in south east London named after an actual crystal palace that was almost unimaginably large when it was constructed in 1851. However, all we have of it now is ruins as it was destroyed by fire in 1936. Instead, we have the site markings along with a few surviving steel supports and ornate stone staircases which mark where the entrances were. And all around it, a large and beautiful park which is our destination for today.

We meet Cris at a nearby street to be picked up in his oversized and very comfortable car which is practically a van, and this drive takes us through some of the most exclusive areas of London and eventually – an hour and a half eventually, I had no idea – to Crystal Palace where we meet Rob and Jade. This is a little of an emotional reunion for me as I last saw them around 18 months ago when we all used to work together on building sites that Cris was in charge of. In that little period when I was so busy with bass gigs I had to quit my evening bar job and go get something in the day so that I could be available for the relentless schedule of rehearsing and gigging with five different acts, one of them the metal band Wild Child, fronted by Cris. So the four of us know each other quite well, and into this comes London newbie Maja who is warmly welcomed and embraced by Rob and Jade. Indeed, as the day progresses, I find myself more and more walking with Cris and Rob while the two girls walk a few paces behind us engrossed in conversation like old friends.

We meet by a housing estate in our respective cars, and then drive onto the site itself. As we start to walk through it I suddenly realise I am in a serious memory lane. I had totally forgotten about this. I used to come here every week in a whole other life. My second job in journalism was as the main writer and editor of the centre pages entertainment supplement for a series of 11 weekly local newspapers all around south east London. I was the goalkeeper of the paper’s five a side football team and we played in a league right here. As we walk across a high walkway, on our left we have the site of the football pitches we came to every week. I stop, caught in feelings of totally unexpected nostalgia and remember those days. Everybody else stops too and we hang out here in the sun for a while, while making tentative plans and fetching ice creams from a nearby shop. Below us is an interesting site and cool addition for the day. Remote control car racing round a mini formula 1 type track and it’s clear these guys are serious and really know what they’re doing. We watch this, enthralled, for something like half an hour, then we continue onwards.

After a while of walking through the grounds, at times in open, cultivated fields, at others through dense, enchanting forest, we come across a large open air street market. It has so many stalls selling food from all over the world and, as disparate as our group of five is, we’re practically guaranteed to find exactly what each of us wants in a place like that. So we go in and go food hunting, meeting up again on a hill overlooking the whole place.

Fed, watered, and all content again, we set off for another meander and wander, this time heading towards the ruins of the palace, where we can truly see and appreciate the dimensions of what this thing was. It’s a slow, summery, lazy walk and once through the grounds we make our way back to the cars to say goodbye and head on home. But Cris has one more thing on his mind as we set off. There’s a route we can take that will see us go past the site where Marc Bolan was killed in a car crash. It has become a shrine to his memory, visited by people from all over the world. Now it is about to receive another international delegation from Italy, Sweden and England. 

All through today, and over the weekend we’ve had a voice message thing going back and forth between ourselves and Sarah, including during our little excursion today. Relations between us have never felt so good and it’s really cool to be able to encourage her along in what she’s doing, and to hear how she’s getting on. Along with the bar decision, us finally being able to get our freedom and time to do what we really should be doing and jumping into that, everything feels like it’s really slotting into place after a very difficult and stressful period. Of course we don’t expect the difficulties or stresses to stop and other tests no doubt await us, but it truly truly feels like we’ve found some blue sky and green grass to rest and work in. And, with Sarah’s love, support and hope, along with her beautiful chaos, we have constant inspiration and motivation.