“Red on Grey”

I fall in love with cities easily. Too many of my friends fall in real love too easily. They’re with a partner for a month and get all excited about where things are going. A month later, they’ve broken it off and start aching for the next girl or the last guy or whomever they think they need. I usually think it’s kind of sad. But it might be healthier than how I feel about cities.

Right now, I want to work in Latin America. That’s just because the last two cities I visited were Havana and Buenos Aires. All it’s going to take is a trip to Vancouver and I’ll know the lyrics to “O, Canada” and start eating maple syrup with every meal. I took one day in Paris to decide that it was my favorite city despite the language barrier, coffees that cost six American dollars and restaurants that would not open until ten o’clock.

My friends have loved Jayne and Olivia and Lindsey and Aurienne and Terry and other Olivia and Arthur and Jen. And I’ve loved Cuzco and Managua and Lima and Tampa and New Orleans and Havana and Paris and Buenos Aires. That’s almost every city I’ve seen in my life. Except for London. London didn’t make the list and it never will.

People love to say that London is grey. It’s an old cliché. The sky is grey today. It’s another grey London day. Look how grey the clouds are today. The river looks so grey in the morning.

I hate clichés about cities. They never say enough. Usually it’s the positive ones I hate. New York, the city that never sleeps. Buenos Aires. The Paris of Latin America. That doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t tell you how the city feels. But if you really hate a place, there’s nothing worse than a bad cliché.

London is grey. That doesn’t nearly say it all. London is grey, but it is so much worse than that. It’s a grey that goes on an on an on across a city that takes two hours to cross by subway. “The Tube.” Really, it’s a nice system, but it’s easy to sour on a train that dumps you in rainy neighborhood after rainy neighborhood after a thirty-minute ride crisscrossing the most disjointed city in Europe.

I don’t mind a grey sky. New York is dark for six straight months. Paris is cold and the narrow streets are windy and it’s really not that sunny.

London stopped being grey for about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes inside a museum. The museum was probably the greyest building in the city. The Tate Modern is a squat, square concrete box on the Thames. It’s a grey building. The Thames always looks grey.

I saw one painting I liked. It was a dead chicken hanging inside of a wooden box. The canvas was painted a bright, bright red. Shocking against its white wall. I stood in front of it for fifteen minutes without moving. It was a Francis Bacon triptych. No title so I couldn’t even look it up after we left the Tate. After two hours in the museum London was still grey. I missed that red for the rest of the trip. London is in a country whose flag has a bold red cross. You would think there would be more red in the city. There’s no grey on the flag. London needs more red and less grey..