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Work masked the real reason for my trip.
Travel dislodges a wedged mind. Thus pilgrims sought awakening, and the Peripatetics found wisdom. After all, our species evolved for motion. Movement begets clarity. Catharsis lies faraway.
All of that is to say I have resigned into a Baudelairean life, feeling at home only with one foot pointing towards the door, present only with a mind elsewhere located. This was more than wanderlust.
When I was fifteen, our physics teacher Mr Wise bellowed at me one day: “you flap around from place to place. Just settled down”. It’s one of those singular memories that jarringly withstand the brunt of time, fresh today as if he towers over me still, his bald head glistening and incensed.
Such prognostication! I am still flapping, Mr Wise. Still flapping.
People are kind of like plants that way. Once you yank them out at the root, they don’t grow so well.
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So let us go then, you and I…
Let us go, and make our visit.
A slow and expensive public transport system has an unintended benefit in that it mires down a city enough to preserve “neighbourhoods”. I had lived in Harrow, Walthamstow, Kensington, and Hampstead Heath. They were always more than directions and names and places. What divides us is not distance, but the inconvenience of getting there, therefore even two corners of the same city can feel far, far away.
Someone once jokingly told me that she considered crossing two tube zones as long-distance dating.
And so in that bubble, some semblance of culture is preserved.
I was staying at Angel. Since I last ventured here, it had grown a bristly beard, developed a caffeine problem, and seems to be hooked on sourdough bread.
Shanghai, in contrast, is so much smaller, because everything is at your fingertips, an affordable taxi away. Distance is measured in dollars, there it’s a pittance.
We don’t quite have neighbourhoods there. The duration of buzz from downing a point of business is enough to travel the distance with its cost.
Saps all the romance out of bar crawls.
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