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Nutshell Kingdom: On the playlist tonight
2005
I would suggest starting off with "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" by The Jam and closing out with "Waterloo Sunset" by The Kinks.
Insane things. All the papers have pictures of Olympic-ecstatic Londoners on their front pages.
The last time I was London, I was smuggled ashore from a Norweigan freighter, hiding in a wooden crate half-filled with confetti paper. I was only there for a night, my assignment having been to steal and replace the results of an international weight lifting competition. It was moonless, with that spectacular fog, and I moved uneasily through winding streets. Having finished up a little early, I spent the rest of the night in a subterranean Turkish bathhouse under a false name and a clean towel with the Union Jack on it, drinking from a very tall tumbler of brandy that caught in my throat like a wash of goosedown. I watched the newspapermen just before dawn as I crouched in a damp Westminster alleyway with a Japanese paper salesman, a South African cigar store proprieter (who had some opium mash) and the drummer from the Buzzcocks, cursing the static in my brain and going through my forged papers before making my bright morning way to Heathrow and back to America's loving arms.
It makes it hard to think about what's happening now; things making as little sense as they do in the middle of workaday life.
