Sail the 279 or 149 from Uptown Tottenham with the Sunday set, slug slowly through the sluice-grey concrete streets of London, change bus and your pilgrimage ends at Archway. The chapel rests neatly beneath the dark sinister Suicide Bridge – which seems appropriate – and the bridge overarches a raceway for cars eager to escape.

Rivet your backside to a merciless wooden plank for a spiritual buffeting from the crow’s nest at my brother’s wedding. Lurching above the bald greasy sea of skin and dribbling bibs and blotched moulding jackets – a raven-headed sister like a witch from Macbeth and baying above the distracted children with the manners of football supporters, ‘Marriage may be seen as a ship.’
The metaphor slowly sinks.
‘Children are the masts of the ship ...’
Nobly sinks your lowering, harrowing soul. Woe she blows!
All along the watchtower the witch waves the flagging flaps of her vulturine wings. ‘Commitment we ordain as the –’
‘Hold?’ I wonder aloud. ‘Gally?’
‘Masts of the ship,’ rasps the rapacious sister unashamedly and seemingly oblivious to the cannons and blunt rapiers and damage of her extended metaphor.
Such ghost of Macbeth moments are branded into the bulk-head of your sensitive brain sans mercy.
A cold chilly London fog engulfed the shabby Mormon prison of steel and stone, and your eyes are helpless to avoid the temptation the big black monster of a bridge, and you imagine the splat of body and bone and blood and gristle on the black tarmac on the alter of Highgate Hill.

After the last Summer of Love flower is plucked, the Winter plague of Darkness descends upon the Earth for forty days and forty nights. Demonic dark-horses of dense smog smoulder over the summit of Archway Hill, gallop beneath the o’er-arching metallic-limbed monster Suicide Bridge, down the slope and smash into your smarting cheeks exposed at the bus-stop.

London. Christmas Term lately over, and the Mormon Bishop dispensing judgment in his palatial deep-piled office (the chapel hiding in the giant crack in the side of the hill). Implacable January weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had newly retired from the face of the Earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard over the lip of Archway Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Waiting and waiting for the ghost of a big red bus to emerge over the Hill like a modern Titanic ploughing through the ice-thick smog and sludging to the rescue. And your eyes squint and wait for the thick black limbs of the giant spider Suicide Bridge to emerge for a moment between the swirling angry sea-horses of smog: for you are watching and waiting for the great and glorious day of the Lard when like a second coming a lone, dark lump of humanity will be seen clutching the iron rod halfway across the bridge and peering down at the screaming stream of traffic racing to be some other place and not be trapped like a musical chair when Life stops with a faint thud and splatter of teeth, brain, blood, muscle and bone.

Dogs – made mad perhaps with the mush of religion indistinguishable in the mire – mooch along the mud-thick streets. And huddled like three witches from Macbeth over the cauldron of a half-collapsed cardboard box, you detect the horror-show of three tramps heads bowed and worshipping a grotesque miniature shrine of the olde three-card-trick.

Across the great divide of dual-stream traffic, above the cracked and crooked pavement slabs, hovers a nun clad in a deep demonic sweep of black down the slope and disappearing from the face of Earth inside a tornado of smog.

And from the portal of a red doorway staggers an old man bare-chested with spikes of stiff grey hair and holding a bottle aloft to heaven like a holy challis, then stands and stares as if turned to a pillar of salt at the slogging traffic.

The plague of smog needle-sharp slips inside the soft linings of the nose like nuclear radiation and stirs inside the lungs a loose reservoir of mucus, and the brain swollen inside the skull stings like the suck of a wasp, and the fingers throb with pain and pulsate with premature rigor-mortis.

Waiting and waiting and when the last drops of Life are falling through the pavement cracks in big pearly blobs you hear the rumbling beast of a big red bus bustling and bullying to the brink of Archway Hill – at first a faint phantom of red, two beams of light broken like Morse code by the smog, faces smeared against the glass of the upper deck, a moving Tower of Babel illuminated with the last bulbs of Christmas, as high as Heaven the big red bus screeches sluggishly to a halt on the slippery slope of black ice.

At the back of the bus you step onto a platform and grasp the rust-ice pole burning into the skin of your palm, and nod to the conductor frozen stiff in the alcove like a waxwork dummy, you feel the wheels on the bus rumbling under your feet, and shimmy up the spiral staircase on mother’s coat-tails, steps as big as concrete blocks coated with dog-ends and blobs of spit that slip and squish beneath the soles of your rubber shoes, and safely at the top you step into a sea of yellow smoke and stale sweat, a disjointed devil’s choir of loud angry voices, and shimmy down the aisle bumping legs and bags and babies, and slump into your customary seat at the front of the top deck, your pink stinging palm swipes a clear path through a thick layer of condensed steam, you peer through the glass at an unfriendly world and the swirling smog trying to invade the bus, and grasp the cold chrome rail with both hands and imagine you are steering from the cockpit of a Spitfire.

Fired with the spirit of the Lard and fresh from the basting of a Mormon Sunday School lesson, mother’s cheeks glow a glory- red, and pupils pupate and sparkle like diamonds the highest ecstasy, the red-smudged smile deepens, and a sudden fear needles your mind that mother might throw high her hands to Heaven, cry Alleluia and sing the love of the Lard to the unsuspecting people of the top deck. So tumbles from mother’s lips the joy of learning the lesson of the deck of cards – for the Lard himself might be likened to the Ace of Space, and the Mormon prophet is the King of Spades, and the Mormon Bishop is the Jack of Spades … And you know full spanking well with your seven-year-old sense of fully matured cynicism that such a lesson is hardly appropriate for a Sunday School lesson, but you decline to puncture the rapture and rhapsody of mother’s happiest moment that will be regurgitated regularly with the remembered joy of a young lover for the next fifty years.

But you turn away and stare with despair through the misting glass at a grey steaming unfriendly world, for deep inside the stomach the last semblance of soul is dead, and the sense of dread drenches your sensitive heart that this is the wrong time and place, that Life has tricked you with the cruelest deceit, and you should never have left the Cave of the Unborn. For every hour of every day that old familiar friend Despair will dig deeper the longing to be far away from the wasteland of withered analogies, from the waking of devilish depression and the dire dreary dread of a grey unfriendly world of walking dead.

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