London in September: A Walk I Take Every Year

The route starts at Waterloo Bridge, goes east along the South Bank as far as Blackfriars, crosses, comes back along the north side, and ends at Somerset House. This takes about ninety minutes at a walking pace, longer if you stop for coffee, which I usually do. I have walked it in September every year for the last seven years, and every year it is the same walk and completely different.

This year's version was wet. Not dramatically wet — not the kind of rain that sends everyone running — but the persistent London drizzle that makes the pavement reflective and the river go pewter-grey. The tourists had not left yet. The bookshop under the bridge was busy. A man was playing saxophone badly near the Golden Jubilee Bridges and people were giving him money anyway, which I found moving.

What I think about on this walk changes year by year. It has been a walk for grief, for finishing things, for deciding things. This year it was mostly for the new book — not planning it, exactly, but letting it exist alongside me for ninety minutes without asking it to be more than it currently is. Walking seems to permit a relationship with unfinished work that sitting at a desk does not.

By the time I reached Somerset House the rain had stopped. There was a quality to the light at four o'clock that felt like the city exhaling. I stood on the riverside terrace for a few minutes before going home. The walk had not solved anything about the book. It had, however, made the not-solving feel more liveable.