Snail trails

One of the weirdest things about living in a megalopolis is that you never go to most of it. You have your habitual tracks between where you live, where you work, where you know someone and a few preferred public places - your private, sticky snail trails on which you persistently criss-cross the city, while the rest of it exists only as a vague hypothesis in far recesses of your mind. 

Today, to get to the Comiket Festival at the Bishopsgate Institute near Liverpool Street Station (of which more later), I caught a bus and then walked right across the City financial district, which felt odd both because it's so busy all week and so quiet at the weekend and because I never go there now, on busy days or quiet days. 

There have been times when one of my trails came this way, when necessity compelled me to take a short-term job in some corner of the financial world. That job with the Argentinian banker, for example, in a pleasant, old converted house - long since demolished - in a street with the wonderful name of Crutched Friars (which is even better with a heavy Hispanic accent). That was so long ago - time and space slip and slide on a long-disused snail trail.

 photo of Crutched Friars statue in the street of that name from Wikipedia