I mean, really. I don’t know that there’s any need for this weather – for this greyness and this coldness and this wetness. Less than two weeks ago – was it just less than two weeks ago? – we were whooping it up outside at the Battersea Power Station, our cries of glee and the Battersea chimneys all reaching for the beautiful blue.

(I was talking about the power station to John the other day, and I said, “And there’re those, um, tubes, you know?” “Chimneys?” he said, because he is both helpful and an architect. “Fine,” I said, “ ‘chimneys’, whatever – you and your technical vocabulary.”)



Less than two weeks ago, then, it was warm enough still that I was in a green dress and red kitten heels, and we were taking, me and Olive, the scenic route along the river to the Battersea Power Station. We saw the chimneys from the curve in Nine Elms Lane, and kept walking till our necks were craned and our faces were turned upwards, till the beast was before us and we marvelled as it loomed.

There were bikes at the entrance for touring the site – assorted sizes of bicycle in man, woman, small and smaller. “I mean,” I said, “come on,” I said, “this is gonna be great.” We strapped on our helmets and took to the wind, crowing as we whizzed past the visitors who’d decided to go on foot. We cycled left and right past the handsome brick exterior while my Jack Gomme bag swung from the handlebar.



The Battersea Power Station was decommissioned in 1983, then partially demolished for one of many redevelopment plans that never happened. Stuck in real-estate limbo, it languished, it dripped, it sat, it sighed. On a sunny Friday, its steely ribs enclosed a damp-smelling hollow. The daylight came in, weakly, through tar-stained windowpanes and, stronger, through broken glass. I’d heard about the Art Deco control room, the Modernist lines, but two weeks ago there were only grim puddles on concrete floors, and bare girders reaching to nowheres. There were spiderwebs on staircases.

It was – is – still stunning.



They’d set up installations by Chinese artists throughout the space – video art, mostly – a Chinese cowboy man singing a Chinese cowboy tune on telly and Cao Fei’s Dancer in the Dark–esque lightbulb-factory music video. Up a dimly lit staircase, we came upon one hundred thousand rotting apples. “Something smells nice,” I’d said, as we climbed the steps, for two weeks ago the rotting hadn’t really started yet, and then “Oh,” I said, as we turned the corner to find ourselves face-to-face with an organic wall in nuances of red and green. “I’m hungry,” I said, and helpfully the on-site Yauatcha tea house was a-waiting with delicate dim sums in green and orange and glowing white.



But that was a Friday ago, and a Friday later what we have is the rain practicing percussion on the skylight. The good thing about this weather is stews. We had Claudio and Madalena over to dinner the other night, for a hearty chicken tagine spiked with ginger and cinnamon. “I thought I was in a dream!” Claudio said, about being fresh from Italy and crashing at my place for the first couple of weeks. “Every night the dinners, and I found the job for a sommelier!” “London is great!” he said. “But then,” he said, and he remembered the illegally shared flat that leaked, and the boss who yelled, and he lowered his raised arms, fork in hand. “But then,” he said, “it started to rain.”