A Weasel in the North. (A Weasel Excerpt).

I walked away from that house doing the crowd-clearing march of the not-right, but I ran out of steam around the first corner. More importantly, I no longer felt any need, there was no sense of something at my heels, no sense of anything at all. The sky was bright and the street shone but there was something missing. Taken out. And now no-one cared or looked at me: fat lipped fur-wrapped shaded ladies dotted about behind wheels and prams, but never looked once at the raggedy man with the thousand yard stare. I was invisible again. I ambled on between bland house fronts that were just that, propped up by sticks it seemed, all pretend. I watched one lady playing her part, out of the door and down the steps to dump her rubbish bag by a London Plane. Well played, I said.
I trudged up a long terrace named after my underground river, but this one flowed north, straight, wide and anonymous and if I'd walked this same route from below I felt no connection now, nothing rose up to touch me. Perhaps this was a namesake only, or maybe there was nothing left down there now to rise up.
I crossed over the tired and scruffy dull iron bridge at the end of this drag. It didn't cross water, but tracks and trains; I heard the rumble just under the traffic's roar.
More pointless plodding to me off the drag, past a green square, no roar now but light twittering from little birds up in the trees, a sunny sound occasionally drowned by the caw of high up crows in the thin branches. I was surprised to come across an empty old boozer, boarded and dead, marked with an eye on one of the boards, but it was blind and quiet and held nothing; whatever it had been before today, it wasn't a place for me now.
St Johns Wood Road was one more Drag, and I was a speck on the tarmac. Nothing to see here, no good or bad, just a road to walk.

Behold Primrose Hill. I didn't see it coming.
I climbed the wind-blown, tree-sparse slope, still wet and shiny. The sharpest wind cut and burned my ears, but brought me up keen and alert, fresh to the view.
I'd never seen the scale of the plan, but it all rolled out before me now. I felt so small, overwhelmed by its immensity, that I trembled and tears shook out of me. My breath was gone and I gasped for air, as I collapsed onto the bench on the summit.
I was in time to watch the momentous dying of our sacred light, the return of our angel ' back to the hidden depths and crevices, now that there was nothing to stop it fading, no-one to walk it back , now that we had all been switched off.
From way behind the dome of London's great bloated church, the last flame splashed against the brightening blue sky then wilted back into the earth. There was a line stretching from me to there: from the hill through the dome to the last emanation of our spirit, our palladium. I looked out across this line drawn over London to its resting place: Southwark.
Now the sun was up and drying the shine off, heating me so I felt sluggish. Heavy in my clothes and old, a left-behind relic, out of time, a last unwiped smudge on clean-slate London.
I watched a windblown old man come winding round the hillside, wispy remnants of hair blowing away like loose cobwebs. His long stick saved his faltering feet from finding their grip, and his blanket-brown dressing gown was tied tight against the imagined cold. He meandered past my gaze several times, each sweep bringing him nearer to me, til finally he passed over the summit, up to my side and behind me. I was sure this was to be one last sign, I assumed he was here for me, but he meandered on, absorbed in his constitutional. There was no affinity. All signs were gone, just me and the hill and time to go. I would head for the dome of the church and then over the water, to the last of the light, a route to tug me off the hill where I was exposed to the empty.
My plod was leaden, dry and dead. Just me and my feet. Sometimes I thought of dying, disappearing into the pavement cracks; no-one would see or care. The world had turned without me.
I wandered down into the old that was now the new, still laid out on the ancient tracks but with smart grey slabs of inhuman scale. No wave came up, no flickering old, no energy left. All sealed away for the new town to rest upon.

Before I came to that fat overblown church of the city, I reached the older Church of the Jester. Cold but with spirit, this poor old church was trapped, confined to quarters, and it couldn't or wouldn't speak out to me, it just stood in its old cold stone and blanked me.
So I came to the Great White Beast that sat on Ludgate Hill, slouched and confident, spewing out punters: All Hail to the Empty, in place of the Spirit.
There was a time I would have cried, and maybe I was infected, but although I was empty and seemed to feel nothing, a tic deep inside said that this was a tragedy. In all this cold reason, I had none. I lounged on the steps in the midst of the milling and let the punters traipse round me. Fuck them I thought, and fuck you they shot back, and thus contracted we got on with our shows, and I got included in snapshots. I was knackered and weak, and stretched an arm to pick the fruits of the urban: chocolates, sweets, jelly snakes. I needed the sugar.
I walked for want of an idea.