The Primrose Hill Diaries part 5

in which my daughter fights men for dogs

(A photo of the BT Tower, if you can see its tiny tip glowing like an alien spaceship between the treetops and the clouded moon.)

When I was a kid, possibly just into my teens, I went on a bike ride that got out of hand.  We lived in a village in the suburbs of York, having moved there from a much more rural one, and I knew the way into town.

But for some reason, on this occasion I ended up pedalling right through the city centre, out the other side and somewhere off towards the Moors before realising I was lost. I remember looking at road signs and recognising names like Strensall and Sheriff Hutton but having no idea how to get home from them. I wasn’t near any shops or pedestrians and would have been too embarrassed to ask if I had been, so I got off my bike and sat in some long grass, wondering how long it would take for someone to invent mobile phones. Oh but it's a good memory, despite the panic. The sun was shining and I combined an entire lack of common sense with endless optimism. I had these wheels, the wind in my hair, the world at my feet. Something would come up!

My daughter is the same age that I was then, and I don’t worry about her getting into such scrapes. I worry about her not getting into such scrapes. She’s an indoors type who has to be dragged out on dog walks, has only ever lived in London, and who once, aged three, asked “What’s a hedge?” an hour after asking, “If the shop doesn’t take credit cards why don’t you go to the cash machine?” My formative teenage experiences happened down by the River Ouse where we had a rope swing, a ghetto blaster, a Violent Femmes cassette and a packet of Silk Cut. Sometimes we swam in the river, downwind of the smell of roasting sugar beet in the chocolate factories. Her formative experiences are also happening by water that smells, but it’s a canal, or the bit of it between Camden Market and Regents Park, which is characterised by dealers, crackheads, a couple of sunken barges and all the litter from a streetfood market that sells something called Yorkshire Burritos.  I pray she never tries to swim in it.

(As someone who left Yorkshire to do a degree in Latin American Studies I experience this burrito stall more as a threat than a promise; it’s like being insulted in a dream. Yorkshire Burritos stir the same sort of feeling as, I don’t know, hearing that Matt Hancock was going on I’m A Celebrity. Things were already bad - AND NOW THIS? You can’t even ride your bike past the stall or hope to get lost near it - too many cobbles, too many tourists taking selfies on them. The burritos contain beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and stuffing, and come with a gravy pot. When people ask, “But don’t you worry about your daughter walking along there?” I say yes, thinking that I should probably call the police about the food.)

“Let’s just move away from those men,” I muttered the first time I walked my daughter to school along the canal, as we only moved here in December and she needed showing the route, “I think they’re drunk.” She glanced back at the group of men. “Nah, that’s drugs,” she said, then went straight back to asking why I won’t buy her a smartphone. (Yes,  they did eventually invent them, and now I won’t let my child have one, what an absolute carry-on.) And then after school she goes off to Superdrug with her mates (Camden branch, I believe, after an incident at the Kentish Town involving an unimpressed staff member and the toothpaste display) and they obsess over skincare and learn dance routines and they use slang they find it hilarious to make me say and I am not required on any school runs at all any more. And then she comes home and starts all her stories, “So basically:”

My favourite recent So Basically involved her girl gang seeing some dogs tied up somewhere near the canal, and some wasted men saying the dogs belonged to them, but my daughter and her friends suspecting they were lying and that these men were opportunistic dog thieves. So the kid and her eleven year old friends stepped in to rescue the dogs and - I’m honestly not entirely sure how the story ended, I was laughing too hard (somewhat in terror) when she regaled me.

Even this morning, after a storm hit London last night, I thought she might be scared and need me to walk her along that lovely stretch of stench. But it was only me cuddling assorted animals (of both the alive and Hamleys varieties) tighter in the night.  So this morning she went off to school without me and I walked the dog and - well this was actually the point of this column. Because the way I got home when I was 12 and lost on my bike is this:

I looked up, scanned the horizon as far as the eye could see, and realised I could see York Minster, at least ten miles away. I knew how to get home from there! It was a long way round, by this point, but that tower was guaranteed to lead me home.

That great rooftop, that I had taken for granted all my life, even when it burned down in 1984 and Blue Peter ran a competition to re-design little bits of it and children from around the country started getting involved in my minster and I was low level furious, why did nobody ask six-year-old me? I had Lego? Well it suddenly took on new meaning, and became my beacon. I ignored all further road signs and focused only on going towards the skyline that leaned towards God.  The cathedral became my North Star.

And now, when I walk the dog from Primrose Hill and down into Regents Park and inevitably get a bit lost, because I don’t really know every last corner of Regents Park yet, I find that if I look up I can find the BT Tower and then I know my way back. It was built in the 1960s, so fewer Anglo-Saxons were involved than in my previous beacon, and it has a big ugly purple display that spins around with news and sports results and things you really do not need broadcast into the sky somewhere between Euston and Oxford Circus. It’s hideous. I absolutely love it. It’s my new church spire.

Yet now, just after I’ve spent months building a relationship with the modernist totem pole, they say the Tower is to be sold and turned into some kind of swanky rotating restaurant that will doubtless exchange all of the contents of your bank account for main grid Instagram opportunities. I’m not saying that all of its customers will be the sort of people who enjoy paying for sex. I’m just saying they’ll pay for sex whether they enjoy it or not. And I presume the awful purple signage will go, which is a shame, because the dog and I have come to depend on it for kicks, because we have been relegated in usefulness after twelve years of taking a child to places she doesn’t need taking to any more. We wander around the park wondering what to do with our useless selves.

In 1961, while that tower was being built, the American politician Dean Acheson said that Great Britain had “lost an empire and not yet found a role.” It’s a quote I memorised for A-Level Politics and have never forgotten, though perhaps it has come back to me because I have been a bit lost myself lately. But onwards we go, feeling very grateful for and unworthy of living in a peaceful place such as this one. The important thing is sometimes just to keep on keeping on. And perhaps finding a new North Star of one’s own.