A homesick walk across the river in the rain, twelve bridges, one phone call to Tottenham and a lesson in slang for the comrades
Nobody in Portland Owns an Umbrella, and Other Things I Told My Mum From a Bridge
It has rained for nine days. Not hard. It never rains hard here. It is a fine, steady, undramatic rain, like being breathed on by a large wet animal. The sky is the colour of a filing cabinet from eight in the morning until four, when it gets dark. I woke up today missing home so badly that I could taste the chip shop. So I did what I do, which is walk across a bridge and ring my mum.
The Umbrella Question
First, a local custom that baffled me for a year. In this city, where it rains from October to June, nobody carries an umbrella. I mean that almost literally. You can stand downtown in a downpour and count them on one hand, and the people holding them will be tourists.
I asked about it in my first week. I was told, with real pride, that umbrellas are for people who are not from here. The rain is light, they say; a hood will do. An umbrella is a nuisance on a bike. And beneath all the reasons is the true one, which is that it is a point of honour. To put up an umbrella is to admit the weather is a problem. Portlanders simply get wet and decline to mention it.
I am from London, where it rains considerably less and we talk about it considerably more, and every person owns at least two umbrellas, one of which is broken. I arrived here with a big black one that had been my grandad’s. I used it once. A child pointed. I now own a waterproof jacket in a colour called moss, like everybody else, and walk about with a wet fringe and my dignity.
The Bridges
The city is cut in half by a river, the Willamette, which you pronounce to rhyme with dammit. There are a dozen bridges across it within the city, and they are all different, which is why one of the place’s nicknames is Bridgetown. There is a black steel one with two decks, trains below and cars above, where the lower deck can lift by itself. There is a soaring green suspension bridge in the north with Gothic towers like a cathedral. There are several that open in the middle to let ships through, and you learn to add ten minutes to any journey in case yours is up.
My favourite is the newest. It opened in 2015, a white cable-stayed bridge shaped like two sails. Trams use it, and buses, cyclists and people on foot. No cars. None. It was the first big bridge in the country built that way. Its name is a word from a local native language meaning people. At night the cables are lit in colours that change with the speed and temperature of the river underneath, which I think is the loveliest piece of public showing-off I know. The city’s website has the details.
I walked out to the middle of it this afternoon, where there is a place to stop, and leaned on the rail. Grey water. Grey sky. A heron on a piling. The towers of downtown with their tops in cloud. A tram went past behind me, ringing its bell. And I rang Tottenham.
Mum
It was nearly eleven at night there. She was in bed with the telly on. I could hear the theme tune of the programme she watches. I said, I just wanted to hear the kitchen. She said, I am not in the kitchen. I said, I know.
She gave me the news. The lift is out again. My cousin has passed her driving test at the fourth attempt. The man in the flat below has got a dog he is not allowed, and everyone is pretending not to know. The chip shop has changed hands and the new people do not do the pickled eggs. Spurs lost. It is drizzling.
I said it is raining here too. She said, proper rain? I said, no. Sort of a mist. She said, that is not rain, that is weather with no ambition. I laughed so hard a cyclist looked round.
She asked if I was eating. She asked if I had found a nice Marxist. I said they are all very nice and they all want to process things. She said her generation processed things by putting the kettle on and not speaking for a fortnight. I said I am beginning to see the merits.
Then she said what she always says. You can come home, you know. And I said what I always say. I know. In a bit.
Teaching the Comrades to Speak
The cure for homesickness, I have found, is to make everyone around you a little bit more like home. So this evening, at a meeting to plan Thursday’s door-knocking, I ran an unscheduled workshop.
It began because I said I was going up the apples to fetch the leaflets, and nine Americans looked at me. So I explained. Where my family is from, further east, people built a code out of rhymes. Stairs: apples and pears. You say the first half only. So, the apples. A phone is the dog and bone. Your feet are your plates. Your mate is your china, from china plate. The landlord, since we are a tenants’ union, would in our case be a great many words, none of them rhyming.
They were entranced. I pulled up the paper’s guide to Cockney rhyming slang on the projector we use for rent spreadsheets. We went through it for twenty minutes. The welder wanted to know the word for money: bees and honey. The retired teacher worked out, unaided, that a butcher’s must be a look, and was unbearable for the rest of the evening. The young man with the moustache, who blocked the voting proposal last month, asked whether there was one for consensus. I said no, because nobody in the East End has ever reached one.
By the end, a room of Oregon socialists was planning to have a butcher’s at the building on Division and get on the dog to the tenants on the third floor. It was the most at home I have felt in two years. I want my nan to have seen it.
The Piece
I owed The London Prat something by midnight their time, and I wrote it on the tram. A weather report. In London: light rain, widespread complaint, eleven million umbrellas deployed, the Prime Minister to make a statement. In Portland: identical rain, nine days, no umbrellas, residents report feeling great and have organised a potluck. Forecasters say the two cities are experiencing the same conditions and will never understand each other.
My editor says it is the first thing I have sent that is not about politics, and that it is my most political yet. She pointed me to the line in what satirical commentary is, and what it is not about national character being fair game if you include your own. I have. The Londoner in the piece apologises to the rain.
It is going on the London satirical news page tomorrow and to Bohiney for the Americans. If my mum reads it and asks whether the Prime Minister really made a statement, I shall send her the paper’s checklist for telling satire from real news, again.
Home, the Near One
I walked back over the bridge at about nine. The cables had come on, blue shading into green, which I am told means the river is cold and slow. The rain was still coming down, fine as flour. I had my hood up and my fringe was soaked and I found I did not mind.
I am not going home in a bit. Not yet. I have a building on Division to knock, and nine comrades who now call each other china. But I have asked Mum to post me a jar of pickled eggs from wherever she can find them. Some things you cannot get in a bulk bin.
The diary is kept on this site, and the rest of my work is over here.
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