I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.
Moby-Dick, Chapter 47: The Mat-Maker
The train shuttles through patchwork countryside and tangled suburbs into looming, high-strung Paddington. I am caught at the frayed edge of sleep, half in the dreamstate of rail-rumble. Through crowds, I walk out of slumber into the stuccoed 19th Century street plan of Cockerell’s Tyburnia.
Markus Coffee catches my unfocused eye. A coffee roaster squats in the window like it just rolled in from the Great Age of Steam, all chimney, boiler and smokebox. Inside, the place looks unchanged since 1957. I blink. Have I fallen through time? The beans behind the counter are a whirlwind tour: Papua New Guinea, Guatemala, Kenya, Nicaragua Matagalpa.
My head spins as I step back into the great, daubed palimpsest of London. Before my coffee is cold, I face the dropped stitch of Marble Arch. A Buckingham Palace portico moved north, made a police station, and now a roundabout flourish, it stands by the site of London’s last gallows. Where I wait for the lights, crowds once jostled to see that thread pull tight.
