A Cold Wallet, Some Oysters, and a Test Match We Actually Won

Feb 6, 2021

9 min read

On the third of January Richard and I walked over the Millennium Bridge after dark, St Paul’s lit at one end of it and nobody at all on the other, and agreed it had been a good quiet New Year. The following evening the Prime Minister came on the television and shut the country again, and that walk turned out to be the last thing I did purely for the pleasure of it until the spring.

So this is a post about the first half of 2021, which began indoors and is ending, touch wood, in a pub garden.

A New Set of Towers

In January I went over full time to our scheme in north London. I’d been splitting my weeks between it and the one in the north-west since the summer, and now it’s the whole job: a pair of towers being built over a live Tube line, which is exactly as straightforward as it sounds. The first floors were just showing above the hoarding as I arrived for good. There’s a moment on every tall building when it stops being a hole with opinions and becomes a thing that goes up, and I’d landed almost precisely on it.

A new project is mostly new people. A different contractor’s team, different consultants, a different set of meeting-room habits to learn — who talks first, who talks longest, whose silence means no. I am still working some of them out. But it’s a scheme I’ve been asked to deliver rather than help with, and that changes how you walk onto a site. It’s mine. I intend to make the most of it.

In the second week of February I woke to find it had snowed overnight and, for once, settled — on the cars, the hedges, the lids of the recycling. London under snow goes quiet in a way that even lockdown hadn’t managed. It didn’t last, and I was sorry to see it go.

Walking Meetings

By late February I had worked out that I can do without restaurants for considerably longer than I can do without my friends’ faces. The rules allowed a walk with one other person, so Serena and I took to meeting on the Thames Path first thing, before I went into the office — out along the river in the half-dark with a coffee, the tide doing whatever it was doing, and the City across the water mostly dark, which at that hour it never used to be.

Serena considers a quarter to seven a lie-in and would rather have been running. We compromised on a walk conducted at her pace. She also used the time to deliver, in person and with citations, the contents of the research papers she would otherwise have emailed me, so I now know a good deal about bone density that I hadn’t asked to. I’d not have swapped those mornings for anything. A screen gives you someone’s face. It doesn’t give you them falling into step.

The Kit

I mentioned last summer that lockdown had put me back on a bike. What I didn’t mention, because it hadn’t happened yet, is what comes next, which is the kit. It arrives gradually. First the padded tights, which you swear you’ll only wear under something. Then a proper jacket. Then cleats, which fix your feet to the bicycle on purpose, an idea I’m still coming round to. At no point do you decide to become a person who owns all this. You just look down one morning and there she is.

In early March the colleague who got me round Regent’s Park in the autumn talked me into something longer, and the two of us rode out to Virginia Water and on to Windsor, which was lovely — the long avenue through the Great Park, deer standing about in the distance like garden ornaments — and also very, very long. Much longer on the way back. I was shattered by the end of it in a way I had not been since the Peak District hike, and spent most of that evening in a bath with a quantity of Epsom salts that probably changed its chemistry. I may also have persuaded Richard to rub my feet. He did it while watching the rugby over my shoulder and did not once complain, and I’d like that on the record, since he’ll never see it.

Twenty-One

Gemma turned twenty-one on a Friday in the middle of March, in a lockdown, in the house she grew up in approximately none of. Her old Dio friends have been having their twenty-firsts all year, in Auckland, in gardens, with speeches — New Zealanders take a twenty-first seriously — and she has watched them on her phone from a study in south London, in between seminars at a university she has never seen.

So we did what could be done. I made the Pandoro brownie, the one she tracked down the recipe for when she was fourteen, and put twenty-one candles in it, which is more than a brownie can structurally support. Richard had brewed something for the occasion and designed the label himself, and I’ll say only that he is a banker. Isla rang from Auckland, where it was already Saturday morning and where, as far as I could tell from the background, nothing whatsoever was wrong.

And Richard, who does not make speeches, stood up at the kitchen table with a glass in his hand and said four sentences. I’m not going to reproduce them. Gemma said “Dad,” in the voice, and then got up and hugged him, which she does about as often as he dances.

Her position is that twenty-one is a number and she’ll do it properly when there is somewhere to do it. She said this through a third piece of brownie, so I’ve decided to believe her.

Forty-Six, by the Sea

My own birthday came and went quietly on a Friday in early April. The proper celebration waited a week, until things had begun to open, when Richard drove us down to the Kent coast for the day: Margate, by way of Whitstable, and on round the coast to Botany Bay.

Lunch was oysters at Angela’s in Margate, which is small and plain and entirely serious about fish, and where I ate a number of oysters that I’m not going to write down. Richard had a port-infused stout called Tidal Moon, from NorthDown, the Margate brewery, went rather quiet over it in the way he does when something is better than he expected, and has since ordered a case for the brewing group, who received it in the shed with due ceremony.

We spent the end of the afternoon at Botany Bay. It’s chalk — cliffs the colour of old piano keys, and a pair of stacks standing out on the sand, apparently left behind when the rest of the headland went. The wind came straight in off the sea and the sun was already low. It isn’t Tawharanui and it isn’t trying to be. I thought about that for a bit, walking along the tideline. New Zealand has had its border shut for a year now, and it is an odd thing to carry an open question about a closed country.

Dinner was on the terrace at Finbar’s in Westgate-on-Sea, in coats, with the sun going down over the bay and rather more seafood on top of the lunchtime seafood. There were bubbles. There were several bubbles. Richard drove home and I did not.

Gemma Explains Money to Me

For some months now Gemma has been talking about cryptocurrency. A year indoors with a laptop will do this to a person. She reads this blog, unlike her father, so I’ll be careful, and she knows I’m doing my best.

Here is what I have retained. There are things called Solana and XRP, and she owns some of each, and they have gone up. There is something called a cold wallet, which is not a wallet and is not cold. It’s a small device like a memory stick, and she keeps it somewhere she has declined to tell me. Over the winter she and some friends were also involved in the GameStop business, from which she emerged with a profit — the size of which I’m not allowed to disclose, which tells you it was either very small or not small at all. Some of her friends did less well, for reasons to do with an American app called Robinhood that, as far as I could follow, stopped people buying at the crucial moment, and whose name I’d have thought was asking for trouble.

I have sat through several dinners of this, nodding at what I hope were the right intervals. Richard, after twenty-odd years in banking, listens with an expression I can’t read, which is unusual, because I can normally read all four of them. I asked her whether it wasn’t all a bit risky. She said, “Only if you don’t know when to get out, Mum,” and went back to her phone. I’m told the proceeds are the Argentina fund.

She is twenty-one. She has a better grasp of risk than I had at thirty. I would like to claim some of the credit and I suspect it belongs to her father.

Out Out

Then May, and things reopened in stages, and we went at it like people let out of school.

Dinner with friends by Tower Bridge a few days before indoor dining came back, outside, in coats, all of us slightly too loud from being out of practice. Then, the first weekend we were allowed inside, STK — which has the air of a former gentlemen’s club, of whichever sort you care to imagine, with deep curved booths and cherry blossom trees placed about the floor in a bid for respectability. There is also a DJ. At dinner. Dancing is currently prohibited by government guidance, which is the first piece of public health policy Richard has wholeheartedly endorsed. The count remains at two. I am not convinced that any steak should cost eighty pounds. Richard, who ate it, is.

The Slaughters, Third Time

Over the late May bank holiday we went back to the Cotswolds with Claire and David, to an old farmhouse in Bampton — which anyone who watched Downton Abbey has seen a good deal of without knowing it. I have now walked the Slaughters with a seventeen-year-old quietly worrying about university, with these same two at New Year, in the aftermath of Gareth, and this time in unbroken sunshine with nothing to worry about at all, and it’s the same walk and it wasn’t the same walk. We did the Oddington loop as well. David, who is a structural engineer and approaches a barbecue as one, cooked both nights. The results, as ever, were excellent. Lunch was in Chipping Campden, where the wisteria was out across every honey-coloured house front, and I took more photographs of other people’s front doors than is strictly polite.

The Saturday after, the sun was still out, and we spent it on an afternoon of drinks across south-west London with friends — the Jam Tree in Chelsea and then down to the river at Putney, glass in hand on the embankment while the rowing crews went past looking disapproving. It was one of those days London produces about six times a year, as if to keep you from leaving.

Other People’s Finishes

Two site visits in June, neither of them mine. The first was a finished tower at Imperial Wharf, to benchmark the fit-out for my own. This is an odd professional ritual: you go round somebody else’s completed apartments running a thumb along the shadow gaps like a visiting mother-in-law, opening every cupboard, photographing the skirting. I took a great many photographs of skirting.

The second was Battersea Power Station. The whole of it: the main building, some of the apartments, the roof, and then down into the shell and core of what will be Apple’s offices, and the Turbine Hall, which is still a building site and already one of the great rooms in London. I’ve looked at those chimneys from train windows since I was a child. Standing underneath them in a hard hat was something else.

Two things I’ve been repeating to anyone who’ll listen. One: there’s a great skylight over the office floors, and the roof around it is open to the penthouse residents, who will be able to stroll out in their slippers and look down on somebody else’s meeting. Two — and this is as it was told to us on the day — Apple wanted the glazed corners of the meeting rooms to follow the same curve as the corner of an iPhone, and rather than compromise on the radius, bought a glass manufacturer. There is commitment to a brand, and then there is that.

I did not try to explain any of this at home.

Southampton

And then the cricket. The World Test Championship final, New Zealand against India, at Southampton. We had three tickets for the Saturday and drove down, Gemma asleep in the back before Guildford.

Friday’s play had been rained off without a ball bowled, so by accident we got the first day of the match.

It was grey, cold for June, and the light was poor from lunchtime on. New Zealand bowled. It was slow and tense and very good, the sort of cricket where not much happens for an hour and nobody looks away.

We were, to put it gently, outnumbered. My understanding of Test cricket runs at around sixty per cent, which is twenty points better than my American football and still left room for Richard to explain, for I think the fourth time in our marriage, what bad light is and why it means everyone goes home. It did, and we did, with India three down.

The following Wednesday, on the spare day, New Zealand won it by eight wickets. World champions. Gemma’s message to the family group was one word, capitalised, and this time entirely printable. Richard replied with a thumbs up, which by his standards is a lap of honour.

I notice that I’ve written “we” in the title of this post. I’m going to leave it.