The Metropolis

If you keep your memories in a box, you never have to worry about anything ever changing

Mike Pollitt | Thursday 15 March, 2012 11:13

Moving House is stressful. Moving house in London is very stressful. Moving into a house in London with your girlfriend for the first time, and her finding a box of your old love letters among your possessions and reading them all, that takes us beyond stress and into the realm of minor psychological breakdowns.

This just happened to a friend of mine. Oh he’d been foolish, no doubt. But aren’t we all? Love letters, like love itself, are inherently foolish. That’s why all those clever PhD students are such committed loners.

But letters my friend had, and letters he kept in a box upon his bedroom shelves. Why, I asked, had he not done the gentlemanly thing, hired a safety deposit box, and stowed them safely away with a vial of cyanide, two false passports and a box of snuff? Or scanned and emailed copies to himself and burnt the originals? I know it’s not the most romantic thing in the world, PDF’s rarely are. But what was his girlfriend more likely to open: a mysterious box with a faint whiff of faded perfume, or a PDF entitled “archived correspondence”?

In any case, romance had nothing to do with it. The old flame who wrote the letters had last licked him long ago. Not an ember remained. This guy was moving in with his girlfriend whom he loved. So why had he kept them?

As usual with human beings, the reason for his behaviour had very little to do with anyone else, and an awful lot to do with himself. The letters had happened to him. They were a chapter in his autobiography. No one likes to pulp their autobiography, especially the early racy chapters about how young, virile and desirable you are.

Perhaps, if he possessed any foresight (and the fact that he left old love letters lying round for his lover to read suggests he may not), he saw them as an investment in his memory. Perhaps he looked ahead 30 or 40 or 50 years, to an old man stumbling blindly through the cluttered rooms of his past, searching of some sign of who he was and what he did, and finding in these letters a memory of himself so fresh and pure it brings a tear to his cataract eye.

Or perhaps he just forgot to chuck them out. That’s also a real possibility. He’s a messy guy.

The past is precious to us all. That’s why we hoard it. But in the end my friend threw the letters out. He realised that the love he has now is more valuable than the idealised recollection of a love which never really was.

As for him and his girlfriend, so for us and our city. Last month a petition was raised to stop Brick Lane’s bricks being tarmacked over. It was claimed the tarmac would damage the historic character of the much-loved street.

And yet the bricks were less than 10 years old. This was an attempt to preserve a city which had never existed. Likewise, this month English Heritage objected to a new tower in Dalston. There are several objections to the tower, some of which are valid—I commend to you OPEN Dalston’s website for a précis. But English Heritage’s objection was that “the proposed frontage… does not adequately respect the historic area’s character, grain and vertical rhythm.”

I’m sure we all love Dalston’s vertical rhythm. As for its grain—I couldn’t possibly comment. But if you object to new developments on rhythmic grounds, you ultimately contribute to higher rents and duller neighbourhoods. It’s like re-reading old love letters instead of going out and finding someone new. You’d be better off storing your objections in a safety deposit box, putting on a spangly new frontage, and trying to focus on the present. Cos that past you’re lusting after, it was probably never even really there.

Twitter: @MikPollitt

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