There are times of the year – the height of the summer holidays or the period between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve – when city roads become bare and the pavements clear. Queues dwindle. Buses proffer seats. The clicks of heels echo around empty underground stations. Breathing in lifts becomes a thing. Running is to run undisturbed.
Living and working in a city is great, but you can’t escape the rat-race cliches: escalators of necks craning over phones and commuters rearranging themselves in a suited Rubik’s cube to allow a train door to close; the struggle to find a space in a pub and the very British request to “perch” at the end of someone else’s table. “Excuse me, is this chair free?”
But when the non-native citizens of cities untether themselves from the flat whites, the desk lunches, the club nights, the traffic jams and the naff ads; when the out-of-office responses go on and suitcases are filled with swimming gear, or presents, and rolled on to platforms and stuffed into the boots of taxis: that is the magic. That is the smoothing out of terrain like a new map, revealing things gone unnoticed.
You remember those amazing shots of an empty Westminster Bridge at the beginning of 28 Days Later? Andrew Macdonald, the film’s producer, explained how they achieved those scenes: by filming in July at 4am, waiting for the sun to come up, grabbing an hour or so of emptiness before rush hour. Before the fumes, the flapping newspapers and the cacophonous soundtrack of city life: barriers beeping, doors hissing, exhaust fumes sputtering.
I will never forget when I spent an entire journey on public transport by myself. Past 11pm on a bank holiday Monday, I was returning from elsewhere as the rest of the capital moisturised, took out their contact lenses and prepared for the return to work. I, meanwhile, boarded a vacant carriage, then alighted at a station without a single soul in it. A mouse scuttled past, but – did I imagine this? – slower than normal.
There are opposites to all of this, of course: the year-round lido swimmer bombarded by fairweather dippers when temperatures hit 27C. The galleries suddenly packed out by a celebrity-endorsed exhibition. The quiet park hosting a funfair. That is when I look forward to time off during school terms and mid-December breaks.
What I am saying is this: I encourage you to take a holiday, but my motives are not entirely altruistic.
