LONDON IN MY HEART (Pt. 1/5)

My visit to the exhibition 'PINK FLOYD: Their Mortal Remains', last October in London, was the highlight in 2017.
...anyway, the first one after the arrival of Ettie, my granddaughter, in July of the same year.
She landed on Earth in Wishaw, Scotland.

The Pink Floyd Exhibition has recently started its 1st tour and can currently be seen in the capital of Italy.
Macro Spazio Expo
ROMA (RM) Mostre from 21/02/2018 to 01/05/2018
https://www.pinkfloydexhibition.com/

But let me start this story with my initial crush in London...

In the beginning of August 1973, I left on a bus my hometown, Zagreb, oppressed in a whole-day heat with a stubborn ‘army’ of 35 Celsius – and I got off in the midst of Munich cold summer, shivering on +8 centigrade.
After reaching Autobahn at the North-West junction of the city, a worn-out soldier in a black ‘beetle’ stops to take the brand new hitchhiker for a ride on the rural roads in order to avoid traffic jams and showed him that Germans also possess a spark of humour by commenting the August temperatures:
‘Zis ist z varmest vinter zet vir ever hed’.
He drove me all the way to Aachen, where I crossed the border to Belgium and I soon found myself at the docks of Ostende where I was almost immediately lucky: in front of a ferryboat I met a brother and a sister – Germans, one studying in London and the other visiting.
They took me across the Channel and when we reached their flat at half past two in the morning - they did not let me go to search for accommodation, but insisted on putting me up.

I woke up to a magnificent, sunny day, which I still carry with me in my memory-box as an everlasting ‘Yesterday’. As soon as I came out to the street overlooked by colourful brick houses, I knew that it is My City… and I fell in love with it.

During the next four weeks I visited every corner of the town, from Hyde-Park to the Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square; I rode back and forth on the cheap tube from one end of the metropolis to the other, with countless in-between stops to see all kind of things which I ever heard about in any context and which I won’t hear about again.

I was certainly known by everybody in several places: in the central 'Burger King' – the newest gastronomy sensation which has nearly become my abode – and in the surrounding cinemas at Leicester Square where I enjoyed masterpieces of Kubrick and Tarkowski and Bruce Lee’s bravuras as well, that people waited to see in queues, which like snakes coiled a couple of city-blocks, while the loudspeakers on the edge of the pavement were shaking due to the screams and the sound of the blows that the soon-to-be late idol was landing on his enemies on a huge screen; I also treated myself with a 3-day rock festival at the Alexander’s Palace, with the hottest live bands of the era: TYA and Wishbone Ash; Pink Floyd had unfortunately already passed the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ in the Planetarium, so I only saw that what was there before them too – myriads of stars; at one occasion frozen like shit on the road, in soaking wet clothes and with no umbrella, I found a shelter under the roof in front of one cinema, stamping my feet impatiently while awaiting the beginning of the evening screening of the musical documentary ‘Last Waltz’: I got up on tiptoes so that the passing bobby can hear me better – in UK they supposedly don’t accept anybody under 180 cm into the service – and asked him:
‘Sorry, Sir, what time do you have?’
The guy smiled politely and replied:
‘It’s 7 o’clock sharp and the rain is expected to stop ‘round half past nine.’
Then I realized that the weather report is the most important information on the island…

...to be continued tomorrow:
'...It’s green, green and only green as far as my sight can reach...'

text & pics copyright by Nash Manojlovic