Moholy smoke, Batman!

Ten years ago I left London and my job in Canary Wharf, at that time a highrise frontier town, to return to South Africa. This past 10 days or so I have been roving again in the city of my birth and have found it much changed. There are the obvious improvements: cleaner, more service- orientated, facelifted and catered for by a lot of really good restaurants; and there is a more profound shift, to a city of style and extraordinary architectural design. Both are bodied out in the Tate Modern, Pink Floyd cover art come to life. But Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the sometime Bauhaus artist whose work is currently on show in that astonishing hall of spaces, would probably have felt himself most at home -- although perhaps rather uncomfortably -- in the gigantic geometries of the new city of Docklands, its high-gloss facades admitting nothing and reflecting everything. This is post-human design; its visitors and denizens seem incidental, beetles in a forest of monoliths. The new city is magnificent and it is completely heartless.

Appropriately, Moholy-Nagy finally settled in London and designed, among other things, the visual language of the Underground, including perhaps the city's best known logo. This was once, for me, a cursed sign, 13 years on the Northern Line sufficient explanation thereof. But here in the Tube network -- and the huge shiny fleet of buses -- Livingstone has left his mark. If the Misery Line had been like this, instead of grimy, battered and chronically delay-bound, why, I might have stayed ... I could do without Mummy patiently telling me the names of the stations though.

The tide of change seems to have left the outer suburbs high and dry. High streets in north London, from Golders Green to High Barnet, appear to be beyond our Ken. Passing through by car, I found it all much as I left it, Tesco land, wrapped in chains.

Did I have a good time? Hell yes. Thanks to the electric village of the WWW, I met some splendid blog friends, and wonderful female companions for walks on the Heath, the Tate, the theatre. And chipped and pinned my way through certain stores.

Damn it all, I miss the bloody place. So I am going to make a plan, as we say in SA. I shall straddle two worlds. More of this later. And more frequent entries.