It was bright and sunny and cold today as I drove through London. Thinking back over the drive, two pauses in particular have stayed with me. Both were at the ends of bridges. The first was at the pedestrian crossing, by the roundabout at the end of Lambeth Bridge.

A week earlier, on a freezing evening, I’d seen the roundabout and its occupant, a magnificent date palm, surrounded in cranes and flashing lights. A few days later the roundabout was still surrounded by barricades and lights, but in addition there’d been the sad sight of the palm on its side, ready to be taken away to who knew where. This afternoon those flashing lights and barricades had gone – so had the palm. The roundabout stood empty, with no sign of the breezy fronds that I often saw from a distance, flying beneath the Union Jack on the Houses of Parliament behind. The sight of that emptiness felt as though a friend had been taken away, with no time to say goodbye.

A slow crawl down the Embankment followed, with updates on the Covid enquiry for company. There were light clouds in the sky, and on the radio Boris Johnson was saying that at first sight the incoming Covid storm had looked nothing more than a cloud the size of a man’s hand.

As the traffic inched forward the news had moved on, stopping at the turmoil in Gaza. By Millennium Bridge we too halted, this time to allow a lengthy crocodile of young school children to cross at the lights. The red changed to green, and the green to red, and then back to green as we sat and waited for the smiling line to skip and dawdle its way over the road. As it did so, the cars and the bikes and the lorries watched. There was no hooting, no shouting, no revving of engines – all were as patient as angels, acknowledging and protecting the children of strangers, whose crocodile made the damage to their contemporaries in the Middle East scream more loudly still.

At last the school had crossed, and the traffic inched on through the winter greys of London.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023