' The tube train coiling out into sharp shadows, sunlight cutting in between ramrod Victorian blocks ' Photograph: Getty
A friend of mine ran the marathon this Sunday - an achievement whatever the weather, I'm sure you'll agree, but more so this year than normally, as the temperature in London rose to a balmy 22C. The thought of her pounding through Docklands in the unseasonal heat had me sweating in sympathy.
Sympathy for marathon-runners aside, however (and frankly, they've only themselves to blame) yesterday was also the first day this year that I caught a whiff of that London-summer smell - the hot mix of dust and warm concrete and slowly ripening litter that's so distinctive, particularly to a country lass like me. When I first moved here I hated it, and spent the whole of the long stretch from May to September casting around for excuses to bolt back north; a decade later and so acclimatised am I that my heart lifts when I smell it. When I read this poem by Tobias Hill while reviewing his latest collection, Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow, last year, it captured perfectly, for me, the gloriousness of the city's grimy summer beauty, while the cascade of references - to Forster, Kipling, the Eliotic "auditors or clerks", the mythical "hanging gardens" and "carnivals" - elevates the landscape into the realm of the fabulous. I'm not so keen on the first stanza and final line, which feel to me slightly superfluous, but Hill's portrait of the intimate glimpses afforded from the train is one I cherish. I highly recommend the whole collection, in fact - there's a fantastic 12-poem sequence that charts the city's changing face over a year. Great stuff.
To a Boy on the Underground
The laptop cauls your face with light, unflattering and glutinous The iPod plugs your ears with ambient noise. If you would only disconnect
you'd see the Underground's dark tract Unearthed. The tube train coiling out into sharp shadows, sunlight cutting in between ramrod Victorian blocks,
and the sous-chef or waiter who basks in the sun in a restaurant backyard, and the underwriters, auditors or clerks who lean out of high windows like the girls
in folklore, one dangling a cigarette, one seeming to be savouring the smells of pizza ovens, Peking duck and piss, the air half-edible and wholly foul,
and here and there green hanging gardens sunken gardens, roof gardens, yards like cesspits, and everywhere carnivals of people, the crowds embracing their collision.
Only disconnect, and all this will be yours, my son.
