He gave me forty-five minutes of pure, unfiltered London geography knowledge before I could even get his lunch fully unpacked.
Got assigned a new client on my Meals on Wheels route this week, a genuinely delightful retired London black cab driver who moved out here to Florida a few years back specifically chasing better weather, only to discover, in his own words delivered with real comic timing, that he apparently misses the rain considerably more than he ever expected to, a confession that led directly into a genuinely remarkable forty-five minutes of pure, detailed London geography knowledge before I had even managed to fully unpack his lunch from the delivery bag.
Former London cabbies, I have since learned from him directly, undergo an extraordinarily rigorous training process before they are ever licensed, memorising, in genuinely exhaustive detail, tens of thousands of individual streets and landmarks across the entire city, a body of knowledge apparently referred to within the trade simply as “the Knowledge,” which he described to me with a specific mixture of pride and lingering, genuine exhaustion that suggested the process had marked him permanently, decades after actually completing it.
I asked him, given how much I write about London from this considerable distance without ever having lived there myself, whether he still remembered most of it, and he laughed and said the specific routes have faded somewhat over the years, but the underlying shape of the city, its actual physical geography rather than any individual specific route, remains, in his words, “properly stuck” in his head permanently, something he does not think will ever fully fade regardless of how many years he ends up living in Florida instead.
What struck me most, listening to him talk, was how thoroughly his relationship with London differs from my own considerably more distant, more curated version, built entirely through reading and writing and conversations like today’s rather than through decades of actually, physically navigating the city’s streets for a living. His London is muscle memory, embodied knowledge accumulated through genuine, sustained physical presence. My own London is something closer to a carefully assembled mosaic, built from other people’s accounts, historical research, and whatever I can piece together from a considerable remove.
I do not think either version is more legitimate than the other, exactly, though I will admit spending time with someone whose relationship to the city is this deeply embodied does make my own, more distant version feel occasionally a little thin by comparison. I asked whether he would be willing to let me interview him properly sometime, for an actual piece rather than just today’s delivery conversation, and he seemed genuinely pleased by the idea, mentioning he has “more stories than anyone’s properly asked for in years,” a phrase that struck me as a small, quiet kind of loneliness worth taking seriously alongside the genuine delight of the conversation itself.
I am already planning next Tuesday’s delivery around the assumption that this particular stop is going to run considerably longer than my usual schedule allows for, and I have decided that is entirely fine. Some deliveries are simply about the food. This one, I suspect, is going to become about considerably more than that, and I am genuinely looking forward to finding out exactly how much London geography one former cabbie can fit into a single Tuesday lunch delivery.
I told him, before I finally left today, about the woman further along my route who spent two years in London back in the sixties, and his face lit up in a way that made me genuinely wish I could introduce the two of them directly, two people with such different, differently embodied relationships to the same city, separated by decades and by an entire ocean of professional experience within it, one navigating it on foot and by memory as a resident, the other navigating its streets professionally for a living. I do not know if that introduction will ever actually happen given the logistics of my delivery route, but I like the idea of it enough that I intend to at least mention it to both of them properly next time I see each.
Driving to my next stop afterward, considerably behind schedule, I found myself thinking about how strange and genuinely wonderful it is that this specific volunteer route, chosen originally simply because it fit conveniently around my own writing schedule, has quietly become one of the richest sources of material and genuine human connection in my entire creative life. I did not expect, signing up to deliver lunches, that I would end up gathering this much unexpected research toward my own ongoing fascination with a city I still, technically, barely know firsthand.
I have started, half-seriously, referring to this particular route in my own private notes as my most valuable ongoing research project, considerably more valuable than any formal research trip I could ever realistically afford, given how directly and how generously my clients keep offering up exactly the kind of specific, lived detail that no amount of reading from a distance could ever properly substitute for. I am genuinely grateful for it, in a way that has quietly reshaped how seriously I take this particular volunteer commitment, well beyond its original, simpler purpose of just getting lunch to people who need it.
More from this author at Lotte Heidenreich, prat.uk.