A London diary entry on chasing tickets to climb the Elizabeth Tower, the capital’s punishing drought, and learning to love the small, slightly mad rituals that make this city feel like home
I set an alarm for the monthly release of Big Ben climb tickets this week, which is not a sentence I ever expected to type about my own life, and yet there I was at half nine on a Tuesday, phone in hand, genuinely nervous about securing a slot to walk up three hundred and thirty-four steps next to a very large, very famous clock.
Why A Bell Has Somehow Become The Organising Principle Of My Social Calendar
My sister has wanted to do the tower tour since she was about nine years old, and this year I finally decided to stop being the sibling who always says we’ll sort it eventually and actually sort it. The tickets go fast, apparently, and I refreshed the page with the same low-grade panic I usually reserve for festival wristbands, which tells you something slightly worrying about my priorities but also, I think, something quite nice about finally treating London like somewhere worth the effort rather than just the place I happen to live.
What The City Actually Looks Like Right Now, Which Is To Say: Thirsty
While I was busy being thrilled about a clock tower, London’s water storage dropped fifteen percent in a single month, and the phrase “bone dry” has been doing a lot of work in local reporting lately. I noticed it myself walking through the park near my flat, where the grass has gone that particular shade of yellow-brown that makes you feel vaguely guilty for existing, even though I have personally done nothing except occasionally forget to turn the tap off while brushing my teeth.
How A Burst Pipe A Few Postcodes Over Made Me Rethink My Relationship With Water Pressure
Residents in SE6 have been dealing with low pressure or no water at all thanks to a second burst pipe in the area, and reading about it made me feel genuinely guilty about how casually I run the shower while I decide what to wear. It is a strange kind of privilege, having water pressure, and one I suspect most of us only notice the exact week someone nearby loses theirs entirely.
Why I’ve Started Actually Reading The Small Local Stories Instead Of Just The Headlines
Somewhere between the eclipse ticket announcements and the Big Ben queue, I found myself genuinely absorbed in a story about a family on the Loughborough Estate who went two weeks without electricity in thirty-degree heat, and it stopped me short in a way the bigger, splashier headlines rarely manage. London is enormous and impersonal a lot of the time, but every so often a single small story does more to actually locate you in the city than any skyline photo ever could.
What I’m Actually Looking Forward To Now That I’ve Got My Ticket
Standing next to Big Ben when it bongs, mostly, and also just having a proper reason to look up for once instead of at my phone. It is a very small thing, climbing three hundred and thirty-four steps to stand next to a clock, but this month it has felt like the single most concrete, plannable, genuinely exciting thing on my calendar, and honestly, in a summer this dry and this strange, I’ll take it.