the new london (welcome to the gernsback continuum)

horsemouth has been on holiday to the new london - he bagged an air b n' b flat in one of the new riverside developments online and departed from langdon park with his new luggage. he arrived on the monorail (having made use of the crossrail interchange at the wharf of canaries). almost immediately he was aware of having crossed over into the gernsback continuum but the moment of change itself was imperceptible. happy people strolled about in the bright enhanced sunshine appropriately dressed for the heat. some clutched iced lattes others almond croissants. a cooling breeze animated the trees - already the planting looked well set in. at night there was the hissing of automatic watering devices as horsemouth sat out on the balcony and posted up the photos of himself from the day to facebook (the selfie-stick was proving invaluable). opposite the orange helio oiticica panels changed colour as they cooled down through the thermal spectrum and still further away the aquamarine glass of a liam gillicked infrastructure project matched the evening sky.

the customer service was exemplary - and there were familiar brands all over the place.

 

 

every once in a while the magic would fade and horsemouth would find himself under a flyover beside a dusty main road or peaking through a hole in a fence at an abandonned building site covered in wildflowers. he would begin to feel anxious and lost but as soon as he was back in the carefully maintained and immaculately clean spaces he would begin to feel happier again and within minutes irrational enthusiasm would be bubbling up beneath his skin

the people were smiling but not overly friendly and a little less ethnically diverse than horsemouth remembered from previous visits (but then no-one would have had any reason to come to this part of town before). horsemouth has the strong feeling that he'd seen them elsewhere - the three graces clustered round a high-spec mobile phone laughing, there was a man out jogging, a chinese woman walking a small dog. nobody, horsemouth noticed, cut corners across the grass. jeans, t-shirts, shorts, summer dresses.