I am still in the WhatsApp group chat for my Mum’s old road and now I have banned myself from TikTok, this is my new favourite scrolling location. People talk for months about missed bin collections. They swap seed packets and dining table chairs (no table). They complain about roadworks, bus routes, the coffee shops on the high street and how everyone’s always double parked round there, the fucking useless council, oh awkward, Peter at number 46 is a councillor actually, what was that you’re saying John? Come over here, say it to my face if it’s so important, silence from John for 7 weeks until (out of nowhere, no preamble) he posts a picture of himself on holiday in Spain, topless with a pint, watching the England game. No football chat in the neighbourhood group chat, please. Oh bore off Tez (winky face). Does anyone want this fully functioning Casio keyboard? 4 hockey sticks, all different sizes (I didn’t know hockey sticks had sizes). I like the scale of this kind of drama. It is low volume, microcosmic, loudly and appallingly human.

I was listening to a podcast about George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and someone said something about how it was a novel as a study of provincial life. Hilarious, because when I read it, I fully missed that. I loved it for the human gossip (Fred loves Mary, Dorothea fancies Will but omg what about her dead husband’s will, shock, drama, illegitimate sons, scoundrels, murders, love triangles). But of course, it makes complete sense that I’d fail to notice that Middlemarch is a study of provincial life. I am from London so I forget, other people who aren’t from here see the city as a place to arrive at. But I am also from zone 4 London, which has it’s own kind of provincial psychology.

I walk through Hoxton in nuclear midday sun to Peer Gallery, for Okiki Akinfaye’s show, because I long for zone 4 limbo. Panoramic canvases, wide as billboards. Cash and carry, foxes, cats and pigeons and Paddy Power. The images are full of blank space, half coming undone, half pulling themselves together. The images are just stolen glances, all jumbling together like angles on a crystal. This show is called RM9 5AN, the postcode for Dagenham Heathway, the local high street near where the artist grew up. In the handout, she talks about her love/hate relationship with it and the way she moves through it (breakfast from angel bakery, food shop at cash and carry, watching the foxes cats pigeons from the station platform). And, like, I relate. It is near enough my own understanding.

I huff a laugh to myself thinking about how this is a modern British landscape, but then I catch myself. It is, of course it is, it actually is. It is zone 5, zone 4, this is a provincial study, a 21st century pastoral. Thank god! This is a landscape I know better than any other, I fell right out of its willderness fully formed. I love it, I hate it, I miss it, it made me. When I lived there I barely looked at it because I could navigate it with my eyes closed. Now I have left, I find new mysteries because it is always on the boil. A painter casting their eye on limbo, zone 4/5 pastoral. Taking the time to look, see, translate and pulling an image out like a magician conjuring a rabbit from a hat. It is so beautiful, and I want so much more, I am soothed and I am restless and I want to scream.

The city sprawls out like a virus, swallowing up the fields around it. Green belt, brown belt, grey belt — the Great British countryside doesn’t exist anymore! Ye Olde Pastoral is just Marie Antoinette’s Queen’s Hamlet, a model village for people who want to cosplay rural life. The real pastoral is new builds and boarded up pubs. You are either in a city or on the outer edges of it.

And the centre of the city is a kind of pit of hell. I remember speaking to someone once, who told me that 3 leylines triangulate around central London and — energetically speaking, zone 1 has bad vibes. Yes, only the perimeter is real. The outer ring. My boyfriend grew up with a field outside his bedroom window, cows and streams and rolling hills. When he tells me about his childhood chasing dragonflies, I point and laugh because I think he sounds like some cartoon Tom Sawyer from medieval times. Only cities exist, duh! The city is the entire world and if I stray out beyond the limits of the M25 I could fall off the edge into an abyss. There be monsters, etc.

Angel bakery, legs, legs, legs. I look at the legs in the painting, I look down at my own. Akinfe has pulled a streak of acid pink/orange over the highest points, where the leg catches the sun. I can’t tell if the acid sits under or over the nude-brown. I think about whether I glow with light from within or if I just reflect it. How bare legs look as I walk down the street with my chin lowered, eyes only flicking up to read the shop signs (even though, I know what they say). Akinfe’s pastoral world is syrupy sweet, bursting blaring neon bright. The fox cat pigeons duke it out in lush tropical scene. I think about all the high streets I’ve ever popped down to. Bare legs greasy with moisturiser, socks and sandals, scraped bun and keys in my hand. Plastic bag stretching over my white and pink fingers. Half a sign out of the corner of my eye. Bus stop a red blur, shop window a green blur, legs and legs and legs. I’m going shop to get (cereal/milk/wax strips/elfbar/one single vegetable that I thought was in the fridge but it’s been in there too long and gone weird so we can’t use it) dyou want anything???? Long pause.

Only cities are real, and even then, there’s a pit of hell in the middle. Avoid at all cost. On the outskirts, weeds grow as tall as double decker buses. Peter at number 46 used to be on the council (now he’s retired, of course) but he still holds court in his garden shed every Wednesday. John hops the fence, scaring the cats and pigeons back down the alley. They slink into the murk of plastic bags and nettles and John presses his nose up against the shed’s thin plastic window. A lantern cuts through the gloom, Peter and Cem and Janet and Sue are looking at a map spread open across an overturned green wheelie bin. They move monopoly pieces over the map, pushing a line out wider than the M25. Tez plays a tinny marching band tune on the fully functioning Casio keyboard, and the troops dismantle the dining table chairs, fashioning them into weapons. Janet is using the hockey sticks as dowsing rods, charting a route and drawing new lines on the map with a big red felt tip pen. Peter is rolling up his sleeves, a tattoo of a love heart on his bicep and the words NORTH LONDON FOREVER in a wavy banner. Only cities are real now. We beat back the boundary, new build by new build, in search of some new province in which to double park our BMWs, our Hondas, our Toyotas, our Volkswagen Golfs. Nuclear sun high in the sky, new coffee shop on the high street, I love limbo, today is a good day.