Jamais vu

Today I sat on an orange sofa and explained an idea I’d had after my front tyre exploded on the marylebone flyover and I’d had to walk the six miles to Ben’s dragging my bike and cursing my absent-minded shortage of inner tubes. I sat there in the offices of the mighty IDEO and explained an idea for massively improving our performance for SOUTH, while some of Britain’s best design minds listened carefully. They listened, and then they demolished it. Maybe that’s the wrong word, they didn’t criticise it, they didn’t tell me why it couldn’t be done (quite the opposite), they just simply took it apart piece by piece and examined it in a way I had never thought to before. They showed me that I had been asking a question in a way that presupposed a certain solution, and that the question didn’t nearly go deep enough into the problem. In a flurry of brightly coloured post-it notes they anatomised our problems, staking out each segment, each component like a medical exam and kindly but firmly drew me back every time I began to gallop down a particular path towards a single solution.

Ben had been caught by a delayed delivery man and was unable to make it over so we skyped him in on my laptop and occasionally he would pipe up with ideas as they came to him or useful nuggets of information that I had overlooked. It was a little surreal, as though HAL from 2001 or KITT from Knightrider were suddenly spouting away on the table. I don’t know if he got the full impact of the meeting, but to me it was like seeing something so innately familiar for the first time, jamais vu maybe. It was also deeply humbling to see the company that designed the first laptop, the first mouse dedicating manhours to SOUTH for no other reason than they believed in our dream.

Walking through the city tonight, my ipod choosing pitch-perfect tracks for me, it felt like seeing London for the first time too. I got to the station but just carried on walking; I felt like a tourist, and I realised that London doesn’t really start until one floor up. If you walk along Regent street you can see dingy woolen goods shops mixing with over-priced suitmakers, but one floor up and it’s an infinitely long palace of french balconies, stone-wrought urns and architectural intricacies that seem to be the last true vestige of empire. Up Portland Place, past the conical All Souls Church standing guard over the BBC and the windows are interspersed with wreaths and ornate overhangs, through Park crescent with its gleaming porticoes that really show you what old money means until Regents Park interjects a vista of darkness among the lights and London has never seemed so much a part of me. On expeditions I often imagine streets in London in the most vivid of detail, today I was reminded why that’s no bad thing.