By Julia Moore

In a previous column, I recalled my experience of dragging items of tableware around London (passim last edition). I did not, however, include the most eccentric item to be so treated, as I thought it merited its own story. This is it.

When my mother died, I executed the usual duties with due diligence, and set about making arrangements to place the ashes in her home town of Bath, West of England. Due to some reason, long forgotten, I could not collect said ashes from the funeral directors, and store them anyplace before heading into London for a theatre trip. So Mother came too.  Being strong on etiquette, I had pre-warned my theatre-going pal, that ‘another’ would be joining us, but that an extra ticket would not, in all probability, be needed. Over pre-performance drinks, pal and I mulled over whether Mother ought to be deposited in the cloakroom - what if my rucksack (in these, sadly, high-security times), was deemed too big for the auditorium and I had no choice but to hand her over, so to speak?...what if, we mused, there was a mix-up on collection, and someone returned home, not with their original bag, but mother?...I stuck my mobile number on her casket, as a precaution to this nightmare scenario (more for the innocent party, than me). All a bit Norman Bates-y?

As it happened, Mother attended the performance, having slipped through security unnoticed (clearly funeral urns more common at matinees than one thinks- that’s why I love London). For, what was probably a first for her, Mother behaved herself throughout the event. As a corporeal being, this would not, like as much, have been the case. Mother loved expeditions to the arts, but always took sandwiches because they ‘went on too long’.

On a subsequent London trip - now with Mother duly at peace in her picture-postcard, verdant churchyard - I recall this, strange trip to the City, ‘mother’ in tow - and can never pass the National Theatre without reflecting on it. The last time I was in London with my mother, I was probably 8 years old, and very bored, sitting in a shop, watching mother being measured/fitted for one of her rather beautiful dresses. Spin forward 48 years, and London trips are very different. Now able to be sentimental about Central London, I rather adore the anonymity of a theatre bar, just before the pals arrive, or a cafe down a quiet lane in Covent Garden (they do still exist). However, before I become a candidate for pseuds corner (a la Private Eye), reality does slap one in the face, constantly - street poverty, humanoid creatures, staring at hand-held devices, divorced from the terrestrial world in which they semi-function (please start a campaign to walk into anyone not looking where they are going, assuming that you will?), and street advertising. To continue the psuedy-ness - one of the most memorable travel snapshots is of a pre-Glasnost Moscow, with NO advertising hoardings, neon-lights or much signage at all. This was 1989, with the ‘free-market’(no such thing), standing on the doorstep. I shudder (yet want) to return, to see the promise of change - change, indeed, but at what price?