Deliveroo Days
(Draft Three)
It was in late 1814 that rumours began to spread of a new resident in the neighbourhood of lower Marylebone. Young, wealthy — reports had her as the daughter of a noblewoman — she had only one, admittedly staggering, defect; she had the head of a pig. Ever since first coming across the tale of the Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square in a book of London lore, I have never been able to pass through that quiet, affluent quad, just north of Oxford Street, without being reminded of its supposed former resident. And so it was again, on a mid-afternoon in late October, a couple of years after I first starting working for Deliveroo. Weaving through the busy traffic of Mandeville Place, into the quiet, green oasis of Manchester Square, I found myself once again wondering: had the legend been constructed out of whole cloth, or had a lady really once lived here, who … But passing the doric pilasters and red brick of Hertford House, the question dissolved. I was close to my drop-off now and my attention was taken up scanning the passing frontages, and cursing, for the thousandth time, that peculiarly English disinclination to clearly display one’s house number.
Cycling up the street, I noticed a couple outside one of the houses: a young girl, perhaps seventeen, something odd about her, something “learning-disabled” perhaps, standing on the doorstep of one of the terraced homes, in a strange, awkward, half-embrace with a tubby, balding little man, a fair few years older than her. Both were Asian, or seemed Asian, to my unpractised eye. Realising that I had cycled too far up the street, I did a U-turn and passed the couple again.
“No-no-no!” the girl was whining. “No-no-no, no, I don’t want tooo. I don’t want tooo.”
Still not paying them much mind, I got off my bike, leaned it against the railings and took the warm package of food from the thermal bag strapped to the rear pannier rack.
“No-no-no!” the girl repeated. “I don’t want tooo.”
“It’ll be ok” said the man, “It’ll be fine.” He began to pull her towards the house.
“No-no-no”, she repeated, “No, I don’t want to.”
I found that I had instinctively started walking towards them, and the next thing I knew I had followed them into the hallway of the building, the package still in my hand. It was only after I was in the close, dark entranceway that I saw that it was not he who was pulling her inside, but she who was attempting to pull him outside.
“But you can’t speak to her. She won’t like you!” said the girl, ignoring me completely.
“I can, and she will”, said the man, equally unperturbed by my presence. “I love you and your mother ought to know.” He rang the ground floor apartment as I left the building.
As I stepped out onto the street once again, a woman came out of one of the facing houses, thin, red-eyed, with a halo of grey curls erupting around her head.
“Is that for me?” she called out, “from Pho?”
“That’s right! I had the wrong house!” I handed her the package just as an enormous French poodle bounded out from behind her into the road.
“Oh no!” she cried, standing stock-still, the box in her hand held out straight-armed in front of her, her heels fast together as though she had been frozen in place. “Oh no!” she repeated. “Stop him! Please stop him!”
Obligingly I ran after the dog, chasing it up and down the street for a while before finally grabbing its collar and dragging it back to the house. Only then did the lady relax from her weird, statue-like posture. She unstraightened her elbows, handed me back the food, dragged the dog back into the house, shut the door behind her, and only returned for her package a minute or so after I had begun to wonder if she had gone for good.
Already my phone was beeping in my pocket, another order calling me straight back to the ranked restaurants of Great Titchfield Street. And by rights, that is where the incident — if it can be called as much — should have ended; five minutes in the life of a Deliveroo rider, mildly interesting in its way but hardly worth writing home about. And yet it remained on my mind, so that for a period of some weeks the memory of that mismatched Asian couple, that middle-aged woman, that enormous dog, would always come to mind whenever I passed through that quiet Georgian street and its abutting garden square, quite displacing all thoughts of The Pig-Faced Lady. It was only some months later, on an evening spent dragging my bike — smashed up in an accident — home through the early-winter chill, that I realised why the little incident stuck in my mind. But more of that later.
+ + +
By the time of the events on Manchester Street, I had been working for Deliveroo for about two years. Two whole years since those first, tenuous days as a delivery-cyclist. Those had been days, turning into weeks, during which my emotions had swung erratically, pendulum-like, between hope and expectation. Expectation: that I would be fired before much more time had passed. Certainly, that had been the pattern that my employment history had tended to follow. In my time, I have held several jobs in which I was fired on the very day that I had been hired. Generally speaking, I tended to last a few months. Sooner or later, though, the same thing always happened. My unique combination of fecklessness, anti-socialness, lethargy, and incipient and ever-present rage meant that I had become used to the sick feeling of hurtling speed, as I rushed, from opening interview to inevitable ejection, through whichever firm had been unlucky enough to hire me.
It was less a healthy optimism, and more a helpless tendency to daydream, that meant that a barrage of hopes vied, from the start, with my expectation that Deliveroo were sure to fire me before too long. What if they didn’t fire me, and I somehow broke my pattern, somehow kept this job? The possibilities were wonderful. I would become fitter than ever. I would earn those rock-hard calves of the serious cyclist. I would learn all the hidden byways of the city that others never see. I would, through brushing up alongside that old elite, the last of the old-school couriers, learn the finer aspects of pedalling lore. I would learn to ride a fixie. I would become adept at roadside maintenance. I would adopt the more obscure aspects of courier chic. I would learn, with tour-guide levels of intricate knowledge, the history and geography of a city that I had always loved but whose centre I had only previously visited as a tourist. I would make friends with other delivery riders. I would find a girlfriend among this group and we would occasionally nip down to Brighton or over the Chilterns on our bikes, trained up to pedal those long distances with ease. And my working life, spent outdoors, on the roads and pavements of the city-centre, up close to the surfaces of things, alongside the tramps and tourists and all the other denizens of central London, would develop a colour and a vividness that until now it had lacked.
Neither of these eventualities had transpired. Two years on, I had still not been fired. Despite the frequency with which I arrived late for my shift or did not show up at all, it had begun to look as though I never would be. Nor had my vain dreams of a more social, meaningful, healthier life transformed into reality. I was fairly fit, that was true. But I had never made any friends among the hospitality class of London’s restaurants and delivery riders. I knew the city better than I used to, but there were still many areas in which, despite passing through them several times a day, I still managed to lose my bearings. I’d never learned to ride a fixie. The few old-school couriers I interacted with turned out to be wankers. And as for a life of vivid incident: occasionally, when people asked what I did at parties, and I said “Deliveroo rider”, they would politely reply “oh, that must be interesting”, no doubt picturing a life, whatever its disadvantages in terms of wages and exertion, nonetheless bringing some intimacy with the back streets and rear entrances of office blocks, of peeps into the lives behind the walls of Kensington mansions and Brixton housing estates. Nothing quite on the par of “Confessions of a Window Cleaner”, perhaps, but at least more eventful than the dull grind of the office. And yet after twenty-four months in the job, the nearest that I had come to experiencing something notable was that decided non-event on Manchester Street: riding to the rescue of a rape-that-wasn’t, and chasing a large dog around for a few minutes.
+++
From my very first day as a Deliveroo rider, I should have picked up on the clues informing me just how friendless, conversationless, isolated — almost atomised — a life it would turn out to be. Pedalling, all togged up in my sparkling-new turquoise jacket and top, down through Charing Cross towards Soho, my phone beeped in my pocket and my very first order came through: a pick up from the New Loon Moon Supermarket. As I tapped “accept”, I noticed something disturbing. Deliveroo divides London into zones, and I had been contracted to work in VWP, just south of parliament. With the enthusiasm of the beginner, however, I had logged into the app while paused at a traffic light on my way through Euston; a mistake, as it turned out. I was in the wrong zone, and had just accepted an order from MMS, the Deliveroo area centred on Mayfair. Despite it being my first day on the job, I had managed to be late leaving home. Unless I could somehow de-accept the order, I would never get to VWP in time for the start of the shift.
How, though, did one go about unassigning oneself from an order? After poking about vainly on the app for a while, I called the Deliveroo helpline, beeped impatiently though the convoluted menu and — when finally put through to an actual person — did my best to explain the situation. But my interlocutor could not seem to grasp the nature of my dilemma. Perhaps it was due to the echoing, long-distance line. Perhaps it was due to the intervening clouds of static between London and Jakarta, or Delhi, or Manila, or wherever this particular call-centre was located. Certainly the telephonist’s poor grasp of English did not help matters.
“Sir, did you say you cannot find the restaurant?”
“No. I can find the restaurant. But I am in the wrong zone.”
“You went to the wrong restaurant?”
“No. I did not go there yet. But I am in the wrong zone.”
“Sorry, sir, I do not understand. What does this mean, the wrong…?”
“The wrong area.”
(A pause).
“Sorry, sir, I do not understand. What does this mean?”
“I am in the wrong part of London.”
“Oh, you say you are too far from the restaurant?”
I won’t bore the reader with the rest of the conversation. After five minutes I gave up, and headed into the alleys of Chinatown. Bumping uncomfortably over the cobbles, I spotted my destination.
“I have a delivery to pick up” I told the elderly lady behind the counter. She looked at me blankly. “I have” I said more slowly “a delivery order. To pick up.” A further uncomprehending moment, then the wrinkles and furrows of her puckered face cleared.
“You wan’ make order?”
“No, no, I have an order. Deliveroo.” I pointed at my logod chest. This time, the arrow hit home.
“Ah, Deliveroo!” A grin of sparse, yellowing teeth and then she abruptly barked out a couple of sentences in Cantonese, still with her eyes fixed on mine. I was momentarily nonplussed, but then a man who had been stocking the shelves rose and retrieved two bags from the freezer-cabinet. These he handed to me and I was off on my first delivery.
I saw with relief that the delivery address was in one of that warren of narrow, medieval streets that abuts Westminster Abbey. Once delivered, a quick hop over Lambeth Bridge would see me safely in VWP, a little late, but then again, when had I ever been on time for work before? South down Regent Street, I followed the curve of the colonnaded quadrant. Pausing at the lights on Piccadilly, I noticed a guy on a Dutch ladies bike with an electrified front wheel. Iranian, possibly Afghan. Like me, he was clad in Deliveroo’s signature colours. Unlike me, he was carrying a big, square Deliveroo bag on his back. Catching his eye, I gave him a comradely wave.
“This is my first day!” I told him. He looked at me blankly. “This is my first day working for Deliveroo!” I explained, raising my voice above the rumble of the revving black cabs behind us.
“I…I sree”, he told me, “I no spik Ingsh.” This time it was my turn to look blank.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I no spik Ingsh” he repeated, as the lights turned green and we both pushed off. Ingsh. Ingsh? Over the years, living in various countries around the world, I had been used to being told “I’m sorry, I don’t speak English” or “I’m sorry, me no speak English” or even “no speak English”. Never before had I encountered anyone whose grasp on the language was so hobbled that they could not even name it. “Ingsh?” I thought, as I headed down Haymarket towards Trafalgar Square. “How does he manage to hold down a delivery a job if he speaks that little of the language?”
Soon, however, the man and his odd pronunciation were forced from my mind as I cycled down Whitehall towards Big Ben. I had not been this way for several months, and in recent weeks a terrorist attack somewhere nearby had thrown up a whole new system of bollards that narrowed the width of the road. These appeared at intervals all the way down to the river, making the journey one of hurry-and-slow, hurry-and-slow, until at last I was able to slip into the narrow lanes around St. John Smith’s square. At my destination at Marsham Street I rang the doorbell. A young lady half-opened the door and looked at me with a suspicious, near-startled expression on her face.
“Delivery” I told her. Her look became no more comprehending. “Deliveroo” I said, pointing at the front of my jacket. “Ah!” She nodded her head in brisk acknowledgement.
“This is my first job for them” I told her, as I handed over the bags. The half-smile which had just appeared on her face promptly retreated.
“I’m sorry”, she told me, as she backed back into the hallway, “I don’ speak — ”
“Yes, yes, I get it”, I replied, retrieving my bike and turning back towards the square. “You don’t speak English”.
I will not pretend that my first forty minutes as a delivery rider was particularly representative of the job. But nor was it unusual enough to be called misleading. Over the next few years, I would spend whole hours shuttling between the back doors of restaurant kitchens, where nobody spoke English, down back streets, where nobody spoke English, to apartment blocks, where nobody spoke English. I noticed this most after I had signed up for Uber, for reasons which I might get into later. The work was identical, but Uber, unlike Deliveroo, has no zones, so chains of deliveries could send me far from the city centre into such enclaves as Whitechapel, Willesden and Wembley — and into several others that didn’t start with W too. But in the city centre also— in Marble Arch, in Euston, in Paddington, and often enough even in the square mile of parks and palaces — my work put me in constant contact with men and women who never needed to use the language of the country in whose capital they lived.
Things would doubtless have been different if I spoke Urdu or Farsi or Brazilian Portuguese. Outside most high-street franchises, groups of riders can be found, clumped together by language and chatting while they wait for their orders to come through. As a mere English speaker I would pass by these fraternal huddles and wait alone in a corner. Occasionally I would get chatting with a Pole or Hungarian, who don’t exist in big enough numbers to ditch the lingua franca. For the most part, however, I was alone. And so the days turned into weeks, and months into years, as I cycled everywhere between Edgware and Streatham, one of a great fleet of delivery riders criss-crossing the city, and yet only rarely exchanging more than a sentence of contact with those who moved alongside me.
+++
Every job brings its own set of unique perspectives, bringing the worker up close with a particular set of factors that the passer-by does not notice. The landscape-gardener can name each species of weed sprouting from the cracks in the road. The CCTV-installer spots the hidden cameras that, unnoticed by others, spy on shoppers as they walk through the mall. The probation worker notices the small bulge on the youth’s track-suited ankle. Soon after starting with Deliveroo, I had forced upon me a piece of knowledge already common to all taxi drivers; that peculiarly English abhorrence of clearly numbering their houses. I was later to learn from an emergency crew paramedic that this tendency has frequently led to patients dying while the ambulance struggles to find them. In my case it merely led to several minutes per day, accumulating to hours over the course of my Deliveroo career, going up and down roads, searching for the drop-off. When the light is bad this becomes even harder, as even those houses that do have numbers tend to use only small numerals, necessitating a stumble up and down the paths of neighbouring properties, peering through the darkness at the figures near the door. When GPS connection is bad, a less common but even more frustrating tendency comes into play; road-name plaques, fallen off and never replaced, or lost in the thick overgrowth of obscuring shrubbery, or never put up at all, can have the hapless delivery rider searching for house numbers up and down what turns out to be the wrong road.
Even once the correct house or building has been located, chances are high that the bell or apartment buzzer will not work. I must have grown up in a particularly bell-conscious social circle, because never in my life, until I started doing deliveries, did I experience the front door bell as a particularly problem. I would go to a friend’s house — back when I still had friends — I would ring the bell, they would hear it, and answer the door. Faulty bells were not absolutely unknown, but easily solved with a replacement battery or button. All simple enough, one might have thought, but evidently beyond the capabilities of a sizeable minority of Londoners. I once spent a four-hour shift noting what percentage of houses had non-functioning bells or buzzers. Of twenty orders, six — 30 % — went to residences whose front door bell did not work. Admittedly, one of these did have a little note by the door, saying that the bell was not working. The rest had me wasting time pressing dead buttons several times before realising they weren’t connected, before hammering on the door. (If you ever wonder why delivery people bang so loudly, by the way, it’s because we soon learn that most people have the TV on, or their earphones in, and so simply don’t hear an ordinary-level knock.) In the case of apartment blocks, even when the intercom works enough to open the door, any spoken instructions from the customer will usually be rendered inaudible by the crackle and hiss of interference. Intercoms, even more than doorbells, hardly ever seem to work properly.
The difficulty of getting a customer to actually come to the door presumes that you have the correct address. I have frequently arrived at a destination only to discover that the customer has moved and has failed to update their profile. Far more often than this, stubby fingers have tapped in the wrong address. Other times, they allow the autofill option to choose their destination, sending the rider, for instance, to Dollis Avenue instead of Dollis Lane. For several hundred orders that I have picked up, nothing more than a postcode has been entered as the delivery address, with no clue as to the street name or house number. Usually the customer has eventually answered the phone and given me the details. Often, however, you will get through to a customer only to discover that they don’t speak enough English to communicate their correct address. Occasionally, the customers themselves don’t actually know their own house number, although how this is possible I’ve never been able to ascertain.
As someone who could barely ever afford takeout food, it was always a matter of fascination to me how little people seemed to care whether they received their items or not. They would make an order, sometimes amounting to several hundred pounds worth of sushi, and then would seem to do everything in their power not to receive it, either giving the wrong address, or omitting the house number and not answering the phone, or else simply refusing to answer the door. They could clearly be seen, moving about behind the frosted glass. But all the ringing and hammering wouldn’t summon them. Finally, I would just set their expensive dinner on the doorstep for the next passing tramp to steal, marked it as delivered and be off.
+++
No tyre can hold up for too long against the glittering vein of shivered glass bordering London’s thoroughfares. Nor will any bike, no matter how sturdy, remain untroubled by a life rattling over the potholes of London’s abysmal roads. Bottom brackets mysteriously unwind. A pedal will begin feeling oddly squiff, and the next moment will have bounced off onto the road behind you. Occasionally an entire headset will gave way, throwing you over the handlebars and onto the tarmac, tattooing your knees and elbows in the places the grimy road rises up to slash you. And so for all the phantom fringe benefits of life as a cycle-delivery-man, an improving knowledge of roadside maintenance was something that actually did transpire: a frustrating, difficult way to learn about the rudiments of bike mechanics, but an effective one.
Nor can I say that my fitness did not improve. The progress was very gradual and I never did get particularly bulging muscles, but I eventually found that I wasn’t utterly exhausted at the end of each day. At weekends, I began to take advantage of my new-found fitness. My excursions into the English countryside were modest at first. A day trip to St. Albans and back. An overnighter to Brighton. Soon, however, I was getting as far as the New Forest, cycling all day, stopping only when it got dark to set up my tent in some village park. I always came back from these trips feeling mildly discontented, troubled by the notion that I hadn’t seen much that I couldn’t have seen in London. But they were an investment, a way of proving myself to myself. Soon enough, that proof would come into use.
A year after starting with Deliveroo, I had managed to get myself relocated from VWP to MMS. It was a few miles closer to home, miles that matter after a hard days pedalling. Equally importantly, it contained the National Gallery, a few large libraries, and several large museums; all essential locations for ducking out of the rain on sluggish afternoons, for passing time between shifts and for nipping in for a much needed piss. It probably wasn’t the best time to have transferred into this busy zone. In fact, this wasn’t the best time for London in general. This was the heyday of ISIS, and while actual terrorist attacks on UK soil were infrequent, each rare instance threw up a fresh system of bollards in its wake, narrowing roads, closing off short-cuts, forcing the cyclist into the slow flow of automobile traffic. Security was beefed up around the museums and libraries too. Places I had begun to take for granted — the British Library, the British Museum, the National Gallery — all locations where one could pop in for a toilet-break, or to simply to take in ten minutes of culture between orders, were no longer worth the long queue and frisk.
It was at this time, too, that I began having accidents. They never involved other vehicles, thankfully. But every so often, a tourist would walk out straight into the road in front of me, leading to a simultaneous swerve and brake that would have me skidding to a crashing fall and lacerating slide across the tarmac. Most of these tourists seemed to be Chinese. According to national statistics, each year brought around half a million per year more to the UK. For some reason, although most of the world drives on the right, it is the Chinese who were most apt to walk into the road in front of you, looking the wrong way. It was at this time, too, that smartphones were becoming truly mainstream. The popularity of Candy Crush Saga and Whatsapp were leading to serious problems, as an increasing number of pedestrians — both tourists and non-tourists — were blithely wandering off the pavement and into the open road, eyes fixed on the phone in their hands. Usually, one could brake in time to avoid hitting them, but I’ve knocked a few over in my time.
+++
I remember one accident with unusual clarity, not because it was unusually awful in itself, but because it took place on a day of almost constant trouble. The afternoon had been one of very long orders. Most deliveries are sent within a mile or so of the restaurant from which they are picked up, but this is not always the case. On this particular afternoon I seemed to be being sent great distances from MMS, where, food delivered, I would pedal wearily back, only to be catapulted a great distance out of the zone again. I had just delivered an order to way up in Kilburn, and was heading back down South again, about to reach that curve where the High Road turns into Maida Vale, when a whole family of Chinese tourists — mother, father and three teenage progeny — began to amble into the road. Most of their attention was focused on their conversation, but they occasionally glanced in the wrong direction, down towards St. John’s Wood. If I had yelled out at this point, I could easily have averted disaster. But judging by the slow pace of the family, and my distance from them, I figured that I had a good few seconds to play with. Besides, after a morning yelling at people to get out of the road, it occurred to me that it might be more fun if I shouted when I was only a few meters away, possibly with a swerve and some theatrical squealing of brakes thrown in, startling them enough to, as I doubtless put it to myself, “teach them a lesson”.
It was me who learned a lesson that day. Just as I was about to begin braking, and much to my confused consternation, they all decided to pick up their pace and rush into the road directly ahead of me, still looking the wrong way. This panicked me so much that I didn’t even shout out, neglecting for a second even to brake. By the time I did so it was far too late. The mother took the full force of the impact, which simultaneously hurled me out of the saddle and over her, my fall broken by the father, who I knocked over as I came down. The father fell over too, straight onto one of his children, who then fell onto one of his siblings and, in short, a moment later we were all sprawled in the road, as neatly toppled as a line of dominos. It was something of a miracle that none of us broke any bones. I and the mother were most bruised, the others picking us up and dusting us down and ensuring that we weren’t seriously injured. In fact the most battered party seemed to be my bike, whose summersault had ended with a crash upside down in the road, smashing the top of my shifters, breaking off one brake lever and bending the other at a 90 degree angle. I was still examining my ruined brakes when I noticed that the Chinese family had disappeared. I looked up and down the street and finally spotted them on the other side of the High Road, boarding a Cricklewood-bound bus. Evidently it was the bus’s arrival that had precipitated their unwise dash into the street. I tested my brakes. Luckily, the one that was still attached was the rear, so would last me ‘till the end up the day. Already, my phone was beeping in my pocket, calling me back to MMS.
The pick-up on my phone screen was La Cave, a super-posh wine bar in a hidden triangle of alleyways near the very centre of MMS. I’d picked up from there before and judged it a less than ideal location. Getting there would require negotiating Park Road, Baker Street and New Bond Street, a series of avenues which seemed to be undergoing constant road works at that time, narrowing or even closing whole sections of them, rolling repairs that had been going on for two years at least and showed no signs of ever being finished. Then there was that sunk network of narrow lanes in which La Cave was situated. I’d been there at least a hundred times since I started doing deliveries, and yet each and every time I somehow managed to lose my bearings. A mollifying factor was La Cave itself, where the staff were always incredibly polite, even to us road-soiled pedallers, and from where deliveries never went very far. As I passed Lord’s and the St. George statue, hearing already the rattle of jackhammers ahead of me, clattering up from the barriered morass of Baker Street, I wondered where this order would take me. Possibly up to one of the penthouses in Soho. Maybe to one of the leafy squares in Fitzrovia or Marlybone. That was the usual drop-off for places like La Cave. Passing the Regent’s Park Mosque, I glanced at my watch. It was half past two. Ideally this would be the last order of the afternoon shift. Pick up, delivery, and then at three I’d sign out as usual and head up to the Wellcome Collection, a lovely little museum-and-library where I’d taken to chilling between shifts.
Arriving at Lancashire Court, I did my usual ritual of getting frustratingly lost for a few minutes in this cobbled labyrinth of lanes. Finally locating La Cave, I picked up the order, marked as accepted on the app, and was less than chuffed to discover that this was going to be yet another long trip. The order would send me all the way through and past Bloomsbury, down under Pentonville and way out practically as far as the Barbican. Still, there was nothing for it. I set off, once again heading down a wrong alley or two, before finally getting back up onto New Bond Street. The road was one-way, heading South, so I sidled up against the flow of traffic for a few hundred meters, before turning eastward into Oxford Street. The first mile was a chore, caught in the slow pace of the tourist-clogged shopping district, constantly having to be on the look-out for rogue pedestrians wandering, with maddening obliviousness, into the road. Past Tottenham Court Road, however, things cleared up considerably. I hadn’t been this way for quite some months, and as I headed easily down the open road towards Holborn, with St. Paul’s rising up behind the old Victorian buildings, I was visited by a memory from several years before, a time when I’d looked at this scene from the second floor of a bus, back in the days when visiting the city centre was a rare treat.
For the first time in many months, I found myself cycling through a part of central London that hadn’t yet become dulled by overfamiliarity. To my right and left, lanes which I had never yet sweated down, buildings whose stairways I have not yet tramped up, hauling orders. Down a narrow road, past the closed bulk of Smithfield Market, with its mysterious clamour of nameless machinery, and finally up to my drop-off on Charterhouse Square. I looked at my watch: 3:15. I had made fairly decent time of it, but I was spent. The Museum of London was near here, somewhere. I did not feel up to cycling all the way back to MMS without a break first. I’d grab something to eat somewhere, relax at the Museum of London for a bit, and head back to MMS only when the evening shift was looming. I consulted my map. A right down Goswell would take me there in five minutes. I headed off once again.
A “Pret” sat in the shadow of the looming, black-brick chimney of the museum rotunda. There I treated myself to a fortifying coffee and toasted cheese. Then it was up the spiral stairs and across the raised walkway, over the traffic and into the museum. I had come here a couple of times before, once as a teenager and once during the holidays at uni. I was surprised to discover that not much had changed. The place was more or less identical, and I found that I knew what each exhibit would show even as I approached it. “London before London”, “The People’s City Gallery”, “Expanding City”. Slightly bored, I made my way down to the basement floor, where a series of photographs were displayed: “Remembering the 7/7 attacks”. Feeling somewhat listless, I took in the photos; disembowelled buses, the fluorescent yellows and reds of ambulance crews, the bloodied being hurried from the scene. Also on display, a “Book of Remembrance”, each page dedicated to one of the fifty-two people killed that day. I had a sudden memory of reading a copy of the Metro a few weeks after the terrorist attacks, and being astonished at the sheer range of people killed. Three bombs had gone off on the tube and one on a bus, and the resulting death toll had included people from New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Ghana, Israel, Grenada, Sri Lanka, Australia, France, India, Italy, Kenya, Mauritius, Romania, and Turkey. A decade later, what struck me most was the sheer amount of British people included in the death toll; thirty two of the victims. After years cycling between the back-doors of kitchens and the thoroughly cosmopolitan quarters of Mayfair and Soho, I had forgotten just how English London still was.
I looked at my phone. It was only four. An hour before I had to head back, but I felt no particular desire to stick around here. The sky outside the museum had clouded over, the wind had begun to pick up and the thermometer had taken a definite turn south. It was too cold to do a leisurely cycle back to MMS. I would have to do a brisk pedal back to the zone, and shelter somewhere indoors until it was time to sign in for the evening. Reluctantly I tramped down the spiral walkway to where I had locked my bike, wincing as my legs registered all the miles I had already done that day. Then it was back down a dimming Holborn, the sun a muddy glare in the sky ahead of me. Something that had happened that day was subtly nagging at me, and as I crossed over Charing Cross Road and entered the stodgy jams of Oxford Street, I struggled to think what it might be.
It wasn’t the crash of that morning, or at least I didn’t think it was. Operating on the single brake was proving surprisingly successful. Was it something that had happened after that? As I extended my emotional inventory, the traffic ahead of me slowed still further and then stalled. I put one foot on the pavement and peered past the bus in front of me. The jam seemed to extend at least a few hundred meters down the road. I returned to analysing my mood. Was it that long, that unjustly long journey, just as I was coming to the end of my shift, that had put me in this mood? Or perhaps it was the boredom elicited by the exhibits at the museum. The bus in front of me had switched off its engine, and was just sitting there stoically ticking, waiting for the road to clear. Cold and impatient, I slipped off the main road and headed the wrong way down narrow Dean Street. I had been planning on heading up to the Wellcome Collection, but on second thoughts I figured I might as well spend the last of my break in the National Gallery.
Rattling over the cobbles of Gerrard Place, I suddenly realised what had been eating at me. Strange, but I had found the opening exhibition at the Museum of London, the one called “London before London”, oddly dispiriting. The bones of Neolithic hunter-gatherers were eerie enough, the actual remains of lives lived in a London in which not a single building stood. London is one of those cities that somehow manages to project an aura of eternity, the sense that it always has and always will exist. Strangely disorientating, then, to have one’s mind forced back to a time when all this, the Chinese restaurants — I had moved from Gerrard Place onto Little Newport Street by now — the crowds, the station — ahead of me the roundel of Charing Cross tube — all of this was nothing, deleted by the prehistoric scrub. As though this were not disturbing enough, the exhibit had held ample evidence of the time before even these few small bands of proto-humanity had traversed the heathland under something approximating English skies. Hippopotami had once lived here, along with rhino and elephant, in a semi-tropical environment as alien to the bustling theatreland — through which I was now cycling, having left Chinatown behind me — as it is possible to imagine. And yet age-browned molars and vertebra sat in the “London before London” exhibit, undeniable evidence. Coasting down Charring Cross now, excited crowds passed by, their chatter warped by the brisk, cold wind. I rounded the corner, Nelson rose ahead of me, a glimmer in the murk. At the base of his column, where the bronze lions sat placidly, real lions had once lived out their lives. The environment had changed utterly, and would change again. One day all of this would be as thoroughly gone as the Proterozoic bushveld was today, with barely a handful of fossils left to prove our existence. The traffic had paused at St. Martin’s. Now it moved and I moved with it, still lost in thought. It is doubtful whether, even had I been paying full attention to the road, I could have done anything to prevent what happened next. Darkness had decidedly fallen, and with an eye on the cars and the pedestrians, I was in no position to spot the pothole that lay lurking below the lamp-lit shadow of Charles 1. My bike suddenly gave way beneath me, and for the second time that day I went head over heels over the handlebars.
+++
It was thanks to the hard-trained reflexes of the cabbie behind me that I wasn’t immediately run over. He screeched to a halt and sat, patiently revving, while I stumbled to my feet. The cars behind him were less patient, their horns giving voice almost before I’d hit the ground. I looked around me, dazed. A group of Chinese tourists had paused in their perambulation and were watching me, mouths slightly ajar, as though I had been caught in an act of unseemly public impropriety. As the beeping of hooters rose to a crescendo, I dragged the bike onto the pavement, glancing back at the offending pothole. It was easily a meter across, and at least ten centimetres both wide and deep. I had come across potholes like this in the cow country on the way to St. Albans and on rutted side-tracks on my way through the New Forest. Never had I imagined that London’s roads were in such an abysmal state that at its very acknowledged centre the roads were crumbling to this extent. The gawking tourists had moved on. I took their place on the pavement and examined the bike. Two leverless brakes looked back at me, like shattered eye-sockets. The shifters, treated to their second assault of the day, had given up. One lay askew, clinging on to the clamp by a sliver of plastic. The other had frankly exploded, shooting through the splintered cover in a mess of uncoiled springs, bobbing about crazily on the remains of a cable.
A moment to check for broken bones, and it was time for the long march north. It was mildly entertaining, I suppose, for the first five minutes, feeling the speculative eyes on me as I made my way back up the Charing Cross Road, one trouser torn to the knee, grime and blood mingling on forearms and cheeks. The novelty of the shocked stares soon wore thin, however. Before I was even halfway back to the A40/400 interchange, I was deeply regretting not hurling my Giant Roam into one of Trafalgar Square’s fountains. Tottenham Court Road, like Baker Street, New Bond Street and countless other roads in London at the time, was a worksite, plastic orange barriers narrowing the traffic to one-way. Beneath the scaffolding of Corinthian House, ragged tarpaulin whapping and furling above me in the breeze, I threw my bike behind the orange cones and sat down heavily on a breeze block for a breather.
I have discovered during my limited experience that one is far more liable to be engaged in genial conversation when one is dishevelled, ragged, even somewhat bloodied, than when one is a presentable member of the public going about his business. On this occasion the rule proved true. I was engaged in somewhat madly muttering to myself under my breath, cursing this city as the crumbling carcass of what it once had been, the pathetically desiccated carapace of an eaten-away imperial metropolis, roads as prone to roadblocks as troubled Derry, a city where nobody talked to anyone else, a capital most of whose residents didn’t even speak the bloody language, where the roads were disintegrating beneath our wheels, where even at the centre of it all — …when I became peripherally aware that a man sitting a few meters was casting glances in my direction, glances of a frequency that implied more than mere curiosity.
Returning his glance, I saw that he was dressed in the same signature turquoise and silver as myself. A fellow ‘roo, lean, tall, sparsely bearded, on his knee a motorcycle helmet, on his face an expression of aggrieved weariness that I imagined must have more or less mirrored my own. He might have been Italian, Spanish, conceivably Moroccan.
“My bike…my motorbike,” he told me, “they stole it. They took it.” Moroccan, I decided. Possibly — his skin was somewhat darker around the eyes than I had first noticed — Algerian.
“Oh really?”
“These hooligan people. Criminals.”
His story poured out. Apparently he had been happily doing his rounds down in Clapham when three of “these hooligan people” had ridden up beside him on another moped, brandishing knives.
“I am so stupid,” he continued. “All of my friends tell me, don’t go, don’t go to near to Clapham, Brixton, these places.”
I had read of bike-jackings, of course, but this was the first time I’d met someone who’d been the victim of one. This was the beginning of a heyday of motorcycle hijackings in London. In fact they were starting to happen so often that a textbook sequence of events could be predicted. Two youths, one riding pillion, would ride up behind a hapless rider, threaten him with a weapon and make off with his bike. The stolen property would next show up in CCTV footage of a smash-and-grab at a nearby jewellers. Finally it would be recovered, trashed, in the local park or piece of waste-ground.
How had my interlocutor managed to get all the way from Clapham to Tottenham Court Road? The question flashed in my mind but I didn’t ask it. Instead I just sat, too exhausted to do anything but listen, as he bemoaned the life of a motorcycle courier.
“These criminal can do what they want to do” he told me. “They steal a bike in the middle of the street. The police, they do nothing. This …” — he paused, searching for the word. With a wave of his arm he took in the cars and buses of Tottenham Court Road, the pedestrians on the pavements, the crowd lining up outside the Itsu for closing time’s half-price sushi. “This London is not good. England is not good a country.”
Neatly forgetting my own rage of just a few minutes before, it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to go back to whichever corner of the dar al-Islam he hailed from, if he disliked it here so much. But the impulse subsided as quickly as it arose. All I could suddenly think about was the long, long trek up through Camden and Barnet that I would need to get home. I told him I needed to get going, rose, retrieved my trashed bike and resumed the long walk home.
+++
Out of stupid habit, I dipped into Regents Park on the way north, my usual route home. It is usually five minutes of cycling pleasure, unencumbered by traffic lights, the dip in temperature refreshing in summer, bracing in winter. On foot, and moving slowly, I felt the drop in Celsius as I never had before, wishing I’d followed the tyre-warmed asphalt up to Hampstead instead. Trudging along in the dark, the trees moving wetly above me in the dark, I tried returning to my muttering about what a mess London was, streets barricaded and gutted, blockaded by never-ending road-works and anti-ISIS bollards, the streets patrolled by machete-wielding bike-hijackers. But soon my teeth were chattering too hard to continue and I walked on in silence, wishing my bike were lighter. It was here, passing a shuttered London Zoo, that two incidents flashed in my mind almost simultaneously.
The first was a memory of something that had occurred a few years before. This was shortly after I had returned to England, after a half-decade of attempting — and utterly failing — to build a life for myself abroad. I was at a particularly low ebb at the time, with nothing to do but go for long rides on a cheap Amacco Diplomat I’d been lucky enough to pick up second-hand. It was as these rides got longer and longer that cycling began to change from something I had always mildly enjoyed, but never thought much about, into something more. Eventually I had settled into a routine, doing the same 25 mile loop every day, up and over High Barnet, through Enfield, skirting over Haringey and Camden, turning up into the Edgware road and then again at Elstree to complete the circle.
One evening, however, I decided to take a midnight ride down through the city centre, the first time I’d been there by bike. It was only a six-mile round trip, but I was still stuck in the casual-cyclist mind-set. Up till that moment, a bike had been for the suburbs, not the city centre. It was one in the morning by the time I actually got moving, meaning that the London that I now cycled through was a strangely alien place. I had only ever been in the centre during the day, when both streets and pavements are clogged with traffic. The streets were now abandoned, and I slid down through Marlybone and Mayfair with astonishing ease, enjoying the exotic sensation of moving under my own power through an environment that I had only been through by car or bus. Down the river valley through St James, and I soon found myself pedalling down the open Mall, the London planes a dark presence above my head. Ahead, a string of bright pools in the darkness, pulsing momentarily around me as I passed beneath each streetlight, my shadow flicking briefly into life below my pedals. Approaching the palace, gilded Victory, floating on her white pylon, rose before me. Beyond, Buckingham Palace silently glimmered a dull white. The last time I had been here was in bright sunlight, among the throngs watching the changing of the guards, the air vibrating with trumpets and drums. Now, the place was abandoned, the only human a distant fluorescent jacket behind the gates, the only traffic a solitary cab rushing past.
I circled the Victoria Memorial a few times, and then, feeling slightly at a loss, leaned my bike against the balustrade and climbed the white stone steps. I had been there a couple of minutes, examining the statues around the plinth when a voice beside me suddenly spoke out of the darkness.
“What were you going around and around for?”
I squinted and made out a girl of around my own age, several meters away in the darkness.
“What’s that?”
“What were you going around and around for?”
She must have been watching me circling the statue. “Oh, I didn’t know what else to do” was my feeble reply.
“Where ‘you come from?”
“Oh, I live up in Barnet.”
“Up in Barnet? And you come all the way down ‘ere? Missus kicked you out, ‘as she?”
“No, no, it’s nothing like that.”
She chuckled. “Oh, she kicked you out.”
We chatted for a few minutes and something was just struggling towards the surface of my consciousness when a low groan came from the ground several feet away. I peered through my fogged up glasses. A man, bearded, was lying in a sort of stricken, hunched posture, up against the balustrade. Beside him, two square wheelie-cases.
“Is he OK?”
It was the man who answered. “I’m OK, mate, don’t you worry.”
“Cool.” I returned to my conversation with the girl. “Anyway, what are you guys doing here? Where do you live?”
She considered this a fantastic joke and chuckled for a long time. “Where do we live? Where do we live? D’y’ear that one, Jake? Where do we live?”
I don’t recall the rest of the conversation. I kept it up for quite a while, somewhat out of the sheer novelty of it all, but mainly because the girl had the most gloriously cockney accent I had ever heard. Living up in the northern suburbs you just did not come across accents like that. But our conversation was beginning to peter. I said goodnight, retrieved my bike and began the cycle uphill home.
Back in those days, it was actually even rarer that it is now for me to end up in random conversations with people I’d never met before. And yet somehow the fact that I had just had a long conversation with a complete stranger, in the middle of the night, with a genuine, full-blooded cockney, did not strike me as particularly noteworthy. It was as I was cycling back up St. James that the thought that had been struggling towards consciousness in my mind finally dawned. The girl and her boyfriend must have been homeless. This meant that I had just had a twenty minute conversation with a homeless person, never having exchanged a single word with one before. But I guessed that that was the sort of thing that was liable to happen if you were going to cycle down to Buckingham Palace in the middle of the night. I had carried that assumption, unconsciously, with me when I embarked on my career at Deliveroo. It had always been there, in my expectation that if I chose to work in the city centre I would surely strike up some interesting friendships, or at least have a noteworthy conversation or two. My own life might be devoid of incident, but I might enjoy the vicarious pleasure of seeing something worth writing about. And yet, after well over two years in the job, what had I actually seen worth noting?
It was at this point that the second memory came to me; of that pathetic farce on Manchester Street, the lady and her dog, the odd Asian couple and the rape that wasn’t. At the recollection, a thin vein of depression was added to the cocktail of emotions running through me as I trudged wearily through the park. The cold had begun to get unbearable. Even when I finally made it out onto Avenue Road, the slight rise in temperature did not cheer me. I locked my bike to a lamp-post, got on a 13 at Swiss Cottage and brooded all the start-stop journey home. I had to get away, if only for a while.
+++
The trip to France marked a caesura. Not that I was aware of it as I set off. All I really knew was that I needed to get out of London — and ideally out of England. Brexit was inching painfully through the government bureaucracy, and while it was nowhere near a reality quite yet, it did look like it would eventually become more difficult to visit the continent. Now seemed as good a time as any to take my first trip to France. So I had booked myself onto the channel ferry, and when my bike was fixed up had rattled and bumped the painful journey down the Pilgrim’s Way to Canterbury, spent a night there and one in Dover, before boarding the ferry to Boulogne-Sur-Mer. It was on the short journey north to Calais that I realised that this had actually been rather a good idea. It was only on the continent that I was able to put my finger on just what I’d been missing during my various sojourns across the home counties. As awful as London’s roads are, the moment you cross the green belt into countryside you feel the road deteriorate significantly further beneath your unfortunate wheels. Days of arduous pedalling over rutted tarmac usually ended with trying to find somewhere to set up my tent for the night. Fields, meadows or forestry land were clearly visible from the road, but inaccessible behind the endless fencing which stretched for many miles on either side of the tarmac. More often than not I would have to wait ‘till it was truly dark before pitching up in a local park, my sleep accompanied by the ghostly creaking of a swing-set in the breeze. France was utterly different, the roads pristine, even into deepest countryside, and unfenced, meaning a mere jump over the drainage canal at the end of a day’s pedalling to set up my tent in a roadside field or copse.
People seemed far friendlier too, or at least I found myself engaged in far more conversations with random passers-by than I ever did in England. Passing into Belgium — unaware for a while that I had even crossed the border — I was cycling through a small town — it might have been Tournai — when a certain amount of screaming and yelling arrested my attention and my progress. It appeared to be coming from behind the wall of a courtyard, and as I watched, catching my breath, two figures erupted from a suddenly flung-open door. The first man was dressed in nothing but a white button-up and a bright pink tie, a piece of apparel which the second man was doing his utmost to use as an impromptu noose. Following not far behind was a woman who seemed to be attempting to prevent the lynching, although her need to dodge the slaps and kicks of the would-be murderer made her role a somewhat ineffective one. The scene played itself at length, eventually including a minor car crash, after the woman rushed into the road and a car had to swerve to avoid hitting her, and the involvement of the crowd at a nearby café, whose al fresco lunch was interrupted when the pursuer, giving up on the tie as a weapon, grabbed a heavy aluminium table, scattering several others, and used it as a very effective club. I left as the ambulance sirens were approaching, cycling on to Mons, and puzzling over the question of just why nothing this exciting ever seemed to happen during my many, many hours cycling around London and the South-East.
All in all, then, I was glad I had chosen to come. I might even have properly enjoyed my trip had not I found myself plagued, from the third day in, with persistent stomach cramps and occasional explosive diarrhoea, inconvenient when you are trying to pedal from A to B. Things got so bad that on my last night in France I stumped up the price of a hotel room rather than spending the night in my tent. The next morning it was back to the Dover, to the difficult cycle back up to Canterbury, and to a text waiting on my phone at the end of a hard day’s pedalling. It was from Deliveroo, and informed me, with astonishing brevity and inarguable logic, that since I had not shown up for my shifts for over two weeks — I wish I had kept the message as reference because I cannot now remember just how it went — that I had broken my agreement (or something along those lines) and my services were no longer required. There was no signature, no number to call and argue my case. My time at Deliveroo, the longest I had ever held down a job, was over.
+++
But, as I have said, it was a caesura rather than an end. My dismissal from the turquoise-and-silvered ranks of the brotherhood of the ‘Roo was not an end to my time as a delivery rider. I was already signed up with Uber. There were other companies too, a new one popping up every day, apparently, that were involved in more or less identical business. But my time in Central London was at an end. Deliveroo had operated on something almost approaching a traditional business model. You had to commit to being in a particular area at particular times every day. Uber did not work that way. You signed in where you wanted, when you wanted. Stuart, which I joined some days after returning from France, released slots weekly, and since those slots were usually two or three hours at most, rather than full-day, it made sense to work close to home. And so I swapped the bustle, the tourists, the monuments, the grand buildings of Central London for the leafy environs of the North-West suburbs.
The first day of the transition: the strange sensation of signing into the apps while still in the comfort of my own bedroom. No need to rush to be at any particular location for the start of the shift. I relaxed with a cup of coffee while waiting for the orders to come in. An hour later I was still waiting and was feeling slightly less relaxed. Uber and Stuart only paid per delivery. No orders when you are paid by the hour is a luxury. No orders when you are paid by the order is a liability. I was just beginning to get worried when my phone finally began to beep and buzz; my first ever order on the Stuart app, a pick-up from a Co-op, a mile or so to the east. I knew the place, sandwiched between Hampstead Garden Suburb and East Finchley. I accepted the order and pedalled forth, reflecting, as I topped the hill by St. Jude’s, that it was strange to be picking up from an actual supermarket. My very first order for Deliveroo, over two years before, had been from something calling itself the New Loon Moon Supermarket. But since then I hadn’t had a single pick-up from anything but restaurants and the occasional café or corner-shop. Was this to be a one-off too? Time, I decided, would tell. I flew down Northway and turned into Falloden Way, hopping onto the pavement outside the Co-op.
At the front of the store, a willowy, prosperous-looking woman of about middle age, all knitwear and beads — typically Garden-Suburb — was scanning her shopping at the automated bagging area. The till was empty, spirits and cigarettes standing in rows for anyone so inclined to just reach in and grab. I walked up and down the aisles. Mrs Garden-Suburb swiped her bank card and loped out of the automated doors. Nobody seemed to be around.
I called out. Nobody answered. I flipped open the door leading to the staff-only area.
“Hello?” Nobody. Behind the till I noticed two bags with paper tags taped to them. I compared the code on the tags with that on my app. Apparently these were the orders I was here to pick up.
“Hellooo?” I called out for a last time. When no-one answered, I reached over the glass divider, took the bags, marked the order as picked up and headed towards the drop off.
It was eleven in the morning by now, the streets empty. Ossulton Way, a long wide road with not a soul on it. Set back from the street, the homes of the wealthy drowsed behind their hedges, their residents all at work or school. Alone on the tarmac, I was able to puff unselfconsciously up the gradient towards East End Road. In the distance, I heard the unmistakable snore of a VW beetle. Ahead of me, at the top of the hill, it passed by, a bright yellow bug. Then all was quiet again, except for my panting and the soft squeak of my bottom bracket as I stood up in the pedals to make the climb. I turned onto East End road and then off again, into Church Road. A row of residential houses, then an Indian restaurant, an Italian bakery, a corner shop — all shuttered and closed. There was something unnerving, after years in the bustling, honking and hooting centre of the city, amid the crowds and the bumper-to-bumper traffic, with walls of thriving commerce banked on either side, to find myself suddenly doing much the same work in this utterly quiet landscape, a suburb so bereft of humanity that it felt as though everyone else had been sucked skyward by the rapture. Past a temple, over the silent train tracks and into Long Lane. My drop-off was near here somewhere. I stopped cycling for a moment to study the map.
The address appeared to be somewhere just north of me, amid a tangle of streets and serpentine alleyways. Up New Oak Road, I turned into what appeared to be some sort of housing estate, a scattering of three-storied yellow- or red-bricked blocks standing at oblique angles, separated by random stretches of turf and a meandering series of roads and paths. The address I was after — on Blackdown Close — was meant to be somewhere in this confusing knot, and for quite a while I cycled up and down, in and out, around and around looking for it. I peered around for some resident or passer-by who might be of assistance. But this neighbourhood seemed every bit as abandoned as the ones I had just ridden through to get here. At long last, I found the building I was looking for. I pushed through the open door of the lobby and made my way up the flat I was dropping off at. No doorbell. I knocked at the door. No answer. I’d had this happen enough in my time that I wasn’t all that fazed. I gave loud methodical knocks every thirty seconds or so, rang the contact number the customer had given, keeping this up for three minutes. Neither phone nor door was answered. So I set the bags on the doormat and headed off, considering my first Stuart order delivered.
A strange and obvious analogue, then, between my first order for Stuart, and my first order for Deliveroo, two years before. Back then, I had been introduced to a side of London which I did not know: a London in which nobody spoke English, from pick-up to drop-off, a London in which English was a foreign tongue. And here, between HGS and East Finchley, I had just been introduced to another London, an abandoned, “28-days-later” London, a London where nobody was around, not the shop-worker, to hand over the package, nor the customer, to take it in, nor anyone on the streets in between. It would be fairly uncommon, during my time working for Stuart, for a journey to contain quite so little human contact as my first had done. But it did happen, with increasing frequency over time. And the effect that this had on me was curious.
It is necessary to jump forward for a moment, to roughly two years after I began working the suburbs, to March of 2019 and the arrival of Covid in London. I worked through the pandemic, my work exempting me from the lockdowns. I remember going out on a delivery on the evening that the first lockdown was announced. It had rained fairly hard during the afternoon. Now the roads glistened and hissed beneath my tyres, the wet tarmac reflecting the roving lights of a passing ambulance as I turned into Golders Green Road. On the way to the pick-up I passed two more ambulances, one by the North Circular, one by Hendon Park. Their orange-and-yellow livery gleamed as they trundled quietly by. Except for such emergency vehicles, and the occasional bus, the roads were utterly abandoned. The delivery mopeds and bicycles had all three lanes of Watford Way — into which I now turned — to themselves. At my pickup at KFC, the order was slid over the counter to me through a small hole that had been roughly hacked into the hastily-erected plastic screen. I made my way to my drop-off. Earlier in the day I had received complicated instructions on the new ritual that we were required to follow. Place order on garden wall. Retreat ten meters. Call customer. Remain standing until order is retrieved. It was an introduction to an apparently new way of life that had been quite suddenly thrust upon us. And yet while it was certainly novel, it did not feel all that new. It felt, in fact, as though society as a whole had somehow intimated the eruption of the virus from Wuhan some years before and had spent the intervening time making subtle adjustments, bringing social mores closer in line with those that would be required in a post-Covid world.
The element of human interaction had been slowly but relentlessly draining from society for some time before I made my first Stuart pick-up, and over the years I watched as it continued. I noticed it in the corner-shop round the corner from my house, where I made occasional pick-ups but where I more often went to get myself a drink. Behind the counter stood an old Pakistani guy, who had owned the place since I was a kid. His English wasn’t amazing, but he was friendly, and seemed to be constantly standing to attention behind the till, waiting for the next customer, even when the shop was empty. Then some relative, a long-haired, bearded man in his ’20s, took over. He split his time between shelf-stocking and the ‘till, and over time picked up a habit of having loud phone conversations with someone on the subcontinent as he scanned your shopping. Then he disappeared, and was replaced with a plump teenager with a wispy moustache, who barely looked up from his phone to scan your drink and take your proffered cash. In time, he was gone too, the till abandoned. If you wanted to pay, you had to shout out into the stockroom at the back, and a harassed and preoccupied girl of around fourteen would come out, averting her eyes, take your money and disappear again.
The corner-shop was too small a concern to become fully automated, but they probably would have done so if they could have. Everyone else was doing it. First the big supermarkets. Then the smaller supermarket branches. Then smaller high street shops, such as WHSmith. All were replacing people with machines. Even the libraries got in on the game. Machines were installed so that you could scan your own books rather than having a librarian do it. There was always a librarian tootling around the place though, so you could ask for help if the machine wasn’t working, as it often wasn’t. Then the librarian disappeared, the library opening hours contracted, and the only person present was an enormous Nigerian security guard, who let you in the door. Then the door was automated. You scanned your library card to get in. The Nigerian hovered around the place, evidently bored. At some point he disappeared too.
The general mechanisation of society was mirrored in the slow change in the attitude of the people I worked alongside. Restaurant staff became ever more robotic. The change was slow but sure. A pleasantry such as “here’s your order, thank you so much” as I was smilingly handed a food parcel, became gradually transformed over the years into an unsmiling, “here” and finally into a blank-eyed, unspeaking thrusting of the order into my outstretched hands, as though my splayed cycling gloves were nothing more than a sort of shelf. On the streets, people walked about as though down hospital corridors, eyes glazed. Nobody looked at anyone else any more. Nobody looked at their surroundings. Once, on my way home to a drop-off, after my phone lost all connection halfway between Hampstead and Golders Green, I slowed beside a pedestrian and asked her if she knew where West Heath Drive was. My tone was level and my volume normal and she had seen me come down the hill towards her, slowing to a stop. She nonetheless jumped as though the soles of her feet had been subjected to a small electric current as I addressed her. Her eyes regarded me uncomprehendingly for a startled second or so before she answered; West Heath Drive, it turned out, was only a few hundred meters away. But it had evidently been so long since a stranger had spoken to her in public that the whole thing came as a shock.
It was when it came to drop-offs, however, that the change was most obvious. Deliveroo and its rival companies had only been around since 2013. Amazon Prime had been around eight years longer. The public had taken time to acclimatise to this new world, in which you never had to leave the house and a flood of packages and food was delivered to your door. They had gone from being thankful, even occasionally chatty, to merely civil. At some point it seemed to become universally decided that opening your door and accepting your freshly delivered sushi lunch was a chore, boring but necessary if you were to eat. That chore soon began to seem onerous, onerous in the extreme. I remember when things reached a point below which they have still yet to drop. I was delivering in Hendon again, a short order up from Brent Cross, to an address near the park. Package in hand, I rang the bell. A minute or so passed and I was about to ring again when the door opened a crack, just wide enough to permit an arm to shoot out and around, where it remained for a moment silently clawing the air. I watched in fascination as the disembodied hand, with its long, talon-like, brightly painted nails, grappled blindly. Then I brought the parcel up towards the writhing fingers, which closed around it and drew it swiftly into the house, disappearing behind the smartly slamming door. It is hard to imagine how people might get ruder or weirder than that. But while I’ve never been back to that address, I have had the same performance repeated a handful of times since, at front doors from Hampstead to Colindale. I imagine I’ll become inured to it in time.
And so it was that when society froze completely in 2019, a freeze from which, at time of writing, there has been no genuine thaw, I could not help but see it as a continuation of a series of trends that had been going on for two years at least. Everyone has their own way of dealing with crises, of course, but there seemed a positive relish in the way that so many Londoners took to masks and working-from-home and segregated shopping and all the other trappings of this divided age. Finally, they were able to go about their lives without any extraneous human contact at all, their very faces safely hidden from the intrusive glances of their fellow citizenry. I’m writing this paragraph on a train to Birmingham, towards the end of 2021, on my way to spend the weekend with a friend. I had to pass through Euston en route, the close, tiled walls of the underground station echoing with a dispassionate and monotonous female voice, repeating the same lines over and over: “Please ensure that you wear a mask at all times. Please ensure you wear a mask at all times. Please ensure you wear a mask at all times”. Almost the moment that I had stepped onto the platform and heard the repeated line, rendered crackly by the tannoi, I became aware that it was not a human voice at all. Unnatural, robotic, it was a computerised text-to-speech program. Strange that an operation as enormous as TFL could not spare a moment or two to record a member of staff saying the same ten words. And yet, the whole thing felt strangely intentional. The clipped mechanical syllables repeated over and over in the echoing tunnels as the masses shuffled miserably along beneath them seemed perfectly designed to give the atmosphere a decidedly dystopian air. There is a segment of the London public, I am convinced, who actively prefer it that way.
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My take on the pandemic is nothing original, I dare say. Everyone likes to moan about it and the change it has had on society. And in a way, if I ever do manage to get out of food-deliveries and into something more lucrative, it will be very much thanks to Covid. Shortly before the virus arrived, I had gone down to Deliveroo HQ and applied for a job as a cycle-courier. The bearded millennial behind the desk entered my details on the computer. He frowned at the screen. “Didn’t you work for us already before?” I admitted that I had and waited for the follow up question. It never came. He processed my application, kitted me out in brand new gear, and I was back on board. If I’d known it would be that easy, I would have reapplied years earlier. Now I had three delivery apps on my phone: Uber, Stuart and Deliveroo once more. Deliveroo, I discovered, had since adopted the business model of its competitors. Gone were shifts. You signed in where and when you liked. It had gone full gig-economy.
And so I was kept busy, with all three apps often beeping at once. An order from Stuart, a pick-up from KFC in Golders Green. I knew the place well, the unbelievably rude staff, the long waits for orders to be prepared. No worries, there was an order I could take from UberEats. This involved a pick-up over two miles away, the distance to the restaurant uncompensated. But what was this? — an order from Deliveroo, from the friendly Thai place at the end of my road. I would select that one, refuse the other two and be off.
I have written elsewhere about the odd psychogeography that develops from growing up in a religious community in one of London’s suburbs, how you see the invisible bisections that divide neighbourhood from neighbourhood; here is the Hassidic zone, here the Liberal Jewish quarter; here, the prosperous house-fronts of the anglicised community, here, the close-curtained windows of an orthodoxy. Now, further resonances were layered onto this map; North West London as viewed through the eyes of a Deliveroo rider, cyclogeography, if you will. Irregular halos develop around certain eateries, corresponding to the sphere of their clientele. The local Thai place stood at the centre of a neat, mile-wide disk. An order from there meant an easy trip within that small circle. A pick-up from one of the kosher places on Russell Parade meant a journey within the wider triangle formed by the Finchley, Golders Green and North Circular roads. Eat Tokyo, by contrast, across the road from Golders Green station, was not in Golders Green at all. It was merely a distant outpost of Hampstead. From the moment your phone beeped with a pick-up from that high-end sushi bar you knew where it would take you: straight up the arduous hill towards the mansionettes of that lofty suburb.
It was Brent Cross Shopping Centre, which featured so prominently in my childhood, that gave the most trouble. Like most shopping malls, it is specifically designed to be impossible to find your way out of. Despite having visited it countless times, I frequently got lost there. Getting in was challenge enough, the place barricaded by fencing, pedestrianized walkways and endlessly looping and meandering coils of rutted asphalt. Even here, the geographies of patronage overlaid ghostly path-lines between outlet and neighbourhood. McDonalds meant an inevitable zigzag over the bridge or through the underpass, to the housing estates that crowd round the back of the Holiday Inn. A pick-up from KFC presaged a more complex journey; first a narrow strip of concrete beneath the brutalism of the overpass, then a negotiation of the potholes that skirt the flyover as you jostled pick-ups and lorries to made your gradual, fume-choked way, round into the Edgware Road and on to the chicken-loving folks of Cricklewood. Kosher Kanteen, by easy contrast, meant a simple journey back the way you’d come, to the Jewish neighbourhoods of Golders Green or Hendon. The rest of the restaurants, however, almost always meant a journey to the prosperous new-builds on Aerodrome Road. The pattern was so consistent that, eventually, after I had finally learned the lay of the place, Brent Cross soon began to appear in my mind as a sort of planetary magnet: stray within a mile of its imposing orbit and it sucked you in, your progress made eddy-like by the slowing barricades that banked it. Then you were stayed, meandering for a while in the thick crowds of its troposphere, before you were swung straight out again, towards the apartment blocks of Colindale. Over Hendon you would go, shooting down Greyhound Hill to Beaufort Park, before, order delivered, it pulled you, panting, back up the hill on another order.
I was not getting any younger. My fitness levels had plateaued and seemed somehow to be going down. I had ditched the Giant Roam for a Surly Big Dummy, a far sturdier but very heavy longtail that meant journeys took about twice as long as they had before. Eventually I kitted it out with an electrified front wheel. It felt like a capitulation of sorts. I was a long way now from the cycle culture of the city centre, that world I had once dreamed of entering, not that I had ever managed to do so. Now I wasn’t even powered purely by pedal power. It was not that long after I bought the Surly that Covid hit. I was doing most of my own cycle repairs by now, rarely going to the shop. I had done a short Cycle Mechanics course shortly after getting back from France and had long been thinking that a change of career might be in order. Too lazy to actually do anything about it, however, I had waited. It was then that Rishi Sunak announced the fixyourbike scheme. In a bid to kick-start the economy after the shock of the first lockdown, he was issuing free £50 vouchers to anyone who wanted to get their bike fixed. If ever there was a time to get into the business, this was it. I registered a company and put myself up on Google Maps, and folks from Golders Green and beyond began queuing up with the rusted bikes that had sat in their garden sheds for years. If I had really made the most of the opportunity, I might be a full-time bike mechanic by now. But I am no businessman, and I preferred to take it slow. After the fixyourbike scheme ended, work slowed to a trickle, and I went back to Deliveroo-ing. But gradually, over the months, my home workshop has been gaining a name for itself. Whole days can go by when I am too busy with bike repairing to do any delivery work. The time is yet to come, if it ever does, when I can happily delete the food-delivery apps from my phone, knowing that I will never need them again. Until then, the last chapter in the Confessions of a Deliveroo Rider will have yet to be written.