London – The Crossroads

A London in Transition

- By Evan Pricco

Sitting in a shady public park under a verdant canopy of hundred-year-old trees as Wimbledon plays on a giant screen, this visitor feels like a lucky extra in a novel or movie situated in London tradition, and the Woolfian setting steeps into you like a proper cup of tea. The moment finally arrived after a 10-day quarantine and pent-up anticipation of the surrounding scenarios, my only interaction with the outside world being trips to the mailbox to send the mandatory tests, this in a metropolis frenzied with energy. England was in the Euro Cup final, which felt like the Super Bowl x100, and Boris Johnson had just declared July 19 as the reopening of the nation, a “Freedom Day,” as they put it. I had finally arrived in what I perceived as London, a film set of an old place, watching a prestigious 144-year-old tennis tournament where the players perform in compulsory, pristine white and the audience, sprinkled with Princes and Princesses, sport elaborate hats. It’s all so staid, a bit regal, this annual celebration since 1877, which inevitably sparks a sense of irony, or in my case, a sense of anxiety: this sort simple observation of traditions that persist amid an incredible wave of the unknown, our past “normal” lives colliding with a new existence of Covid tracing, travel restrictions, Delta variants, social distancing. The off-kilter nature of the moment is palpable once experiencing something previously considered normal.