Transubstanti-what?

Let’s start with the bucket fountain.

A off-cast from a Fisher Price set, I’m sure the arty types would have some ponderously creative reason to justify why This Is Significant. Me? The sooner it’s melted into plastic benches the better.

Yet in 2001 Nick Ward gave us Stickmen, and had Paolo Rotondo staring at the edifice in admiration. And you know what? Looking at a piece of Wellington on the big screen, even at this garish plastic-fantastic, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of… significance. In that moment the humble fountain transubstantiated. It became an icon, and that’s what cinema does to you.

Zoom ahead. A couple of days ago I saw the new all-singing Matt Daemon flick. What got me was that Jason Bourne ended up running a lot.

I like running. What made it special however was that Bourne ended up running around Victoria Station in London. You see, less than forty-eight hours previous it was me that was running through Victoria Station. I had a different agenda involving a full bladder and no toilets on the National Rail from Esher, but it was me.

You recognise the little things: the concourse filled with commuters, the Oyster barriers, the escalators that seem to go on forever. For most Londoners this is the daily grind. Except in that darkened cinema, Hollywood had dropped by and had anointed the mundane. I was spell-bound.

Perhaps this is the religious experience for the twenty-first century. As for me, I’d arrived in Blighty earlier in the year after three months trekking through Africa. For better or worse, railway stations are now my life. I left Africa with a bullet-proof hide, like a merit badge for doing it solo in the third world.

Arriving in London I realised I was like a kid again, wide-eyed and unprepared for the big bad world.

Makes me miss Godzone. Wellington seems so quaint. A beautifully small town with a metro feel. Flat whites and eggs benedict at Brooklyn Cafe, jumping off the pier at Oriental bay. I never thought I’d burn for the place, but there you go.

And the bucket fountain?

As if. Incinerate.