Street Haunting
Street Haunting: A London Adventure
No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil.
The walk
The pencil is a pretext, “an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.” The hour, she says, should be the evening and the season winter.
“It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil.” On the way she imagines herself into the lives of strangers, and she comes home with “the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.”
The line
“to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths”
Straight streets, and off them small footpaths that curl away into other lives and come back to the same corner.