The True Line, Again

The Ivyholt Baths reopened to the public on the fourth of April, two years and three months after a councillor gave me six thousand pounds to open a truss.

There was a ceremony, because there is always a ceremony. There was a ribbon, and a speech from the leader of the council which contained the phrase “this administration’s commitment”, and a speech from Councillor Aluko which did not, and which mentioned by name the borough engineer who wrote the 1971 memo, a man called G. H. Steadman who has been dead since 1994 and who got, in the end, forty-nine years late, a round of applause in a room in Hackney.

Hester came in a coat that made her look like a woman who had personally financed the Renaissance. Kwame brought his mother. The scaffolder came, and cried, and denied it.

And then they let the public in, and within…