goodbye hello

The great hall of St. Pancras has become a major landmark of London. It helps that it is the first glimpse the thousands arriving each day from Paris or Brussels, to the tune of one train per hour, get. It helps even more than the station was immoderately but wonderfully restored a year ago when Eurostar services switched to here from Waterloo after new high-speed tracks were laid.

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in St. Pancras, just opposite the arrivals doors. In twenty minutes, my dad should be sauntering through these doors, after enjoying the first fast train ride in his life. He's coming over from Paris where he worked last week. There's still some time.

I open the The London Paper that I picked up outside the Science Museum on my way to the tube stop and get all nostalgic. The daily is one of three that are handed out citywide and free each day to commuters, but today I hold their last issue in my hands. The paper's folding because you can apparently not make money by not charging.

Before I read the last issue, dripping wet with the staff's self-pity and sense of betrayed entitlement oozing from each page, I tune my iPod to Chris Anderson's Free, an audio book that I downloaded, quite fittingly for free, from its home at Wired magazine. In chapter after chapter, the case is made that free is the new black, that soon companies will give all their products away for nothing and turn a tidy profit. I am not convinced by the arguments, and even less so by the audio book. I prefer to read.

What I have is The London Paper. I'm the first to admit that its demise is no cultural loss. Topics for articles were chosen from a narrow range, the writing was often poor, and the focus on celebrities, shopping and fashion didn't appeal to me. But browsing through its smartly colored and cleanly laid-out pages after a long day of work was curiously soothing. No brain was required for reading – or even for solving the easy sudoku. There were plenty of photos, and most showed our great city. It was like having a hundred local TV stations on your lap, each page a zap away from the next. And with time, the publication grew on me.

On Monday, there will be no more London Paper. Nevertheless, I won't miss it, at least for a while. On Sunday I'm going to Oxford for a workshop of two days. On Wednesday, I'll fly to Syria on vacation. This might thus be the last post in a while, but even though it's free, this blog will continue. Of this you can rest assured.

The doors in front of me open. Throngs of suits and backpacks spill into freedom. Worn-out businessmen and enthusiastic tourists are released from the confines of the train. In the midst of it all, my dad strolls through, his eyes fixed at the canopy of sky-blue steel and glass above. He is clearly impressed and in the right state of mind for London. The weekend can start.