London in lockdown.

London in lockdown.

As if you didn't know already, London is dead. In the small hours of an early March morning, London collapsed with a massive cardiac arrest. It looks though as if it might just come back to life in a couple of weeks time. For now though London resembles the quietest of graveyards, a capital city deprived of all oxygen and waiting for a post mortem that can only be a matter of time. Or is it? The chances are that all is not lost. At the moment though it doesn't look good at all. In fact it's terrifying.

This morning you set out on what will hopefully be the last journey to London in lockdown. You would not believe what has happened to the West End of London although you may have an idea of what it looks like. But to see the heart of the commercial West End in all of its rawness and earthiness was to witness a city that looked thunderstruck, dumbfounded, barely familiar and completely unrecognisable.

It is a London that stopped breathing in March, gasped for air during both March and April and then just vanished without trace. The global pandemic coronavirus had plunged us all into chaotic turmoil and heart wrenching tragedy. There were those of us who were deludedly convinced- and with every justification- that Covid 19 would just blow over in much the way that all seasonal illnesses and viruses pass through and then just go away. How wrong we were.

And yet you wandered through all of the West End's most celebrated landmarks, its winding, twisting roads, its long and lingering thoroughfares, sighing with open- mouthed astonishment. Was this the West End that my late dad would regularly wax lyrical about, the West End with its thousands and millions of tourist admirers from all over the world and now a West End he would have been truly horrified to see?

Walking down Charing Cross Road you were suddenly reminded of its olde world charm, its centre of literary excellence, the second hand bookshops in noble profusion, Foyles, its flagship, world famous book shop. Foyles is still now shut up, shuttered, gagged and locked up for the duration until the government deem it safe to open again which could be any time. Charing Cross Road was frighteningly silent, a morgue, a chilling mortuary, even a mausoleum that has been left to rot with nobody in sight to lift its mood.

You walked down Charing Cross Road and the pavements may just as well have been a sandy desert, a vast concrete bowl of sun kissed pavements but little in the way of human life. Occasionally groups of builders would emerge from somewhere only to then find that the people wearing masks were now outnumbering them. The buses were trundling through the West End almost apologetically but they looked, for all the world, like red ghosts. The sprinkling of musical instrument shops in nearby Denmark Street had now lost both their percussion and woodwind quality. Tin Pan Alley had now forgotten all about its traditionally hypnotic rhythms.

But wherever you looked the West End looked in a state of petrified paralysis, its once healthy heartbeat now gone, stolen and robbed by circumstances completely out of control. For the time being London must continue to function without its supporting actors and actresses, its leading stars of stage and screen, its multi- cultural cuisine, its cosmopolitan food and drink, its histrionic theatre and all of its lovably ostentatious gladrags.

If London were a human it would be weeping and sobbing floods of tears. Oxford Street is still grieving because it has nobody to turn to. The shops and the huge department stores look like lonely individuals with nobody to call a friend. At some point you were reminded of a state funeral procession without the coffin. The tourists, in all their varying states of intrigue, will not be visiting London this year because this is not the time for cheerful revelry and charming comment.

As you stepped off the bus at Trafalgar Square you cast your mind back to the mid 1960s when your wonderful dad would point at Nelson Column in the gathering wintry darkness and introduce you to a world of total escapism, the centre of a capital city that glittered and flickered with its tempting blandishments. The whole of London used to light up in a remarkable show of neon Coca Cola. Now though London is totally without its fascinated humanity, denied the chance to show off, flaunting its party frocks, riding freely in its after theatre rickshaws and then supping a late night pint or two.

Outside the National Portrait Gallery, with its marvellous columns and pillars, there were a sprinkling of people although it was hard to tell why they were at all since there was nothing to look at as such. The fountains in Trafalgar Square were still cascading water with absolute abandon but around them were only the occasional set of passer- byes.

You passed the Garrick theatre, the Trafalgar Studios and JK Rowling's The Cursed Child at Cambridge Circus and wondered whether their seats would ever be full again. The Dominion theatre in London's Tottenham Court Road was conspicuous by a blank screen that told its own story. No tickets will be sold at any time in the unforeseeable future. There is a greyness and solitariness about London that can never be accurately defined because none of us have seen this before. The pavements are no longer echoing to the beat of endlessly pounding feet from all over the world. It probably feels like the end of the world to some but to the eternal optimists we must believe that those feet will once again dance to a happier beat shortly.

For the time being, London will have to be monitored like the sick patient it quite clearly is. Nobody though should bring up any grapes or flowers for London because it just wants time to clear its head before somebody wakes it up from its slumbering state. And yet in a couple of weeks time we've now been re-assured that we will indeed be able to shop until we drop, shopping will become the latest fashion statement and families will once again be able to do the Hokey Cokey with their loved ones.

But then you moved away from the scene of broken hearts, of inexplicable estrangement, of social distancing and lockdown and then took another deep breath because the lump in your throat had just got to you. All of this apartness, solitude and painful alienation had just hit you right there. You convinced yourself that you never wanted to see London like this, that this should be a once in a lifetime experience. No more second spikes of the Coronavirus should ever visit our wonderful planet because we really do miss our loved ones and we hope that Covid 19 never rears its head again. Never.