A drift is what happens when you stop steering – and every single meaning of the word is about the same thing
The Drift holds a 4.5 from two thousand two hundred and forty-eight people, charges twenty to sixty pounds, and its name means the same thing in every single context in which it is used.
All the drifts
A ship drifts when nobody is steering. It goes where the current takes it, and the point is that it is not being navigated.
Snow drifts. Sand drifts. The wind moves it and it accumulates where the wind decides.
Continental drift. The plates move, slowly, and nothing is driving them anywhere in particular.
A person drifts – through a career, through a decade, through a marriage – and the word carries the specific implication that they did not choose to and did not notice it happening.
To drift apart. To drift off. Genetic drift, in biology, which is change with no selective pressure behind it – change for no reason at all.
Every use of the word describes the same thing: movement without intention, and slowly enough that nobody objected at the time.
Which is what happened to this district
And we are going to say it, because four hundred and seventy-four articles have been building to it.
The City is a port. That is why it is here – the river, the crossing, the wharves. The banks and the insurers and the coffee houses grew up around ships arriving.
And the ships stopped. The docks closed. The container killed the whole thing inside fifteen years in the 1960s.
And the City did not move, and did not decide to stay, and did not consciously choose to become a financial centre disconnected from any physical trade whatsoever.
It drifted. It carried on doing what it had been doing, because everybody else was doing it, and because nobody was steering, and because there was no particular moment at which anybody could have stopped it.
A square mile of glass towers is standing on the momentum of a harbour that stopped working sixty years ago, and every institution in it is here because of something that no longer happens.
Genetic drift, briefly
Because it is the one that ought to be better known.
Natural selection is the famous mechanism, and it is directional – traits spread because they work.
Genetic drift is the other one, and it is just chance. In a small population, a gene can become universal or vanish entirely for no reason at all – because the animal carrying it happened to be stepped on, or happened to have more offspring that year.
A great deal of what any species is turns out to be accident, retained.
We have found the same thing in every article of this survey. The Elephant and Castle is a cutler’s badge. Old Speckled Hen is a car. Nickel is a goblin. The name stuck because it stuck.
Verdict
Excellent bar, superb views from the Heron Tower.
Go, drink, and look down at a district that has been drifting for sixty years and has not noticed.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The thing about satire when reality’s already maximally absurd is you have to be more precise, not more exaggerated. This demonstrates perfect precision.