London’s worst
The problem with a brief visit to old haunts to have a laugh with mates is that you end up with a backlash of teary nostalgia, but yesterday really took the bisquit.
I was hiding from the trendy, loud Islington crowd in the upstairs room, hunched over the computer.
Ah Islington… It breathes money. The widow of Douglas Adams lives around the corner and the tennants downstairs moved in with a plasma TV so big it takes up half the room in their flat for which they pay more than my entire assistant chef’s wages in rent.
There are still a few genuine residents left, selling second-hand furniture or cutting keys on Cally Road, but it probably won’t be long before these scruffy hangers-on face the music, sell their little shops and houses which are now worth a gazillion quid (meaning their offspring can’t afford the inheritance tax on them) and move up north to live on the proceeds. Leeds or somewhere where they can mingle with their own kind. Islington is for bankers, rail regulators, clinical psychologists and political editors of the Spectator.
London has shown me its best side on Friday, now I am looking at its worst. Not the traffic, not yards strewn with piles of rubbish, not hordes of scroungers, not even the drunken thugs — the pretentious social climbing classes which have taken over and rendered inhabitable such former great ‘hoods as Primrose Hill and Notting Hill and now — so help us all — extend their greedy little colonies towards Hackney and Lewisham, pricing everyone out of the way. This is why we can’t really go back to London (since our last stay, houseprices have quadrupled or something), not that Reading is much better.
So I sat at the computer, typing and clicking away. I was checking out Veghead’s blog and the squatter’s advisory service as I was seriously considering upping sticks and moving back south of the river.
The machine was getting increasingly pesky. Just before leaving for New Cross it had hung on me — for no reason other than trying to play Radio 1 — and since I was in a geek-free zone (hubby and mates all out) I was left with a choice of poreing over LINUX manuals for a lengthy time (not much help since most relevant stuff is on-line these days) or flicking the off-switch like in the good old days. So I did and spent the rest of the day fretting that I might have fried its chips. I hadn’t but our relationship did not improve after that. It successively forced me to kill a process (twice), refused to recognize the floppy drive and declined to start up the web-browsers Mozilla, then Konqueror leaving deranged icons bouncing all across the screen. I logged out and back in to no avail (“restoring session” the petulant piece of s**t had the nerve to beam at me before resuming its deranged bouncing). All this meant that I had to climb downstairs about half a dozen times to ask John for help, who was guaffing along with a large crowd of visitors to whom I should have been rather more sociable.
To really put the boot in, the evening rounded off with a program on the beep about an antidepressant which has caused me two years of pain (still on-going) and I could not get on the bloody newsgroups which were the only people I could talk to.
Anyway, all this is behind me now. We are back in Stirling and the temperature has dropped by ten degrees. It is time to return to the whales of Trincomalee and think of warmer climes.
Tags: Travels on my Doorstep, Tag Index
Denni