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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nIf I wrote this shit it would be like I’m inventing a terrible stereotyped London scene but it’s right here as gaudy as fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s also startling because stepping away from the crowds, as at the beginning of Van den Brugh, is the Sallyverse. This sort of spectacle is the flip side. London is a city of oversaturated everything. Just walking through two tube stations the sheer onslaught of ads for concerts, movies and other events mean that you have this subliminal sense of the sheer amount of things that are happening. Other European cities don’t have it at this intensity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, and Tennessee Fried Chicken has turned into a peri peri joint with no significant seating. So yeah, we don’t get the white goods falling but instead the endless procession of the Arsenal crowd. Unreal city. As our friend Tom put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
TFC continues to exist because it’s mythically true. Allowing the businesses that actually exist on the Holloway Road to deny Clide his court is ungenerous. There are probably actually far more decent places to eat up and down this street than there were in my day, and that hasn’t taken away from the grubbiness of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And Sally would totally have bunked that bus. She wouldn’t even have flashed the ticket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, and there goes an ambulance up the street!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In other matters. I notice that I refer to certain London roads with the definite article: the Holloway Road, the Seven Sisters Road, the Edgware Road. Actually I think with the last of these three, our friend Tom Eliot follows suit. When a road is long enough and old enough it gets the definite article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most perfect gift however was on the Stansted Express before I was even in the Holloway Road region. A woman who repeatedly told her partner. “But David, you don’t know that.” Absolute dialogue gold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My bus bunking moment was foreshadowed at Tottenham Hale when the ticket barrier swung open and a black member of TFL staff gestured me through without my ticket. “You’re alright, mate.” It wasn’t actually a comment on my vibe or the quality of my limited edition Adidas, but rather that I didn’t need to fuss with the ticket; it was cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bus driver on the Holloway Road was also black. I’ve tried to explain the importance of the afro-caribbean population to public transport after WWII to my students before. Commonwealth isn’t an easy concept for Mitteleuropeans to understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Actually this was something I noticed in Marseilles last year. So many of the regular supermarket staff, the functionaries who do the real jobs are black. You nod, you appreciate, you give that respect, especially in a city you’ve never visited before at 11pm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ll be passing through there on the way to visit my mum in Avignon in a few weeks. I was told that it was a dirty and a dangerous city. I found it interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think it was Prince Siddhartha who said, “try not to be a dickhead, innit mate?” And I think he was onto something there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, and the postcode here: N5 1RA. I read the second half as IRA. Reminding me of this road in the 70s when certain pubs had signs “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish” and others had a lad who’d wander in with a cup for donations to the Sinn Fein cause. Another aspect that Mitteleuropeans might find hard to process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I failed at the British person at the airport task. Whatever time you are travelling from anywhere to anywhere else, if you are British you are required to get in a pint at an airport bar, pub, restaurant, whatever they have. I didn’t drink a thing until I was fully established on Holloway Road. I’m clearly becoming old, even if the Greek woman in the pub couldn’t see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe the Greek woman recognised that I had become in some manner European, and therefore in need of a warning about football crowds. I am after all the sort of person who says Keir Schtarmer, and who could easily get into trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is closer to being Soma Jones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dancing out across busy roads though! That’s something I can still manage. Some European countries have jaywalking, it’s not necessarily taken too seriously, but my partner imagines that the cops actually care about that, but in London jumping out into the road is standard and necessary. You learn to intuit velocities along streets with accuracy quite early. I had a partner who was deaf, and they couldn’t do this, so I had to consciously slow down, a little like I have to with a European, but just knowing the pace and mindset of traffic here is a joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Parisian road crossing is an art. In Paris, like in Rome, traffic is its own law. Pedestrians aren’t even tolerated, not individually, so to cross the road in Paris you have to engage en masse. They can’t kill all of us! It’s like storming the Bastille every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I was younger, during a sojourn in the Medway Towns, I was in the habit late at night of walking across parked cars, up their bonnet, over their roof, down the boot and skip off. I have no idea how easy or difficult that was because I was young and under the influence of recreational pharmacology. I was never caught, bothered by car owners and neither did I fall off and injure myself, because why would I do a dumb thing like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s Sally logic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, and I haven’t mentioned the accommodation yet. It’s a set of unusual shaped rooms, if this one is anything to go by. I’m not sure the window has been able to close properly in the last five years, but the weather isn’t bad enough, and I have little of much value in here for that to be a problem. Coming back from the pub I encountered a young guy, twentyish, having trouble with the key code of the front entrance. He had a lot of scars about his face, but I took that to mean that maybe he’d been losing fights lately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once inside he asked about whether I knew about the match. There was a girl in the corridor, maybe his partner. They left their door partway open, but horses for courses. From another room I could hear an older woman speaking Italian, possibly into a phone until relatively late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My partner would have complained about this place so much, judged all of the people, but it’s perfect for my purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another factor before I even landed was also interesting. Coming back to the UK on a plane was never notable before. It was just about coming home. The descent was through a thick viscid layer of cloud. So much of it. How fog enshrouded would it be when we landed? I realised for the first time that coming to the UK was like descending within the deep atmosphere of a gas giant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we made planetfall on something that felt moderately solid (biscuit?) it became apparent that I had lived for decades in a sempiternal gloom of Humbrol painted dampscapes. Scenes across the Lea Valley that were essentially drab colours with little sense of depth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem is that if you stay within the cloud layers of Humbrol fustiness, you’ll never know who you are or what implicit values and landscapes invented you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s not all a critique: the black transport staff, the endless traffic noise\u2026 Actually that’s the most important part. Now that the crowds have subsided, the eternal late night traffic of the Holloway Road is the most natural substrate. A lullaby of sorts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh and the global high street has decided to help me. Even just tapping on card readers with my European debit card works everywhere. I changed a big handful of cash to tide myself over in case, and that just means that I’ll have to be a little luxurious when I’m not enjoying this shithole accomodation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also the sheer bellows on random drunkenness along the street, even after the crowds are gone, just the regular London drunks, are a phenomenon unto themselves. Yeah, I’m not clear on that plural either. I hear anger and noise and the rest in Mitteleuropa, but not this guttural noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s more something I associate with New Year’s, when it’s everywhere, but there’s a certain accent of challenge in it that I don’t hear elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This morning’s major discovery: Hotblack Desiato still exists. For a while they became Hotblack and Co, but it seems like they got back together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Took in Clissold Park, Green Lanes and Stamford Hill this morning. Although the last of these felt a little dangerous in the wake of recent Middle East politics. There have been recent attacks in Golders Green, so I didn’t hang around too long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Visited my friend Gyrus who contracted encephalitis earlier this year. He doesn’t remember a number of important recent incidents including coming over to visit me last autumn, and also that he totally got into Balming Tiger after I introduced him to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One question that came up after he apologised for forgetting various things was how many of those things he was just bad at remembering before this health issue, like maybe he found names or directions hard to recall anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He answered that the problem was that he couldn’t remember what he wasn’t in the habit of remembering before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But after I reminded him about Balming Tiger, and the Buri Buri MV in particular, he rewatched it and started to recall small elements of his visit. The memory encodes itself in complex whorls. His sense of humour and ridiculousness about the whole thing remains intact. I think he’s going to be okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then I went to have dinner with my dad in Islington. He walked back with me to the tube station, recalling when he used to take a train from there to Moorgate at his first job in the financial sector in the 70s. One day he was late and missed his usual train which crashed killing and injuring many passengers. Being late that one day may have saved his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also told me about his attempts to find a teacher to relearn the Burmese he spoke as a child in Rangoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone is engaged in the act of remembering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, and we were going to a restaurant this evening that has a BYOB policy, so I snapped up a few cans of Lech in a shop along the way. An immigrant kid who was getting his own beers in remarked about my choice, if to himself. “Good choice.” London seems to be welcoming me back through myriad small inflections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, and my major non-Sally move was to have a 0% beer while lunching with my pal with memory issues so that I’d be more present later in the day when I had dinner with my dad. I’m not sure whether that’s true insight into my own limitations or just getting old. The two are possibly related.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ah, and I may have solved my other major problem of this trip. I need to return some CDs to a major figure in the UK improv scene who has retreated to Ipswich. If I posted them from Europe he’d get hit with customs fees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have identified the nearest post office and I shall send them tomorrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CDs sent to Ipswich, visited a K-pop shop in the West End.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Things are normalising on the third day. Found the churchyard through St Mary Magdalen’s church on the Holloway Road, a route we took to school in the 70s. School kids were coming back through it today, and I’d forgotten all of the gravestones so ancient that they can barely be read. The park keeper used to keep bags of conkers for us in autumn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Picked up a couple of old Penguin paperbacks in a charity shop, another CP Snow and a slim Pynchon. Came back via Islington library, the first library I ever went into. Especially the reference department upstairs. I might spend the hours tomorrow between checking out of the room mooching around there. It still seems well used as a community resource.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And tonight, finally, the pub. Might not be a huge crowd, but there should be a few people who still want to see me, or are at least curious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okay finally the pub night. Might not surprise you but it surprised me that four out of the five attendees were writers. The exception was Tim who has been working in gourmet foods for years and is a friend I have known since\u2026 1990? Deep history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mike, a poet who I had never met in person before, came out to the pub. he has a beautiful blossom of bleached white hair. He’s a practising Christian but with a very imaginative take on theology, and works in his daily life as a plumber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gyrus, who I saw yesterday, turned up again, this time he brought Joel, a long time I Ching expert with him. I used to hang out with both of them in the Warner flats of Waltham store where Joel still lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last but not least was Edmund, another writer. I published the second edition of his debut, but we go back decades in experimental music. He and Joel had never met before, but Joel knew and admired his novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This makes me look like more of a literary figure than I am in real life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile in the other side of the pub Edmund’s fianc\u00e9e Pia and her friends were celebrating one of their circle’s birthday. Pia is Finnish and very lovely, and after so many of Ed’s exes I’ve dealt with, including a schizophrenic who emailed me regularly about him, I’m so happy for Ed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is what the final au revoir of the visit looks like, and this is the London that came out to see me. It was very funny, and everyone got on fine, and a certain amount of beer was consumed. Next time there will be other friends and different jokes, but I don’t think I made a mistake in returning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I kept the organisation minimal. You do other than state a date and location you’ll be negotiating for ever. You certainly don’t beg people to come and catch up. You feel the love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately I had an early lunch at a decent Indian before but Mitteleuropean living has left me ill prepared. After two pints I felt bloated and when I had a moment to visit the toilets, threw up a lot of it easily. Social nerves, unusual diet, the fizziness of Kronenbourg? I don’t know. No damage done, but the internal fluidity was quite different from the external.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oddly enough an older musical\/literary figure of the Hackney scene was there with his coterie when I arrived. We played on the same bills and were nodding acquaintances ten or fifteen years ago, but I didn’t force it. In spite of being a thousand miles from home I didn’t feel that lonely although none of my little gang had arrived yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s the Sally composure. Feeling safe to potentially just read a book all night if no-one can get away from their responsibilities the next day. It’s not about needing minions, just good company that is generous enough to spare you an evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Final pub night detail. On the bus from Hoxton there were two middle-aged guys, one of mixed or uncertain ethnicity and the other a black guy with dreads, and the former repeatedly advised the latter, “you’ll come out of it someday, trust me.” And other amazing phrases. They were clearly good pals and got off the bus to have a swift half at the pub while I jumped off a few stops later to get dinner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The thing was that when I entered the pub to begin my evening, they were still there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Final day in London. Slight change of plan since Sokollab in the west end was actually open today I visited there, found a lifesized Yves standee in the shop and bought the new Chuu and Yves albums far cheaper than they are in Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, and I ordered a new debit card from a physical branch of my UK while waiting for Sokollab to open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Catch the plane back on time and this will have been a very successful excursion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Found the legendary Multi Faith Prayer Room at Stansted Airport and nearby there was a door that loops around to the beginning of the duty free area, but it only works in one direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Somehow the magic of getting on an aircraft worked. Passport control got confused about my mass of documents to stay in Europe, but we got there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can also move through the U-bahn here will a wheelie bag and another bag, on stairs, faster than the locals when they are entirely unburdened. On the Tube they’d be overwhelmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (notes from early May visit to the UK) Well, here I am. The Holloway Road still exists and my pub of choice, The Coronet, a converted cinema has closed down so I’m at The White Swan at Highbury Corner instead. 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