home.

april 2012 update: maida vale is no longer home! it was a good year. alice moved over from new york, and we shared a lovely flat with a strangely dark blue carpet. she's since moved back stateside, and i've relocated back to nw3.

maida vale was: quiet, anonymous mansion blocks. sometimes i'd sit on our little grated balcony four floors up and watch the lives being lived through the windows of the [posher] block behind ours. hundreds of windows, hundreds of souls eating, watching tv, ironing, trying on hats. we named some of our neighbours and made up the stories of their lives. ben and danielle lived across from us for a few months, then mysteriously disappeared and were replaced by a family with a little girl and a cat. the cat came over to visit a few times and reminded us of our last home together in irvine. there's something so wistful about saying goodbye to an animal.

maida vale was: canals. i loved running up the canal as far as i could, imagining if i kept going i would get to birmingham and beyond. the houseboats were so brightly painted, and spoke of an entirely different world with its own language, inhabitants and secret places. i occasionally exchanged words with them, and wondered what it might be like - coming and going and mooring as you please, making homemade jam and chutney to sell from your deck, learning how to fix a motor. they inspired a story of mine once.

the water is murky now, and hides all sorts of discarded rubbish. it's sad to watch it flow slowly under the bridge, and remember the life vein it once was. thousands of miles of canals still criss-cross the uk, and the paths alongside them where the animals pulled the boats are used now by cyclists and joggers in their lycra and nike tops. no more horses, no more 'legging' through tunnels. why is nostalgia so appealing?

maida vale was: olives and other bits of deliciousness you could find in the local delis and bakeries.

i miss our place and the quiet, leafy streets of w9. but it's good not to have to depend on the 46 bus anymore.

goodbye putney.

you've stuck by me through it all: the recession and numerous closures on the high street, the emergence of a mexican burrito stand (only one more and i would've had a free one...) and the opening of a tk maxx! oh yeah. bargains galore.

i will miss the writing on the walls. the bricks above foxtons muse: 'time like an ever rolling stream,' and near the thames you can spot 'time and tide wait for no man' above eye level. i'll miss watching the tidal patterns as i cross putney bridge, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. i'll miss counting the carriages on the district line trains running across the next bridge over. i remember well my lunches in the graveyard behind st mary's, the grouchy librarians and the always-crowded-no-matter-what-time-of-day pavements.

goodbye putney. it's back to hampstead now with its yummy mummies and baby gap sales!

venturing south.

if i had an endless pot of money and my choice of neighborhood, i might very well pick rotherhithe. something with exposed beams that overlooks the thames.

there is something mysterious about the old wharves and faded paint on the bricks. something that goes back centuries, to a time of exploration and discovery and slavery and shame. a time when pineapples were seen for the first time, the squawks of tropical birds echoed through the fog on ships coming up the thames estuary, and subdued lions and bears were brought to jamrach's emporium. rusted pulleys droop empty and useless, beams that might have once extended to docks or ships now hang in the air, vulnerable and shiny with a recent coat of paint.

imagine the river hundreds of years ago. the heartbeat of the city, the country. a lifeline of ships, goods, food and artifacts from abroad. the starting point of so many voyages and explorations. now it is neatly banked by high walls. boats full of tourists zip up and down, from westminster to london bridge.

still, i bet there are hundreds of stories still waiting to be discovered under those waters.

RIP Walthamstow Stadium (1933-2008)

The other day I was on the bus heading out to Chingford in East London to visit my friend's mum, when I saw this outside the window. So this is it. I remembered all the uproar two years ago when the closure of the tracks was imminent. Radio shows interviewed pensioners who remembered the old days before the national lottery when they would go to 'the dogs.' David Beckham - or was it his dad? - grew up in the area and worked at the track as a boy. It was the death of an icon, a tradition, a certain nostalgia that softens the edges of memory. We choose to forget the ugliness of gambling and absent parents. Instead, dog racing - like fox hunting for the upper classes - becomes something for which you must take a defensive stance. You see its plight, you defend it as a part of your identity and you mourn it when it's gone.