Dusty Laptop Interlude #1

Dusty Laptop Interludes is a weekly digression from the usual Hairybones content. Each Sunday will bring a new installment from an offline journal found on an old laptop running a Windows 95 operating system. There is no internal floppy drive and the external jack is shot, so the only way this story can get out is by way of me re-typing it.

It follows a twenty-something’s journey to find himself, truth and true love in a city that can bury all three in a heartbeat.


Episode 1: Love on a street.

Is it possible to fall in love with a place? Is it possible to fall in love with a point on the map as you do with a soul? If so, is that love a mere reflection of what you believe in, of yourself, of your ultimate aspirations and needs? Ask these questions and the question mark will always linger beyond the hypothetical. You can try and breakdown why you love someone, something, somewhere. Beauty, depth, mystery – you can apply any checklist you like and the love itself (being greater than the sum of its parts) will always exceed it.

Poets, artists, scientists, priests, prophets and even Buddhas have tried to explain to themselves and us what love is…and failed. Their efforts have made for some truly astonishing art, started terrible wars and helped us understand ourselves and our place in the universe just a little more. Yet nobody has come close to explaining what love is. We celebrate the dizzying heights of its inception, philosophise about its murky depths and lament its demise. Despite the futility we keep trying to make sense of it. Love is inexplicable. Love is irrational and unpredictable - just like life itself. Maybe the meaning of life and the meaning of love are inextricable. Love exceeds explanation and consciousness. Like life, love just is.

I fell in love with a London street today. And I’m not going to tell you why, I won’t even tell you how - my words would only form bars and eventually a cage. All I can do is give an account of the moment that I first walked down it, through it, amongst it and relay some of the observations and thoughts that stuck around long enough for me to write them down.

I have lived in London for four years and I like to think I have seen and experienced a lot of what it has to offer. But in these four years I have never visited the place that I visited today.

I was meeting up with a potential new flatmate. Here, East, was the only point on London’s compass where I hadn’t lived yet. The East is a vast unknown to me and there I was, AtoZ in hand, trying to find a pub called the Royal Oak (and hopefully someplace to rest my head for a few months). The first hint that piqued my curiosity as I walked along Hackney Road was the odd person laden down with a pot-plant or flowers. Then as I turned onto Columbia Road, several cars with trees jutting out of sunroofs and windows rolled by – with the driver and passengers barely visible amidst the foliage. Several large market trucks flanked the road by The Birdcage pub and once I cleared them, I saw it.

It opened up before me as a river of colour snaking through the brown brick cliffs of the two-up/two-downs on either side of the slightly meandering street. Can you imagine a sight more beautiful in London’s grey-stained and harsh East End than a street chock-full of flowers?

I have always sought out contrasts and I have always lived close to a market. They are cultural hubs that remind me I live amongst a rich and diverse community that (at least in this city) spends most of its time indoors. But Columbia Road, a flower market in deep East London, is something else entirely. It’s a sight and spectacle so inviting that you can’t help but plunge right in. Once in, the slow moving current takes you on a riverboat ride though banks of exotic and fragrant stalls – with each flower vying for your attention as though you were its naturally designated pollinator. The market traders are every bit as colourful as the produce they are touting, as this is after all London’s Cockney heart. The air is dense with their soundtrack of shouty East End market-boy schtick and one-liners peppered with Cockney-accented Latin plant names (for a fiver!)

Being a flower and plant market, Columbia Road escapes the crass materialism of other shopping experiences. People walk down the streets smiling serenely as they clutch on to their new plants. These purchases won’t lift your status or make your life easier. They are living things that brighten your day and remind you that the world isn’t all concrete and machinery. Sure there are flower markets around the world that look a whole lot better on a postcard, but living in London (and particularly the areas surrounding these markets) is an intensely urban and often bleak existence and it is this setting that drives home the magic of this oasis of colour. Its flowers and plants remind you of the natural world from where we once dwelled. They are the flesh we apply to the skeletal bones of our architectural structures. They supply us with oxygen in more than just the scientific sense. People smile as they walk off with their newly acquired plants because it has made them feel more human, more in touch with nature.

I finally found the Royal Oak pub in the middle of all this. An old market pub with a market licence (8am opening time) that had been done up slightly as a gastro pub...maintaining some of its orginal market charm. It was late afternoon and as I sipped on my pint waiting for my prospective flatmate, I looked out on to the market through the large pub window at some of the stalls now being packed up. As the bargain hunters swooped in for last minute steals, I noticed that anyone who bought a large plant had to hug it in order to take it home. It was at this point that I decided I had to live here. Even if it was only like this one day out of seven, I knew it could only be good for the soul to live within strolling distance of Columbia Road, East London.