Dusty Laptop Interlude #2

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 2: Firecracker night-shiver

My meeting with the potential flatmate was a let down after the high of Columbia Road. He was a shifty Turkish bloke that ran a dirty local café and lived in an apartment with décor my grandma would have been proud of. I made my excuses and headed back to the Royal Oak in the hope of re-igniting some the emotion from earlier in the day. It didn’t.

I hadn’t felt positive about anything in months and he’d killed it. I blamed him and felt the anger rise up in me before it subsided to give way to the familiar dull ache of disappointment. I ordered a double JD and a beer to soften the fall. I let a few gay guys flirt with me and buy me beers to take my mind off everything. They started talking dirty, so once again I made my excuses and left.

My ipod played Galaxie 500 tracks in random order on the train and I heard explosions during the walk home from Ladbroke Grove station to my apartment.

I‘m home in a home that won’t be mine for long. I have to find a place to live. I write down what happened today and hit the wine rack and hash stash. I polish off two bottles of cheap Australian Shiraz, a few joints and play air sax to Coltrane. I consider going to bed before grabbing another bottle and heading up to my roof-top to investigate the bangs and flashes going on outside. I sit down too heavily on my rotten deckchair as a rocket sweeps up from my left periphery and arcs over my head. The explosion fails to jolt. The way I’m feeling now, nothing could. I’m in a triple bubble of Shiraz, jazz and hashish with a meniscus an inch thick.

Then I get it. Guy Fawkes. Bonfire Night. All of England celebrating a renegade who tried to blow up the British Parliament, while most of them are gripped in fear as another, more intangible force threatens to carry out the same symbolic act – anytime, anywhere. The irony of this vapourises, but there is no escaping that London looks resplendent…if under siege. I suppose this is what the Blitz must have been like. The muffled base-boom thuds both near and far, patches of the vast urban expanse lit up by sporadic flashes, the smoke and its acrid tang hanging heavy in the cold night air.

I’m going to miss this rooftop. I love the view it affords me of this mean but addictive city. Anybody who has lived here knows how it can close in on you, consume you and bear itself down on you so you feel like there is no escape, no room, no air to breathe.

Up here on this rooftop I replenish my take on my existence with a heavy dose of perspective. Up here I am above it all. I can see the city and all of its chaos at arms length. Its topography and its patterns begin to re-emerge and I regain some semblance of understanding and direction. I have air to breathe again and can see the way out…even if, for reasons still beyond me, I never choose to take it.

I open the Shiraz and above the surrounding din still manage to relish the sound of the glig-glig-glug as I pour it into the glass. I slug back half my glass and sling my head back and gargle, savouring the sensation as I let the overflow run down my cheeks and chin and all over my shirt – taking the vampiric pleasure I normally feel driniking such blood-like liquid to some crazed new high.

I sink into my chair feeling the wind cool the spilt wine against my chest. John Cotrane’s sax is wailing out of the speakers behind me and I watch the fireworks dance their graceful dance, their randomness loosely syncopating with Coltrane’s soaring and dipping ramblings.

Looking at things through Shiraz tinted glasses, life isn’t so bad really. This rut I’m in is a mere temporary setback. I mean, this here is a hard city. It takes time, hardwork, conviction and luck to make an impact.

I reach for the bottle and the legs of my chair give way. I land on my side and catch the bottle just before it spills its contents. I look up at the sky and a firework does a lame imitation of a parachute as my lids get heavy…like weighted drapes…

Read Episode 1

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.