I went with Cindy to East London this afternoon to visit
Philippa and Dylan and my goddaughter, Deia. I felt immediately guilty upon
seeing the aforementioned, as it’s the first time I’ve clapped eyes on her in probably 5 months, and she
looked a great deal more grown up. I now know exactly what my Great Aunts meant when
they used to say “my, how you’ve grown,” before sucking their lipstick-covered false teeth back
into their mouths.
Philippa is pretty much 9 months pregnant. She's enormous
and the baby is due at any moment. A new pram, in a flat pack, sat in her
hallway. Apparently, she’d got Deia’s one down from the loft, forgetting that we
used to call it ghetto pram because it looked like something that they’d have
used to transport leaflets during the miners’ strike in 1985. Philippa took one
look at the sorry-looking thing and said “never again.” She deliberately left
it on the street outside her house last Sunday morning. She lives just off
Columbia Road and when the flower market’s on, pretty much anything that gets
left there finds a good home. She went out for the morning, and when she
returned, a group of tourists were standing by the pram having their
photographs taken! #retro
We walked to Broadway Market and bought food from some of
the street sellers there. I’ve never had an enormous vegetarian scotch egg
before, and it tasted wonderful. We sat in the shady London Fields gorging
ourselves, chatting about theatre and playing with Deia, who was on very good
form; giggly, intrepid and getting rather good at using her pleases and thank
yous!
The sky was very misty and weird at around 4pm today. There
were coronas everywhere; curious little soft focus rainbows. The sun looked
like it was sitting behind loo paper, but with no trace of a cloud in front
of it.
The atmosphere on Broadway Market, however, was electric. We
went down to the Regent’s Canal and looked at a set of barges which had been
turned into book and retro clothing shops. A guitarist sat on the roof of the
book barge playing classical music. It was truly magical. Cindy bought a print
by a local artist to remember the moment.
350 years ago, Pepys, who could be a desperate hypochondriac,
demonstrated the woeful lack of 17th Century medical knowledge by
writing:
I
stood in great pain, having a great fit of the colic, having catched cold
yesterday by putting off my stockings to wipe my toes, but at last it lessened,
and then I was pretty well again, but in pain all day more or less
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