That place

I walked down the steep slope into Highgate Tube this morning and was confronted by scores of beautiful flowers which have been planted in beds by the tea and coffee stand. I thought, as I entered the tube itself, how genuinely thrilled I am to be living in a part of London where people care about these sorts of things. It really makes a difference.

And so the editing circus has moved to the far less convenient environs of Victoria Park in, well, really in the middle of effing nowhere. It's actually an area of the city I've come to despise. I've come to associate it with the ghastly smug generation, ten years older than me, who made a killing on property in the 90s and hold regular dinner parties to rub other people's noses in the fact!

Funnily enough, it's the first area I lived in in London. I did 3 months there, sharing a double bed with my mate Jo, whilst at drama school. It was a fairly untenable situation. I didn't have my own room, I had nowhere to put my stuff, and Jo and I both craved the privacy which the situation we'd entered into didn't allow. Victoria Park is in deepest, darkest Hackney and is only served by busses. It used to take me forever to get into drama school. 

In those days it was a very undesirable location. Tall, depressing, concrete council blocks peered out from behind every pleasant Victorian rambling town house, and the girls I lived with used to tell me not to venture any further East than the pub half way down the opposite street. It always felt rather dark and gloomy, but I guess I lived there in the winter and was generally quite frightened of London when I first moved here. 

Nevertheless, the bohemians had already started moving into the area, attracted by low prices, and big houses. The council blocks were renovated or knocked down and after I'd cleared out, the slow process of gentrification began. Cafes moved into the boarded-over shops, artisan bread shops replaced the chippies, and as the yummy mummies and their wealthy city executive husbands started to replace the artists, so came the expensive bookshops and ridiculous establishments selling wooden toys and designer baby wear.

These days if you go there,  it's impossible to buy even a sandwich without first taking out a mortgage. My £1.25 beigels and 30p doughnuts on Brick Lane have become roasted vegetables on a rye Swedish sandwich with a garnish of Wiltshire water cress for about £7. It'll be served to me by a glamourous student with a World War One haircut and a "ra-ra, ya-ya" accent who wants to be a writer but will settle for PR when daddy stops funding the boho lifestyle. 

To make matters worse, all trains have now been cancelled on that tragic little line which goes from Highbury to Stratford. The announcements were hysterical;

"We apologise that the 10.35 to Stratford has been cancelled due to, due to [sic] a currently unidentified reason which is under investigation. We apologise for the inconvenience which this may cause you."

So here I am in Dalston, trying to figure out how to get further East. I've actually given up and have stationed myself in a cafe for an hour. I'm having what would appear to be a low-fat vegetarian breakfast which comes with an eccentric single boiled potato. A boiled potato for breakfast, I ask you? It doesn't seem to have agreed with me very well. I'm not sure my system was quite ready for the stodginess of burnt bubble and squeak with runny baked beans and five grilled tomatoes!