Walking through Islington

After a day of working yesterday, which felt profoundly painful on a Sunday, I jumped on the 43 bus to Highbury to meet Fiona and Michael for a bite to eat. I realised, as we trundled down the Archway Road, that I usually have work with me when I'm on a bus, and that I don't tend to notice how ludicrously slowly they seem to travel! The twenty miles per hour speed limit we have in most of the North London boroughs feels desperately slow. Frankly, in London, you're lucky to be able to travel at half of that speed. There isn't a road which isn't congested in some way, but on those few occasions when you are able to travel at 30mph, like the times when you're returning home from a gig in the middle of the night, it's really nice to be able to do so.

That said, I've now got quite used to driving at twenty miles per hour in London. It can therefore get very confusing in the boroughs where the speed limit hasn't yet been lowered. Bizarrely, this includes the tourist haven of Westminster, where clueless people repeatedly step out in the road to take photographs without any warning. If there really were a place in London where it might be useful to slow the traffic, it's there. But then again, nothing feels consistent in London when it comes to road travel. Parking regulations differ from road to road. In Highgate, you can park on any street, and most single yellow lines, any time of the day or night except weekdays from 10am till noon. This is, of course, just enough to to deter commuters from driving here, dumping their cars and taking the tube into town. In Hackney, however, where, let's face it, you only visit if absolutely necessary, the regulations prevent people from parking six days a week from 8am til 10pm. I can't imagine how residents cope. What happens if you have the builders in? Or friends to visit? These kind of regulations smack of cynical money-making schemes. The most draconian parking regulations are often in the poorest parts of town where middle class lawyer residents don't threaten to take their councils to court!

My general confusion was aided by the fact that the 43 bus appears to have changed its southbound route and now goes along the Cally Road, bypassing Highbury Corner entirely, which meant I had to do an irritating schlep by Shanks' pony.

We had our tea in an Italianish cafe on Upper Street. The service was a little languid but the food was good. Michael disappeared to a party in Walthamstow and Fiona and I decided to go on one of our epic walks. It's one of the things we like to do when we're together. We talk and walk and do both things at an incredibly fast pace! We walked up through Highbury Fields, then along past Highbury Barn to Finsbury Park, where we did a loop past the Sobell Sports centre, up into Crouch End and back to Highgate. It was a walk which triggered many memories. Even though we're both Northamptonians and Fi now spends most of her time in Brighton and Glasgow, that particular part of London will always be special for us both. I can't count the number of times we've trudged along those pavements together, each time nattering about whatever was important to us at the time, which of course changes as you enter and exit different phases of your life. For me, what's incredibly special about my relationship with Fiona is that our lives have always worked in tandem. It's as though we've always been travelling at the same speed, right from the age of 14. During those 30 or so years we've constantly had each other's backs and only rowed, I think, three times. That's a proper friendship.