A walk with Philippa

May 25th: A walk with Philippa

One of the drawbacks of lockdown was not being able to see my two closest female friends, Philippa and Fiona. I’ve known Fiona since we were about 15. We played in the Northamptonshire Youth Orchestra together and used to busk as part of a string trio with our mate Edward Thornhill in shopping centres across the Midlands. On one occasion, just after I’d finished my A-levels, my parents went on holiday to France. I was so convinced that I’d tanked my exams, that I refused to go with them, telling them that I needed to be in Northamptonshire instead, in order to go through the process of clearing. As it happened, I did rather well, and got into my first choice university, but by then the holiday had been booked and I was destined to stay at home alone. However, even at the age of 18, I was scared to be on my own at night in our house in Higham Ferrers, which was considered to be haunted by pretty much every person who stepped inside it, so Edward came to stay with me for the week. By then we were both driving, so we spent a fairly magical time travelling out to crop circles in the middle of the night, ghost-hunting in the eerie Brixworth church and listening to ELO, ABBA and Steeleye Span on the car stereo. Typical teenaged pursuits. On the Saturday night, my mother sneakily called from France, expecting to hear the sounds of a full-on drunken house party. What she heard instead was the sound of the kettle boiling, me with a mouthful of one of her home-baked chocolate chip cookies and Fiona and Edward playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in the background! We’d phoned Fiona up at about 10pm to say, “we’re coming to Northampton to pick you up… bring your violin.” We played chamber music through the night. I was a dream teen!

Fiona now lives in Glasgow. We speak most days on the phone, but I haven’t been able to see her, and this saddens me enormously. Philippa, on the other hand, lives in London. I met her when I was 19. She’s actually the same age as me, but was a year behind me at York University on account of having taken a year out to back-pack across India, learn to walk like a model and become impossibly glamorous. I think, to this hick-from-the-sticks, all the people I met at university who’d grown up in London seemed that little bit more sophisticated and confident but Philippa was something else. As my Mum once put it, “you notice her the moment she walks into a room.”

Philippa has two children, however, and my assumption about most families in lockdown was that they were all hunkering down, dealing with the misery of trying to educate children, whilst, in many cases (including Philippa’s), simultaneously working full-time from home, without being able to rely on child-minders, parents, or, for those long first weeks, the ability to go to the local park to let the kids run around like lunatics. Philippa also has a husband, two dogs and a cat. They all live in a tiny terraced house off Columbia Road and I genuinely don’t know how they’ve managed to stay alive!

Anyway, we decided to go for a lovely walk one evening in late May. I drove out East, and we went on a winding route which took us across the slightly grotty Ion Road Gardens, past Hackney City Farm, through Haggerston Park (which is full of plum trees - a post war initiative designed to get Eastenders eating proper food) and along the canal tow-path all the way to Victoria Park. 

Philippa on the tow path

Hackney and Shoreditch have a very different vibe to Finchley and Highgate. Many of the people who live there are considerably too cool for school. It’s a Mecca for bearded hipsters with coiffed hair, cut to look just a little bit shabby, who drink home-brewed beer and eat in terribly expensive über-trendy restaurants in old warehouses. City workers by day, the suits come off, they reveal their tattoos and they pretend to be artists by night, playing with guitars and frisbees in parks, and discussing philosophy in barges which have been turned into bookshops.

(I should point out that none of this describes Philippa who is a highly successful screen-writer!!)

The great irony, of course, is that you have to be very wealthy to live in Hackney these days. It’s a shit hole, with dreadfully arcane parking regulations, gangs, shootings, and terrible pollution, but because it’s also got cereal bars, macrobiotic cafes, spoken word artists and an impossibly cool, shabby-chic vibe, it’s more expensive to live in than the genteel, tranquil, leafy, but apparently boring Highgate! Based on the people we met on our walk, I’d say a great many Hackney residents are really noisy, quite into drinking and quite bad at observing social distancing measures. I can’t tell you how many people bumped into us as we walked along the tow path - and how many of them didn’t seem that bothered!

I must book in a session with a psychotherapist to get to the bottom of this bizarre and irrational dislike I have for Hackney. Of course, it’s got a lot of positives. The area around Philippa’s house is absolutely beautiful. It’s row upon row of charming terraced houses, all perfectly kept, and a brilliant backdrop for period dramas. They film there ALL the time. The streets are filled with kids playing out. It feels really safe - like a proper community - and her neighbours are wonderful people.

Philippa and her husband Dylan outside their lovely house

One of the other things I love about Hackney is the graffiti. That sounds like a strangely sarcastic comment, but the walls by the canal are filled with it, the colours are quite brilliant and I love how it all reflects on the smooth surface of the water. The graffiti is often quite witty, political and artistic in those parts as well. It doesn’t feel as mindless or destructive as it can feel in other places. 

Some of that graffiti

Anyway, location aside, it was a real tonic to see Philippa. It always is. She makes me howl with laughter, puts up with my whinging and always deals with my curious outbursts with great kindness. I do say some very odd things to her. I’m not quite sure why this is. We went walking with her dogs, who are the fastest things in the world once you let them off their leads. They are particularly fond of squirrels. You see these little black dots tearing into flower beds without any sense of the damage they may be doing to themselves, or the the herbaceous borders! I also wonder what the dog would do if she actually caught a squirrel. They’re adoringly good-natured creatures, but maybe they’d chew them to see if they squeak. Eek!

With the lovely dogs in Victoria Park