Encounters in my neighbourhood

My neighbourhood has an ability to absorb most collisions. At its worst there are occasional explosions of loud music, bitter argument and violence at which point discrete phone calls are made to police and the local council's ASBO team. But for the everyday grievances of difference we mostly just ignore, tut, or keep objections to the privacy of the home rather than the street.

There are though moments of choice when we have to decide which way we're going to go. For example, after a few weekends of aggravated tension on our street related to the selling of illicit substances, I came home to find the shop had opened, so to speak, literally on the doorstep to my building. Unfortunately, before rational thought took charge, my middle aged self stepped in to berate the young man as he made a sale to a car passenger, with an eye rolling 'Seriously! you're going to do that here, on my doorstop!'

The rational side of my brain finally caught up with me two seconds later as I made it to my doorway, just as the young man also caught up with me and said 'Excuse me Miss, what did you say?'

Now at this point a few scenarios where trying to make there way around various neuronal passages in order to come to some decision on the best possible course of action to take at this point, influenced by the following confounding variables:

1. I was carrying my cello and therefore couldn't actually run very far, very fast.
2. I was almost in the block door but there was only a few feet and an open gate between the young man and me.
3. He was actually being very polite.

So my eventual response: 'I was just saying, have a nice evening', as I disappeared into home. 

The shop's not been back since but I somehow don't think the withering eye rolls of a middle aged cello carrier wearing hand knits and doc martins would really have had any impact on that decision. 

Meeting the neighbours

All happening in Homerton this evening ... traffic collision outside the block turns out to be our suspected local dealers trying to execute a handbrake turn in order to get away from a police pursuit. The driver missed the turn and hit a neighbour's car instead, which then rolled into another neighbour's car. The driver legged it leaving his girlfriend to deal with the police, two of whom ran after the driver eventually tackling him on the green. They've just brought him back kicking and screaming ... literally. 
Meanwhile half the street has come out to watch the performance and piece together what happened, swapping notes and perspectives from our various vantage points, having a laugh at the poorly planned escape attempt and commiserating with the car owners. Conviviality in action! It may not be pretty but it works.

Of raffles, tights and gala affairs ...

Only in Hackney would prizes in a black tie fundraising raffle include 60 rolls of toilet tissue. Pleased to say I won the 7th prize ... an electric tooth brush. This at least meant that I got to display the magnificently price-tagged tights (see previous blog) when I went up to collect my winnings. Most tables seemed to be made up of property developers, housing associations, and assorted mayors, mayoresses and consorts from other boroughs who spend each weekend attending each others' galas. They are identified by the subtle competition of 'my ceremonial chain is bigger than yours, and did you see the car that I arrived in'. The charities we were raising money for weren't allowed to make a presentation lest they lower the bon vivant tone (we're talking food banks, domestic violence and youth work) but fortunately the Speaker filled the gap by engaging in a bit of karaoke until the real Elvis Presley impersonator came on for his act. I love Hackney.

The Wickly News

I now own a piece of London. It's just a little piece; an ex-local in a yet to be gentrified part of Hackney, with the traffic hum of the Eastway between us and the lights of the Olympic Park. Given the eye-watering rents in London, and the historically low interest rates its probably a good thing to engage in generating debt I hear you say, sensibly sounding like an elder relative.

But there is only one good reason that I can think of for buying my own space .... The chance to spend days putting flat pack together! I love flat pack almost as much as I LOVE my new Bosch. I love the fact that I made the bed I sleep in, the wardrobe where I hang my clothes, the table I eat off and the chairs I sit on (not to mention a desk, an office chair, a lounge chair, a bedside table, and a bathroom caddy).

Now I know the real craftspeople among you will be rolling your eyeballs - ikea is not exactly artisan - they also need to rethink their tax policy and what's in their Swedish meatballs (refer to recent horse meat scandal sweeping Europe). But it is about the only opportunity I get to justify owning power tools. And there is something awesome about the scale of the place, and, perhaps only to those of us who are compulsively organised, about being able to count every nail, screw and allen key in each pack.

More importantly, anyone into flat pack instantly gets what some of the most densely written concepts in social science are on about. Take 'assemblage', for example, one of the popular A's (others being Affect, Affordance and Actor network theory). There are bits, we put them together generally according to a plan usually derived by someone else. Sometimes there may be bits left over or bits that don't fit quite correctly and require a degree of pressure, or a hammer, to get them into place. Affect is the sensation you get when you realise you should have bought two of the wardrobe door packs (damn you ikea) or when you can only get to an ikea on a Sunday afternoon along with the rest of London, and realise an embodiment of Dante's seventh circle of hell. And the interactions between human and non-human on such occasions, between people, and more people, and trolleys and prams and cardboard and aisles and soft and hard furnishings, are all you need to experience to really understand Actor network theory. A theory for exiting ikea without feeling claustrophobic or developing rage would be handier.

The new home is also a great place to engage in some ethnography of hipster led gentrification. Cross the Eastway and you enter a space where a shop, run by a man who shaves only half his face, survives by selling just one type of bike - fixed gear. Next door the shop sells only 12" vinyl. In the cafe, a woman enters wearing a towering flowered head dress and no one blinks. And everyone, from the bike shop to the laptop repair shop, serves espresso with their goods. Between the Eastway and the Peanut Factory is a Cash & Carry and book warehouse. Next to the White Building, with its trendy micro brewery, pizzeria and performance spaces, is a swingers' club with blacked out windows. Dotted among it all are squatted dross-scapes, warehouses and artist studios. And binding it all together is the smell wafting from Mr Bagel's and the German bakery across the road. Welcome to Hackney Wick.

A fine day out

At the risk of sounding completely bo-ho, it's been a fabulous London weekend. Saturday was spent walking to Southbank with the weather remembering what it's supposed to do in summer. Okay, it's only 22 degrees but leave me with my illusions. It's warm enough to sit outside and sip my Pimms and that's all that matters. We even have our own urban plage now ... two inches of sand on reclaimed sidewalk next to the Thames. It comes with a replica Chowpatty Beach (Mumbai) cafe, where they serve sides of poetry. And along with these visual memorials to hot days in the past comes auditory reminders of joy ... of the squeals of kids running under the hose pipe in the backyard, chasing the dog and getting scratched from razor sharp kikuyu grass ... although at Southbank there is no dog or lawn but never is there so much squealing as when the dancing fountain is turned on.
 
To these pleasures can be added two seminars at the London Literature festie. The first, a talk on 'London as a Satellite City' with Rana Dasgupta (author of Tokyo Cancelled and Solo) and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (author of What if Latin America Ruled the World?). The second was Owen Jones (who looks all of 16) discussing his book on Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class. There is an absolute hatred held by some in the UK for those who must sell their labour for a living and have no control over what they do once engaged in that labour. It is an indigenous version of social cleansing based possibly on the fear of retribution for the violence of the industrial revolution. 

On my way back home, pondering this hatred, I realised I must now be a Londoner as I could give correct directions to everyone who was lost along the way (although I'm worried the young ladies at Liverpool Street station, heading to Southbank, may not have made it given their lovely high heels had 50 minutes of walking to do).

Home in Hackney, being 90 minutes walk or another world away from Southbank, is having its own festie at the moment: Create (the Hackney Fringe Festival). In an old WWII bunker at the back of a theatre in Dalston, Sukhdev Sandhu created a performance piece of Night Haunts, scenes from the underside of London. I'm not sure I really needed to know that the men who unclog the Victorian sewers of the fat of a 21st century city occassionally eat what they find down there (okay it was an unpeeled orange but really ...!).

The bunker, creating the dark and dank smell of London at night, also provided shelter from the random monstrousness that is a rapidly regenerating Dalston that I pottered through on the way home, just in time to round off my day with the David Hayes vs Wladimir Klitschko heavy weight title fight. It's amazing how watching boxing on a 50 inch high definition plasma screen with slow motion replay can improve one's appreciation of how much it must hurt.