History

London is a film with an ever-changing cast of characters and a new storyline every hour. There's the woman in her mid 40s with the glazed stare. She brings her own hair dye to the salon and sifts through garbage at night. The silver-haired man who sits in every shop window with a coffee and a newspaper. A tall intellectual type in a checked shirt, hair in a ponytail, with The New Yorker stuffed in his back pocket. The barman who does a famous whiskey sour and a bouncer with a scarred face. A bus that never arrives, a sliding door, a missed train, an emergency cab-ride, al fresco dinners, hot nights, burning buildings, boarded windows, screaming sirens. Someone exited in search of a better life and those left in the wake began questioning theirs.

Back to Black

After a reasonably cool summer the weather suddenly became stifling hot, the kind where the streets smelled like tar and dusk didn't settle until well after 9pm. As a result, West Hampstead residents dined later and later, meaning longer nights for shift workers and even later after-work-drinks with Jim, Moet and the sunrise.

Amy Winehouse died in a home a 10 minute cycle away, imposing an eerie kind of atmosphere where historians would remember Back to Black could be heard streets over and the normally edgy, slightly rough Camden town enjoyed a robust smattering of preppys and tourists hoping to see a ghost.

London continued to be a revolving door of old faces and new tricks, wistful goodbyes to old friends and hellos to ones dearly missed.


I enjoyed a brief period of waking up at sunrise and going out and enjoying London before the tourists and the traffic do. Predictably this didn't last long.

A one year anniversary came and went and everything was still the same, plans just grander.