Between the Sea and the Moat

Hullo Ladies and Gentleman! My apologies for a week spent away from the Notes, but I have been busy at The Inquisition - why, on Tuesday we even had to administer a severe probing to the head of one of the Parties in the Commons, so you can imagine I have been very busy exercising my Inquisitorial talents.

Now I am resting for the weekend, however, I can tell the tale of my adventures in the area of Shoreditch, so named because it lies between the bank of the Thames river and the largest waste disposal area in Europe, which used to be called "the Ditch". I was dispatched there by the Delightful Miss E, who rather fancies it might be the spot for us to purchase a Mansion or two (as I have mentioned before, Willesden Gardens is merely temporary digs).

Here are some of my impressions of Shoreditch, which is a passing strange spot. Some of my comments are footnoted, and will require attention at the bottom of the page [0].

1. the whole area is covered in pigeon poo. This strange circumstance has come about because a rare pigeon lives around the area, and some paper pusher at Tower Hamlets Borough has decided to follow European Environmental regulation to the letter, so has introduced Extraordinary Pro-Pigeon policies. For example they employ a lot of the lower classes as rat killers (it is said that rats kill the chicks of this rare pigeon), and the good Townsfolk are required to have pigeon roosts on the eaves of their homes (if they have proper homes). So the automobiles, wagons, omnibusses and pavements of Shoreditch abound with the leavings of this blighted bird, preventing outdoor dining, the cultivating of gardens, or any kind of casual promenading with one's mistress. In fact, one is likely to see even on a fine day like today the occasional young lady, dashing down the street in her finest frippery, protecting her bonnet with a cheap umbrella encrusted in the stuff - and on every street corner there is one of these vile rat-faced rat-killer chaps, making money during the day offering to wipe the mess off a Gentleman's suit. Quite shocking! They're suicidal blighters too [1], swooping one's head all the time. The worst of it is, this blasted rare pigeon is visually quite indistinguishable from the pesky ones, so they can't enact any pigeon control measures. In fact, I discovered immediately upon entering the region that Hawking has been banned from the region by European Edict since 1999. How is a gentleman to get on?

2. As perhaps our readers are aware, Brick Lane's famous Indian restaurants (see below) are quite a tourist attraction. Because of this, some jobsworth at the council has introduced special laws on the sorts of food that can be served in the Shoreditch region - specifically any food that is not "British" or "Indian" gets a kind of levy applied to it, and quite a vicious one, or so one of the obliging rascals loitering outside a chip shop was happy to tell me in between cursing and spitting. So even though the Shoreditch area is apparently full of the very brightest and finest Dandies in Europe, dressed in the latest and most daring cut in suit, with slanty hair and outlandish monocles, there are very few cafes within which they can practice their Bohemian ways, since coffee is Italian [2]. So in Bright Young Shoreditch, there are no bohemian cafes of any sort for Bright Young Things, and no gardens for cafes or pubs due to the aforementioned pigeon problem. Not quite what I expected!

3. Most of the Help in the Indian restaurants are from our new Eastern Principalities [3], and a lot of the willowy, extremely blond Eastern European young ladies are expected to wear saris by their bosses (who I rather suspect like looking at pale Polish pre-teen bellies). This looks really rather strange, and rather turns one off one's idlis.

4. Shoreditch has recently been acclaimed as quite a "happening", "cool" area of London [6] which means that, just as night follows day, so there must be a lot of street "art" scattered around the Borough. Unfortunately, in trying to live up to the expectations of the outlandish New World language with which it has been branded ("cool"! I mean really!) much of this art is truly really bad. I saw a young Mohammedan Lady, looking most oriental and exotic in full hijab, leaning on a yellow banana-shaped bollard which was actually carved in the exact likeness - I do not tell a lie - of a whopping todger, with a clutch - yes, a clutch - of stunted testicles at the base that doubled as a bicycle rack! It was one of a line of 6 erected (if you will pardon the pun) outside a sari shop. I didn't have the heart to tell the woman what was being done to her by the faceless, unseen sculptor of these obscenities. There were lots of other strange "installations" too - a line of fake dog droppings [7] on some shop's window, pictures of street urchins with new-fangled electrocephalic viewing devices for eyes etc. It was like Newtown in Sydney during the Walking the Streets festival, if that festival were arrantly "avant garde" as opposed to just face-numbingly boring.

5. There isn't actually much housing in the Shoreditch area, which rather let down the whole point of my journey. I had been promised by various of my colleagues and acquaintances here in London that Shoreditch has much "affordable" housing for young Couples of Means, while also being somewhat more interesting than much of the surrounding area. More fool me for listening to these knaves, damn their eyes! The reason housing in such a fashionable area is cheap is that the whole area is actually built on reclaimed wasteland and rubbish dumps, most of which now resemble nothing more than wind-blasted heaths. And on all these heaths, houses have been fashioned from what are now euphimistically called "mobile homes", i.e. gypsy caravans without so much as even the benefit of colourful paint [8]. So should one wander even one street East of Brick Lane - as one must if one is, as I was, looking at the houses rather than the restaurants - one finds oneself looking down over the heath, at these serried ranks of completely identical and rather tatty looking gypsy caravans ("mobile homes"), all occupied by the same Bright Young Things one can see in the Lane. So in the rows between the "mobile homes" are these dashing dandies with slanty hair and the latest black skinny hose, hanging their skimpy underthings and uni-klo [10] shirts out to dry on tiny clothes-drying racks on the street. A most alarming and confusing sight!

6. Brick Lane of course is not a lane, but a kind of converted elevated coach road (according to local signs, an "overpass"), and many of the "quality Indian restaurants" for which Brick Lane and Shoreditch are famous are actually either prefabricated buildings on, or squalid little converted sheds under the raised road. If one looks at a map one can see that it is an old section of road linking Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street (I think, from memory). Of course the Overpass is no longer used for coaches, which go on more modern nearby roads, but the overall effect is not quite the tourist attraction I had in mind.

These queer local rules and the completely unexpected nature of the buildings here combined to make me think it is hardly suitable for a gentleman of my background and character. What will our sophisticated European friends say when they come to stay in our mansion, but instead find us squatting outside a tiny gypsy caravan on a wind-blasted old rubbish heap, in a suburb with only one line of actual buildings, all of which are squalid Indian restaurants run by Eastern European girls in Saris, who look down on us from the rear of their restaurants from under pigeon-poo smeared umbrellas while they smoke cheap cigarettes and argue with their friends in Polish? It just will not do. Instead I think I will go and look at Greenwich next weekend, as I have heard the Museum of Ice Cream has been converted into quite affordable Mews.

Footnotes are below:

[0] some of my footnotes are also footnoted, which may lead to confusion of numbers if one does not pay attention.

[1] The pigeons, not the lower classes - well, I suppose those lads are too, if one considers how they performed at Waterloo, in the Zulu campaign, and more recently in Manchester City

[2] I've no doubt in fact that if they could the Council would levy a tax on being Bohemian, since it's a suspiciously Eastern European sounding practice (and jolly dirty too)

[3] Yes! I know, these Eastern European countries claim to be "part of Europe", but we know that under the new treaty - which it seems is falling apart under the influence of the upstart Irish [4] - "part of Europe" really means "a principality of France, Germany and the UK", or so I read in the Daily Mail, and I am a man devoted to Plain English, so I shall choose to refer to our - and I don't mean this in a condescending manner - lesser cousins from the East as being from the "Eastern Principalities" [5].

[4] and isn't it time we sorted them out (again)?

[5] At least until next month, since it seems the revocation of the Treaty of Europe is going to cause the entire fabric of space and time to unravel - at least in France - and so soon the Eastern Principalities shall become independent for a month or two, until they are swallowed up by the Russian Bear, after which I shall refer to them as the "Western Principalities".

[6] - heaven knows why they use this terrible language from the New World. Why can't they just say something sensible, like "it's the cat's meow" or "a terribly diverting grove" and be done with it? Isn't good, sensible English language good enough for our modern social commentators?

[7] apparently, according to the artist, presented "in juxtaposition with the omnipresent leavings of the Rare Blighted Pigeon, just as life's precious moments are in continuous juxtaposition with occasional moments of special joy". After this there was some poppycock about "the Abject as profound contradiction and erudition of the joyful and sacred" regarding this so-called juxtaposition. My god! I do declare! One could not make this stuff up!

[8] As we know, since the Daily Mail [9] and the other tabloids for the lower classes ran their campaigns against gypsies and travellers in the 90s, all those worthy members of the British Underclass have strangely disappeared, and their caravans been put on the market very cheaply. Even my own Father lives in one, down on his ancestral lands in Devon. Oh the shame!!!

[9] Incidentally, it is from the Daily Mail that I learnt some of the things about Shoreditch and Tower Hamlets Borough. In case you could not tell.

[10] For those not sure what this means, uni-klo is a company in Japan which manufactures cheap and very unattractive kimonos, which has opened many shops in London and is doing a roaring trade selling "cool" clothing for Londoners. One can see the many horrors being visited upon us by this adjective from the New World, can one not?

As a final note, I was inspired to this style of footnoting within an article of this sort by the blogging efforts of one Daniel Davies (aka dsquared), whose post on Budweiser beer at Crooked Timber is a truly splendid example of this style of posting at work. Full credit where it is due! (But not actual links, since I am lazy).