Number Twenty One : Go a wandrin'

I've been up in London nearly a year now, and despite my feet barely touching the ground, I've hardly had much opportunity to explore the city (besides the Southbank) properly. This is mostly due to the fact that - just as for when I was living in Brighton - the city is the LAST place you want to be at the weekend. A late night foray through the streets of London provides a smorgasbord-esque array of new sights and sounds, but is fairly inadvisable as a lone woman (as I discovered whilst stumbling through Soho not so long ago). Yet any time from Saturday morning onwards, the city becomes the domain of the tourists, "all scented and descending from their satellite towns", as Elbow say. Unless you want to metamorphasise into the stereotypical a-scowlin' and a-shovin' Londoner, it's safer to stay in with a nice cup of tea and watch the Hollyoaks omnibus. But not for me - I was up at 7 this morning, and walking over London Bridge and up through The City an hour later to pay a visit to the much recommended Columbia Road flower market. Now, the market itself is nice enough even though it was much smaller than I'd anticipated and ridiculously overpriced, but the experience of sharing the city with only the market traders, a handful of masochistic joggers and some of the undead returning from a heavy Saturday night is the kind of thing to "put a little birdhouse in your soul" *. This is the fabled un-time, evidently caught between the remnants of frenzied socialising the previous night and the still dream-wrapped beginnings of a lazy Sunday. And of course its attraction is increased furthermore by the fact that I really should have been here working on a PJ** which I've been putting off for about a month too...

*Today's post is brought to you by iTunes/Limewire/YouTube, the letters ESS and ZEE (who've had a bit of a ruccus) and the number 21.

**For those not indoctrinated to archi-speak, a PJ is what we naval gazers like to call a Private Job. If you're looking to waste more time, Norm does a great 1984 DuckSpeak analogy on PartIV: http://www.partiv.com/2006/09/27/doublethink-duckspeak/