Money and that

I've just returned for a lunchtime amble around the southern end of the Isle of Dogs.  It's a lovely day in London, so I thought I'd take the air for an hour and try and slough off the morning's bureaucratic ennui.

It's a funny pee-of-the-double-u down there.  It's really isolated, being at the foot of a peninsular, although it's only half a mile from the centre of Greenwich.  The housing is really mixed too - some rough-as-fcuk old-school docklands terraces, interspersed with gentrified town houses here and there.  It's really nice when you catch it right: quiet, personable and different - very unlike London.

I walked past a few houses that were for sale as I pottered.  One was particularly splendid - a solid Victorian mid-terrace, well-kept and in a nice street close to the DLR.  So taken by it was I that I jotted the details down.  This, it turns out, was a mistake.  It's up for a million quid, way beyond my ken.  Discovering you can't afford to live in an area that 60 months ago you wouldn't have kennelled you dog in is bruising to the ego.  And it does prompt the question: who the fcuk lives there?

Full-time Shirk

This post is an addendum to the last one; it's also a lesson from history.  In last month's post, I rattled on a some length about my need diligently to practice playing the guitar.  The band I'm in have a gig looming, and I'm all over the place.

You'll be pleased to hear I did buckle down.  Sadly the buckle honeymoon was short.  I got bored and simply stopped.  If I'm brutally honest, this lack of application is the template for my entire life.  I get bored extremely easily.  But perhaps I'm being too hard on myself?  Perhaps I just work better under deadline pressure?  Yeah, let's go with that.

My employers (peace be upon them) are moving.  The lease on our current gaff is up come the end of the year.  We're upping sticks and moving to central London, and I for one can't wait.  We're currently based in Canary Wharf.  CW is loathsome, all mouth and trousers.  I hate it.  Nothing is what it appears to be.  The architects and interior designers do their best, but they're fooling no-one.  The oldest building in the entire complex can't be 30 years old.  This means they all by necessity fall into one of two aesthetic categories:

1. Emotion-free cack-handed (ahem) modernism.  Think a branch of Boots that sells cocktails and fajitas instead of plasters and dunkies.

2. Faux-olde worlde (shudders) charm.  Picture an enormous good-quality static caravan with MDF inglenook fireplaces and easy-wipe Chesterfields.

CW also has its own Lego police force.  It's private land, you see, so one has no inherent rights when promenading up and down its boulevards.  The tension between this and the fact that CW tries its damnest to look like any other public space in the capital occasionally causes problems.  Once, some years ago, I returned to my bike en route home to discover it had a puncture.  I set about fixing it on the "street" and was quickly approached by a uniformed member of CW's security team.  His opening gambit "Is everything all right, sir?" struck me as bizarre.  Has is one to answer that?  The best I could manage was.  "Fine...[pointing] just fixing a puncture."  That seemed to reassure him and he sloped off, presumably to compile a report on the incident.  Our "chat" also gave his sniffer cocker spaniel ample time to check my pockets for TNT or some such.

Strange place.  I can't help thinking it must have been jollier when full of violent, hairy dockers and brasses.