I went to King’s Cross to meet an old school friend I never see anymore, Nicola. She lives in St Albans and the trains from there don’t run to the main terminus, but to the Thameslink station a short walk away, amongst the filth of the locale. King’s Cross is really a horrid part of London and should be bulldozed. It’s amazing that it’s theoretically prime real estate, it’s soon to be the gateway to Europe because of the Channel Tunnel link running to St Pancras, therefore also the first thing visitors from the continent will see, and it’s grim. It’s held together with exhaust and dog crap, the roads are unnavigatable to pedestrians – the centre of every carriageway having a metal fence running down it to restrict people crossing – and even the major high street shops give the area a wide berth. There’s no Boots or anything like that.
I don’t know how this came to be, and it’s odd to think that this ugly, unliveable Kings Cross is actually the vastly cleaned up area that the council have spent millions on. But what’s the expression; you can’t shine a shite. It used to be full of prostitutes, which – okay – might not be the sign of a great area but at least it had a purpose then. It really doesn’t now, aside from the notorious cheap, and therefore notorious, hotels. And it’s a shame because the houses and streets are actually nice, if they weren’t all in disrepair. You’ve got the two stations in King’s Cross and St Pancras, with Euston a short hop up the road, and so you’d think it would be sparkling with expensive terraces but no, it’s a grimy mess. I wish I was in charge of the world, I’d change King’s Cross. That is what I would do with my powers. Poverty, world peace, they could all wait. Kings’ Cross needs some urgent attention.
There are no pubs either, and seriously, this really is a barometer of an area, don’t you find? If there’s not a decent pub, it says everything. I needed to find somewhere in order to meet Nicola, but getting increasingly desperate at the compete lack of pubs that weren’t boarded up, I looked into one called The Scotsman and found it to have a stripper standing on a plywood stage for the entertainment of five or so men. At noon. Who gets to 10am, 11am, and says “I think I could do with going out for a pint and a stripper. Not a nice, attractive stripper. Some harridan. Yes, that’s how I shall spend my lunch hour.�
Eventually I found a half-decent place a short walk away and we met there. I’ve not seen Nicola in about two years, which is insane. She’s now a police officer with the Met. I can’t get my head around this, but then let’s not forget I struggle to get my head around the idea of people I’ve know for a long time growing up at all, getting older, working, having children, buying a house, any of that stuff. I’d be flabbergasted if Nicola worked in a garden centre. But no, it is amazing that someone I knew at school is a policewoman and I couldn’t resist asking lots of stupid, childish questions.
I was trying to ask proper questions, and maybe I did manage that eventually, but at first it really was ‘do you get to turn the siren on’ and ‘have you ever hit anyone with your baton’ and stuff like that. Because I treat my life as a bit of a game I find it amazing that someone my age (that I know, I recognise that people aged 17 are doing stuff like this) is really putting herself out there in dangerous situations and literally rolling with the punches. She dismisses it all, and talking to a police officer out of uniform, when they’re just being casual, is interesting because she’ll say things like “really, it’s all an act. We don’t really know what we’re doing.� I love getting little insights.
We talked about the office politics side of the job, which is interesting. You don’t get to see that unless you watch The Bill, which is all lies apparently. I felt ridiculously grown up.
Leaving Kings Cross and heading north towards Angel we wandered aimlessly, stopping off at pubs en route. Apparently my teenage sweetheart is now married. A couple of long lost friends have kids, or are on their second husbands. Wow, I really don’t know if I’m the luckiest person alive to have somehow sidestepped all that, or if I’m actively denying myself an adulthood. See, it’s alright when you’re 29. Ten years is nothing, what about when I’m 39? There a fine line, in your late thirties I think, between flamboyant bachelordom and stunted patheticness. I have to be careful with that.
Nicola made her way back to the train station around five and left me in Camden, where eventually we’d migrated. I found a cocktail bar on Inverness Street and got chatting to a glamorous South African art dealer called Angelique Harper. We got off to a good start when she asked about my day, which I said was fine, and she said hers had been terrible because she was having a ‘font problem’. She’s been having problems with the font for her company logo. Boy, ain’t that a nightmare? I love trivial things like fonts so that was a good start, and I thought things were going pretty swimmingly (she’d suggested I go back to her house) but then she had one too many martinis and I just did the gentlemanly thing and poured her into a taxi at the end of the night before going back to Wade and Aria’s. She was pretty incoherent, it would have been completely wrong to take her up on her offer of a drink at hers. Actually, now I think about it, it probably would have been a good idea. Oh well there you go, sometimes misjudgements can work out to be for the best, this might have been one of those times.
- Post to:
del.icio.us
Digg
Newsvine
Nowpublic
Reddit
« Previous | Home | Next »