Is This an Ordinary Day (a Walk in Camden, Unexpected Kindness, and British Good Food)?
25 Gennaio 2010
Waking up quite early in the morning last Saturday – 4 cats around are not really the best company to sleep as long as you would like to! – I made up my mind to get to Camden Lock Market and have a walk around there before meeting in the afternoon with the London Art & Culture group.
I took the overtrain and then walked down the railway station to reach the market area. Camden is a folkloristic place to say the least, where people go to exhibit themselves and tourists buy any kind of fake punk stuff to have the feeling they recall an old memory, born and developed here, who affected them not only in teenager years – fucking seductive for the ones of us who still live/feel that way.
I mixed with this human flow, and became a further stranger among them. I ended up eating a wonderful seafood paella – sitting on the pavement in front of the channel. Sun was kissing me and about other 50 winter lizards, whilst looking around and thinking about my best friend and how much I desired to have her here with me to share this.
‘Kindness’ is the password, and no matter at the moment that it might sometimes be connected with hypocrisy – althugh I didn’t notice this happening around me up now. “Anything bad that might happen to you, if you go through any crisis or feel like crying or just need to talk, call me!” – a complete unknow lovely girl from the London Art & Culture group told me this after visiting together a contemporary art exhibition last Saturday at Saatchi Gallery. Yes, this is London, something very different from the cold, cool town of our imagination. The exhibition wasn’t astonishing: much of the works was somehow already seen – it seems to be quite hard to say something really new in contemporary art! But at least I met lovely Londoners in it – Rebecca and Samina. Yes, my dear ladies: I feel a little more confident now so I’ll be able to join you also in the evening next time!
Sunday I met Brigida and her friend Ula to go to a free shop in the area of Spitalfields. But we soon ended up, with some more mates, to join a pub – one of the most messed up place I’ve ever been, with such a loud volume music you couldn’t talk, so stuffy that you can understand why swein flue spread so much here, and with such a bad and mixed taste in forniture&decoration that you don’t need to get drunk to throw up. This to tell the truth, but nervertheless the building was really lovely, and in any case there was a very nice and relaxed atmosphere – not to mention the brilliant Brigida’s friends and the funny conversations we had with them!
We finally went for dinner in a place that deserves a mention, as everybody say UK food sucks: no, it doesn’t (when you have an ‘anthropologist of food’ leading you to *highly selected* bistrots such as the St. John restaurant where you get local food cooked according to ancient recipes. What I tasted recalled no memory in my head, it was something unexpected and so good that you… ahem… can’t believe it’s British!