Conversation in the hairdressers

I'm in the hairdressers getting a cut which turns me into Anna Wintour - a sad mistake as it's obvious I won't be getting up at five every morning to get it tweaked - but I don't mind; I never mind too much, it must be the instinct to please. The stylist is a lively, gregarious girl with a lovely, unplaceable accent. The shop is empty save for the boss in the corner listening to something on earphones. Usually I'm useless at hairdressing conversation, but needs must.

Has it been a quiet day? I ask.

Well... I thinks it's normal, she says. Usually we get busy after five. You know, people coming in after work. We stay open late... Anyway, it's raining.

Rain is the bottom line. I've not known a street more prone to rain than West End Lane. It almost needs a poem written about it. Regularly I get caught out in the sort of showers that only exist otherwise for climactic scenes in Richard Curtis rom-coms.

The hair cut gets shorter and shorter. We've agreed that we'll start long and work upwards - the usual hairdressing technique, I imagine, unless you're in some upside-down universe of hair extensions. I have an underlying feeling of doubt but I don't want to be discouraging so I smile and say, keep cutting.

I remember once, she says, when I wasn't able to wash my hair for two months and it was really long and dirty. There wasn't any water. So I cut it all off. (She demonstrates with imaginary swipes of the scissors). We were living in the mountains then, you know, because of the war.

She keeps cutting. Her face is bright; if you had only the picture to go by you'd imagine she was talking about a brilliant holiday.

I'm Kosovan, she tells me in the mirror. I was twelve in the war; we stayed in the mountains for two or three months. My sister had to go down to the village to bake the bread for everybody... If the soldiers had found her, they would have made a massacre. My friend came from a village where half of the people were massacred. Sometimes I look for it on the internet: I want to know more about it, even though it is bad to keep revisiting it.

And the haircut you gave yourself? I ask. Was that what first made you want to do this job?

She laughs, reading my thoughts (what kind of a refugee haircut will I end up with?!) and No no, she says, I wanted to do this a long time before that.

Mrs Dalloway

To Waitrose, Finchley Road. We had to buy smoked salmon, darling, for a grand occasion chez nous this weekend, and only Waitrose would do.

Shops seem to be closing down all along Finchley Road - those big emptyish shops that sell slightly outre furniture - and the sleet flishing past the windows today added pathos to the miserable scene. It used to be such a grand parade of shops, I thought, though how any place without a car park could survive on the sidelines of the A41, I couldn't establish. Ah, it turns out they can't.

Waitrose was pululating with life, but then they have a subterranean car park so they're alright, Jack. Upstairs on the shop floor the clientele were fascinating. Mr Q eavesdropped like crazy as Hampstead mums compared notes on skiing hols. There was a preponderance of women, of course, it being the working day, and about half of them wore fur hats. Extraordinary people! Clearly hibernation has been a hard habit to shake off in the wilds of Hampstead.

Pie exulted in his seat in the cockpit of the trolley and kept lunging to left and right and casting flirtatious spells over the other shoppers, who were duly enchanted. I tried, meanwhile, to rein in my rampant desire to buy everything: why is it that Lent sharpens the sense for luxury? I would never normally want, in all seriousness, to buy eclairs.

Downstairs to the car, to find that a gold Rolls Royce had parked beside it. An ancient creature like one of those exiled princesses from Muriel Spark's New York phase was making her way into it at the passenger side. She had big hair, a shrunken body, gold everywhere, big gold-encrusted sunglasses, tiny gold shoes. I felt sorry for her; to be so glamourous is laughable these days, and I couldn't help being reminded of the gilded Brooke Astor's sorry end.

Peace and Angst

Today I feel "this website is dull". Bloggly ugly dull dull. That's not even my voice I'm writing in. It's like I've been possessed by another, someone who drivels and cares not from whence the words come. 'Bloggly' I ask you. I'm sure the cardinal rule of blogging is not to mention the actual act of composition (how dirty!) but I'm driven by the urge to put things artfully into words, and when it isn't working I feel hollow and appalled with the waste of effort.

For something more cheerful, why not go to the Maygrove Peace Park? It is just around the corner from (somewhat fictional) Finchmore Road. There are swings, to the delight of Pie, and a sort of assault course for grown-ups which Mr Q throws himself onto with both vim and vigour. Aarghh, there goes that voice again.

It is peaceful: there are quotations from John Lennon, Ghandi, Edmund Burke and The Mayor of Hiroshima, engraved into paving slabs. A statue of a figure in contemplation on a rock lends a cerebral air - and could be an Anthony Gormley sculpture, which would bestow kudos as well as peace.

There is an 'outdoor gym' - Camden Council have installed them in parks all over the borough. The first one we saw was in Kilburn Grange Park and was being played on by loads of kids. It was still fenced off at the time, prior to its unveiling, and the sight of tons of children eagerly doing illicit exercise brought joy to the heart.

Last week, being half term, there were lots of children in the Peace Park. On one hammock-like piece of apparatus, about eleven kids were clinging for dear life as a young man (care-worker? escaped prisoner?) swung them higher and higher. I could hardly bear to watch.

I shall now do my local borough a great service

Camden.

London is split into boroughs and Camden is mine (not just mine, I think there must be nearly a million of us) though only just: if I crossed the fabulously-named Shoot-Up Hill, I would be in Brent. Imagine that.

Camden has a big campaign, Love Camden. I think it's for the council's self-esteem, though maybe they do it for the tourists too. The first place you might see the campaign is in the groovy banners hanging from streetlamps in all of Camden's high streets. I recall that when Kilburn's banners first arrived it was at the nadir of the credit crunch and, amid the debris of a mile of empty bankrupt Pound Saver shops, there bloomed a flurry of groovy banners.

Funny, I thought.
Who are those meant for? I thought.
Not me, naturellement (I thought, for I was still conversing with I like a RastafarI).

For as a Londoner the big issue is to remember that we are all strangers and must never acknowledge the presence of the Other Londoner. Now that's another matter...

... But it turns out I've been hooked in by the Council. Their brainwashing has worked. Not only do I love Camden (lets not define 'love' Prince Charles-styley right now), I love the campaign to love it. They've got a very groovy website. Perhaps they've implanted the word groovy in my brain. Ha! PROPAGANDA...

The campaign draws attention to Camden's many shops, local and quirky, which are so much more interesting than the generic chain-stores killing the lifeblood of ye olde high street. In West Hampstead, for instance, there is a new and ghastly TESCO Metro doing its damndest to lower the tone. All is not lost, however. West Hampstead, or Wampstead as it shall be known henceforth, is still the No. 1 destination for dignified charity shopping.

The other day I bought two pairs (one magenta, one grey) of leopard-print trousers. In Cancer Research. In Wampstead. Groovy indeed.

The Daily Stuff

Today in Sainsbob's of Finchley Road, I purchased two artisan inspired (forsooth!) sourdough loaves. Little ones, but rather toothsome and satisfying. Not like the gubbins that dissolves as soon as it touches your tongue and is only "Taste the Difference" in that it tastes a fraction more palatable than the devil's own white sliced. Mr Pie is a fan of the sourdough: apparently it's much better for taking on long bum-shuffling excursions around the kitchen-slash-livingroom. But I tell you who is really a fan of the sourdough, and that's my sister Dill.

Go now, I urge you, to her website where many beautiful pictures, not to mention ideas, await you. Dill is currently blogging about her trip around Italy, funded by the Geoffrey Roberts Award, a scholarship she won because of her utterly single-minded determination to find out how to make bread properly. The more she gets into it, the more it seems to her that making good bread is the answer to all the problems of the universe. I'm inclined to agree. There are no bakers - not just 'none of note' but none whatsoever - on the Kilburn High Road. Everyone must be surviving on Mighty White and Taste the (negligible) Difference. Sometimes I long for a bready revolution.

First sight

My first glimpse of Kilburn was walking up Belsize Road towards it. We were just boyfriend and girlfriend then. It was 2006.

The first thing I saw was The Kilburn Bookshop - which has not changed its shop front at all in these four years. I can remember looking at the long stretch of shop-fronts, thinking 'Here's another piece of the London', like it was all a jigsaw puzzle and I didn't know where or when I'd see this piece again.

It still thrills me to walk that bit of Belsize Road, thinking about the past and the present overlapping - at the time, of course, I had no idea that I'd ever return to this mysterious place, Kilburn High Road, or that I'd one day be pounding the puddle-strewn streets pushing a buggy containing Mr Q's baby.

I can remember asking 'What's it like round here?' to which the reply was, 'Uhh, dunno really, don't really come here that often.'

Ha Haaa!

I just have to write because I'm mananging to do this while Mr Pie, my baby, is in the same room. How is this done? I hear you cry. Well, it turns out the secret is to put the laptop on the worksurface in the kitchen where he can't see it. He hasn't yet noticed that I've retreated from the sofa. It's only a matter of time, of course.

Why 'Kilburnia'? Why now?

It strikes me that anyone who started a blog at this late date had better have a passion they want to share, even if it's one which has newly occurred to them. I have, though it's crept up on me, a quiet obsession with Kilburn. I've resented living here, I've pined for the sunshine South of the River (once upon a time I lived in Peckham, brap brap), I've moaned at length about London in general to anyone who mistakenly asks my opinion...


But this is it. We live in Kilburn and we're not planning to move... until Mr Pie makes that a necessity. So I've made peace with the place and I'm actually finding things to like about it, things which arouse interest and even make me rhapsodial about its joys. Stop me if I'm getting too technical. Liking something, if it doesn't come naturally, is going to take some work. So this blog is that work. To quote from my favourite hippy-dippy book of inspiration, "In order to begin, we must start with where we are."

Kilburnia doesn't exist, apparently; it's more of a mythical empire like Borsetshire. Denied by estate agents and other tribes lacking in imagination, there's still a lot of evidence that Kilburn exists, even if some people get their pants in a jive trying to hide the place in 'West Hampstead Borders' or 'Greater Cricklewood'.

In my craft and sullen art

Forgive me, it's now my thirtieth year to heaven - as of today, Feb 15th, if I manage to post this quickly - but I've been unable to do anything as grown-up as settle myself at the table to face my laptop and write to my merry heart's content. Today has been taken up with trying to please a rather stroppy Mr Pie. At one point I said to him 'Please please please can you stop the griping because I just don't think I can take any more???' His response: NNNNNnnnnngggggggghhhhh.

By the way, I've found out what made him quite so grumpy all the way back from Gladstone Park (see below). He was sitting on a corkscrew. Sorry, sweet little pie.

Three go shopping (yes folks, the excitement is palpable but I thought I'd better blog something)

Willesden: twenty minutes walk away from Kilburn tube. We go up Chatsworth Road (so suburban it kills you - they've cut down the eucalyptus tree that used to enliven my walk to Willesden Green Writers Group on a Thursday evening. They = the suburbanites at number 89. Why do people live in such places? All the houses are horrible mock-tudor, built like the back ends of galleons.)

I can't help loving Willesden, though, the little bits that I know of it. The Samaritans shop is charity shopping to the max. Always something I want to buy: today a novel by Barbara Trapido, The Travelling Horn Player - bought because I loved (although it had a whiff of trash about it) her rollicking read Brother of the More Famous Jack - and a Penguins 70 by James Kelman (because I feel ill-read by him).

Mr Q bought DVDs for our projector nights-in; though Pie's arrival has meant we've not been to cinema together since, we've made up for it by watching lots of stuff projected onto our livingroom wall. Tray sophistickay.

There's a jeweller's in Willesden. We found it last year when I needed a new watch glass. The last one fell out in the snow on February 3rd '09 (deep traffic-ceasing snow in London) and was never seen again. That time the husband-and-wife team persuaded me to let them send off to Japan for some new glass. This time they've parted me from my little Lebanese gold cross while they solder a link onto it so it fits on a lovely gold chain. They are masters at the art of persuasion, clearly.

I feel slightly odd describing gold as lovely. It is expensive and I hate equating the cost of it to things which would be more worthy of money being spent on them. However, it is both a birthday present and an heirloom. God... now I sound like an aristocrat.

Lastly and oh no no no means leastly: The Willesden Bookshop. My word - and anyone else's word who's been in - it's good! We browsed for an hour (I would have said 'for hours' but Mr Pie's nappy changes and meal times dictate otherwise) and bought six or so books. Such suckers, we even fell for two books at the counter. There you go, I've pasted a link to a blog where the writer (an American I think) waxes lyrical about the selection of childrens' books on offer. In actual fact we got nothing for Pie this time: though I CANNOT WAIT for the day when he wants to have books read to him, at the moment we're still on the cardboard books with photos of animals. His favourite is a picture of a mother and baby gorilla, and he shows his appreciation by licking the page.

Oh! What'll the neighbours say? What'll the neighbours...

Poor Mr Q, what he puts up with. Not only has his wife started to blog, she's started mentioning him in it as well. Mr Q is no stranger to putting his life's wares out for all to see, he's actually rather a success at it. But, as he points out to me, he is always careful to disguise the facts. There is some wisdom in this, though perhaps also a gnat's gasp of paranoia. Still, in the interests of matrimonial harmony I had best point out a few things which Mr Q drew my attention to:

1. We don't live in a street called Finchmore. That's a fictional name.

2. Mr Q is a fictional construct. He seemed to find it reassuring when I put it to him last night that he doesn't, in fact, exist as 'Mr Q' at all.

3. No, it's not called The IRA church. That was a rumour put about by my naughty uncle and repeated (in all innocence) by Mr Q. Please don't send round the heavies.

And now, if I may be permitted to say my piece, I should just like to add that at present I think it is highly unlikely that any of this blethering is going to meet its target, should it have one. I undertake to do a bit of masking, covering of tracks etc. But really, unless you leave a comment letting me know how I'm getting on or who I've unwittingly insulted... well, I'm just going to have to carry on regardless. Now excuse me, I've pies to attend to.

The Republic of Kilburn

A lot of Irishness about in Kilburn. I'm told that back in the oldendays (the 1970s?) it was notorious for its Fenian spirit: Mr Q maintains that the pubs on the high road were hotbeds for IRA plotters, and that the toilets in these places always have extra thick walls - so that the explosives could be hidden safely within (or something along those lines.) When I try to imagine what life must have been like then in Kilburn, I get two images, both from films. Fillums, sorry.

Withnail and I: the scene where they go to the pub and Marwood has oil of petunia on his boots. There's that terrifying guy with the bugger-grips sitting alone by the door to the lavatories (you see?), brooding over his pint and giving Paul McGann the willies. 'Ponce!' he declaims apropos nothing. And, when politely asked by Withnail to repeat the accusation, 'I called him a ponce and now I'm calling you one... '

Breakfast on Pluto: having only seen this once, my memory is sketchy. I was too dazzled by Cillian Murphy and his sequins to take in much History. [Interesting fact: Cillian Murphy the Actor lives round here; we saw him at Queen's Road Farmers' Market. Once.] But anyway, there's a scene in a London nightclub and a bomb goes off... okay, the connection to Kilburn is tenuous.

So that was 70's Kilburn. What's it like today? Still Irish, I tells ya. There's a newsagent's just next to Brondesbury station which sells all sorts of orange and green papers like the Kilkenny Times and the Daily Gael. There's a guy with a shop called 'We Recycle Furniture' and he's so Irish you wouldn't believe. There's an empire of builders' merchants/suppliers called M. P. Moran where the staff are disconcertingly Irish. And for those who like to leave no stone unturned, there's church on a Sunday at Quex Road.

Last time I was in church (a.k.a. in Mr Q's opinion, The IRA church), all the men at the back got up and left before the last hymn, like it was an unspoken rule. They just got up and headed off, muttering hasty goodbyes to each other. To a man they all have that hairstyle that says '1970s Ireland' - you just know forty years have gone by and they've never once parted their hair or combed their sideburns any differently. Dem fellers.

Taking the family lobster for a walk

Today I took Mr Pie for a long, long walk to Gladstone Park - it's in a whole different borough, and when I say 'walk' I mean Pie sat all snuggly in the buggy and I pushed him the whole darned way there and back. It was bitterly cold: usually I love nose-nipping, hand-chapping days but today as I raced along homeward trying to ignore little Pie's cries (he was freezing cold) I felt bitter.

It's a peculiar mini-hell, pushing a bawling infant away from you while simultaneously gripping the buggy handlebar like a lifeline and reminding yourself, perversely, that you only made the outing for the baby's sake. Because babies need fresh air, so say the folk, and in general it's good for the sanity of their entourage too. Just sometimes it can look to passersby as if a mentalist is taking their angry pet monkey for a punishing drive in a mini open-top 4x4. Just for the hell of it.

But who cares what people think? If I gave a monkey's I'd be taking Mr Pie to a safe, warm dance 'n' sing session somewhere over in (West) Hampstead, like that agressive woman I saw in the advert for Gymboree today.

"I have very modern ideas on parenting," she said (her baby daughter sitting there in some sort of Edwardian frock) "and quite clear ideas on how I want her to develop." (I bet she's already made-up the spreadsheets for the five-year plan.) "I do lots of activities and things with her... so she'll be a confident, happy and secure person." (Death-ray smile to camera).

It brought on flashbacks of the Alpha-mum in the NCT group we attended, all L'Oreal locks and iron will. As usual, it made me feel guilty that I've never really aspired to bring Mr Pie up as any of these things. It's not that I don't wish them for him, it's just that I think it's wrong to sublimate my desire to forget my own traumatic upbringing into a career plan for the life of Pie.

Postscript:

I'd forgotten the best bit. While the police were trying to corral the local yoof, a pair of joggers appeared at the top of the road. Joggers, like cyclists, have a secret code to abide by when it comes to pavement etiquette: too quick for the pedestrian category, too slow or tiny to join the vehicles, your true home is the empty road or else the pavement when no-one is looking.

Unfortunately, everyone was looking. Lady-jogger decided that it was best to give the police incident a wide berth. She crossed to the other side of the road and ran elegantly by without fuss. Male jogger, on the other hand, ploughed straight on. He was all set to jog right through the fracas - knife, dogs, yoof, police - as if jogging on a higher plain. It was only the fact that a policeman put his arm out to stop him which made him change his route, and even then he tried to have a 'Hey, look here...' bit of argy-bargy with the obstacle in question.

I wish they'd let him run on a bit, then they'd be allowed to arrest him, no?

The hood

"This is Finchmore man," I heard our neighbour say one day, "the F-Zone." He's a scary guy, all twenty stone of him, and I'm sure that for him the street we live on is riven with danger and criminal potential.

For me it is a place where the bins are a bit of a mess, the house across the street always has some crappy piece of furniture put out on the pavement on the wrong day for bin men, and the dwellings down the Cricklewood end let the side down badly. But it's not Hackney or Crackney; neighbour or not, it's lovely and tame.

Actually, I did see a fight on our street once. We lived in the attic of the building back then, and I was drawn to the window by the noise down below. First there were couple of boys, our neighbour and a lanky fella, and their dogs. It was a summer's day and the boys were scuffing around with not much to do. The dogs - salivating, leash-straining rottweiler-types were pent up like maniacs; whining, yelping, lunging at each other when they could get close enough.

Then the police arrived. A couple of cars and four policemen, and it seemed to me there was nothing casual about the way they were reacting to two youths and their dogs shooting the breeze on a summer's day. Very heavy-handed, I thought. "Why you pickin on me?" the one guy kept on saying, "Why d'you always go for the black man? It's him that's got the knife!"

Ah, a knife. I never saw that knife, but the threat of its existence was enough to bring three more cars and a police van roaring into the road in little under a minute. More police, and the scene now stoked up like a hornet's nest. For a second it looked like they were getting things under control - the lads separated and pinned against garden walls - when one of the dogs leapt from its tethering and gashed a policeman on the arm. That was frightening.

Next thing the policeman was being bundled off for urgent treatment, and the boys were getting handcuffed. One was led to a car while the other was dragged, kicking and mouthing off, to the waiting van. Even as it drove away I could hear him ranting within, punching the metal walls.

And that was the last time I saw my neighbour. For months and months the lads down this end of the street got on with more or less standard teenage behaviour, baiting each other, standing round smoking, doing nothing much. It was only when he reappeared, all twenty stone of him with his gangsta swagger and his air of downtown Baltimore, that bravado returned and our neighbourhood got its name: the F-Zone.

Mr Pie, the local baby, is sitting on the floor whilst his parents tap slavishly at their laptop keyboards. Soon Mr Jobs (is that really his name?) will have us sending mind beams to each other via apple tablets, but until that day arrives... tapetty-tap.

Okay! I think at last I'm happy with the look of my blog and I'm all set to start blogging. But what about? Well, happily for us, here I am all of five minutes away from the glorious Kilburn High Road so I think I'll write about that, first up. That's the place, in the picture I've chosen for the header. Can you imagine the poetry of these sunlit streets in North London? Close your eyes... not now, some other time. We've got a blog to get up and running. Let's not forget that 'blog' comes from 'weblog' and you can't call something a log until it's made it to day three.
Deep breaths everyone.

A test-piece I wrote before I was ready for the blogosphere

I'm listening to Woman's Hour - I imagine that's the kind of thing you're inclined to do and admit to doing whilst blogging. The Woman's Hour drama I've found pretty entertaining this week and my my! it's only Wednesday. It's called 'How Does That Make You Feel?' and it takes the form of someone talking to their therapist, a different person each day. I absolutely love the idea of eavesdropping on a conversation such as this. And I like to know the kind of questions a therapist might ask, I like the refreshing line the therapist takes towards statements that usually raise a sympatheic mm-hm from the listener (whatever they're really thinking).