ECHO 19/2/06

Early Sunday morning in the city – Deptford High Street and the Kentish girls are heading homeward in their 4x4 Ravs and their Mini Coopers after a long night out, stereos playing loud dance music; one stops to pick up a hitch-hiker, black guy carrying work tools and a hard-hat – the newspapers are laid out by the Asian couple that own the little general stores, being the only shop open at 7.30am – magpies are like different creatures here, not shy and guarded like their rural relatives, instead these here wait close perched on railings and fences almost at eye level and watch you wander past without flying away, chattering – the buildings in the area are a mix of blemished ageing edifices and, further back from the main road, London low-rise ‘50s and ‘60s flats – the older properties have a tarnished grandeur: stucco and plasterwork decorations and embossed details of leaves, wreaths, filigree curlicues and porticos now flaking; some have corner turrets capped with ornate spires or weather-vanes or copper-stained slates –

Dream of South London and the pop groups of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s – Squeeze, The Jam – I am on a playground swings with an unidentified mate; we are raucously singing ‘Going Underground’ and ‘Another Nail In My Heart’ as we swing back and forth – we're dressed as snappily as possible for the time: black stay-press trousers, white shirts and a Harrington and duffel coat; my mate - lets call him Haggis for old times sake - has a trilby on, loafers and white socks – there is huge energy and fun emanating from us - we are no older than 19 years, 20 max – a female friend passes, we've known her for ages since school and after – black jumper and scarf, ponytail, drainpipe jeans – she shouts something when we say hello, scolds me angrily then yells that she is getting divorced already (from another mate of mine) and bursts into tears – I jump down from the swings and tell her I’m sorry – she looks fit to collapse so I take her off to a Turkish café a short walk away; we sit outside and she tells me all about the arguments, the coldness, the fruitless attempts at making it work, the bullshit that my mate has been giving her while he’s been off with other girls – she cries on my 19 year old shoulder and I wonder what it’s all about this growing up lark, she’s only two months older than me and now she looks lonelier than an OAP – somewhere ‘All Around The World’ by The Jam is playing on Radio 1 –

That odd sensation of waking up in a new home – the unfamiliar noises that you isolate in the dead of night and try to work out what they are and where they are coming from – eventually they will become commonplace and thereby virtually unnoticeable, but for now they are present: the clunking of the boiler and the ensuing throbs and pops of the central heating; the shifting of floorboards as they expand or contract to temperature – the disorientation of unknown place and presence – and then where I sit and write in a room at the front with the blinds down, pinned to the wall handwritten on a faded scrap of paper is this quote:

'I said to the man who stood at the gate "Give me light that I may tread safely into the unknown," and he replied "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than the light and safer than a known way."