london : just exactly heaven

what's london like : any sunday moring 2003 : ricebag spent a year crossing the cement paving on the suburban streets of brixton and dulwich ... where poor doesn't care what colour you are and art is the scrawl you sing ... music pours from mouths and ears and there is a beat is a beat is a beat ... sitting in a boozed up smoked out basement listening to Jazz by men called M and Tomorrow ... grey council flats and limp plastic curtains ... tattered dolls in windows and pre-teen babies on the 7am bus-to-school swigging coke and chowing mars bars ... high school gals with their t--long legs on the 2pm bus with their own too-soon babies in their new new blue roller strollers ... everywhere talon salons and hair-straightening salons and black people talking black and white people talking back ... caribbean mamas with silver hair calling me love and making me sad ... my london wasn't chelsea and it wasn't kings road, sometimes it was glamorous but most of the time it was just the best people-watching place ever ... strolling down the park on chilly sundowns, frisbee with the flatties on dulwich plain, our regular sunday pub lunch at the coach n' horses, starting at noon summing up at midnight ... stumbling home at 2am with the boys and their planet kebabs filling my first floor domain with the reek of garlic sauce and chips luv ... i do miss the london pub ... where a beer and a mate is some kind of art and in that city they are all artists

Ricebag had a Pimlico boyfriend who was born with his morning toast home-made decrusted buttered and toy-soldiered, served by a liveried waiter who said "yessah" and stepped back from the silver service. The Pimlico Boy, whom we shall call Ed, as that is his name, lives in a 6 storey pre-war mansion that grandmother "left" him and while I was never good around people with Money (my assumptions, not theirs), he was excellent around me who had none. Lovely Ed who plays football and polo and hands out havannas after brunch and drives a silver BMW convertible, deserves a platinum-spoon horsey blonde with a double-barrelled title, whose riding boots have the nicks of fox-hunting burrs and whose parents had a gentle, sophisticated air somewhere on the right side of his Eton entourage. I'll still never know what those months were all about but Ed picked me. And he was right and I was wrong and that is all I have to say about that.

Why think on London?? Just started reading "Vile Bodies" by Evelyn Waugh (really love Ev - esp "Brideshead Revisitied") and this bit just tickled:

"What's London like, Fortitude? I never been there but once."

"Just exactly heaven. Shops and all."

"What are the men like, Fortitude?"

"Well they ain't much to look at, not after the shops. But they has their uses."