Coal Black Mornings by Brett Anderson

Author:Brett Anderson [Anderson, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781408710470
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2018-03-01T04:30:00+00:00

6

My time wafting around Bloomsbury had rekindled my love for the capital. It all started many years before in childhood when during the odd weekend or half-term my family would jump on the train up to Victoria and then on to the Circle Line to South Kensington in order to ‘visit the museums’. The rattle and drone of tube stations, and that peculiar dusty, diesel smell still gives me a slight frisson, and when I felt trapped in the cage of my dreary town as a kid I would often just walk to Haywards Heath railway station to stand on the platform and wistfully look northwards up the tracks trying to glimpse some of the lustre and promise beyond. There’s something about the size of London I find comforting: the sense of anonymity, the wealth, the power, the possibility. All the love and poison indeed.

I was accepted on a Town Planning course at UCL, and with Mat and a motley collection of other students moved into a large, crumbling Victorian house on Wilberforce Road in Finsbury Park. In order to minimise rent the whole house was crammed with beds, so the only communal space was the mildewy, laminated MDF kitchen where we would gather and stand around chatting and chomping on toast. It opened out on to a small, scruffy, weed-strewn garden where no one ever went, not even in summer. It was basically a dumping ground crowded with old fridges and pots of dried-up paint and a tangle of broken furniture. The only warmth in the house came from those rattly old Calor-gas heating units with heavy orange cylinders which we would have to haul up and down the stairs. Their cosy, gassy smell still reminds me of those days. Mat’s, Ade’s and my rooms were right at the top of the house, so we effectively lived in our own separate little enclave away from the other sub-tribes that had inevitably sprung up through the forces of the house geopolitics. Below us, in the master bedroom, there was a kind of alpha-male Goth called Colin and his henchman Dan, who were both also at LSE but who didn’t really bother climbing up the stairs very often, so Mat, Ade and I would often spend the evening together in the same giggly, fuddled haze of dope and chatter and music that we had in Ridgmount Gardens. I remember we would sit on the beds in our coats, huddled around the heater, smoking and cracking pistachio nuts while we listened to records like Felt’s ‘Space Blues’ or ‘Solid State Soul’ by Raymonde, the carpet of shells scattering and spreading across the lino.

Anyone who knows London will understand that living in Finsbury Park is very different from living in Fitzrovia, but I loved the scruffy streets and the kebab houses and the shops full of cheap plastic tat that were precursors to the Pound stores. I’ve always been inspired by the arse-end of the city and tried to look for stories and vignettes in the bustle and majesty of the everyday.

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