Strolling up the Lea and then through Stamford Hill, Stoke Newington, Dalston and downtown Hackney with the cracking dawn, most happy to discover in an African independent church the organisation called Kumon, which offers an alternative English and maths programme for small children. Later, most unhappy to discover that this is not an Ebonics-style misspelling of “Come on” but the name of the Japanese capitalist profiting from our failure.
Other highlights: a profusely bearded Bengali streetsweeper apparently trying to shake down a Turkish café proprietor to ensure the forecourt stayed really clean, the latter refusing to be disturbed from his immaculately prepared breakfast; a fox-cat High Noon; Gibson Gardens, which one had never noticed before; happy pigeons dining on polychrome vomit; activity possibly corroborating my doubts re the Rose Hotel; immensely obese African ladies and emaciated white fashionistas awaiting the opening of the Princess May Car Boot with their great suitcases, one half expecting some multiculti Noah-mobile to draw up and transport them to a better take on Paradise; a traffic warden parked in a bus lane and pissing himself as two very wobbly colleagues attempt to extract money from an off-licence’s cash machine, the flashing lights turned on to warn every approaching bus; Hackney Kill The Jews Coalition posters on nightclub doorways as well as on the mosque; drunks everywhere – unloved men in parks with their Red Bull and vodka, the skeletal woman who drinks and sleeps and coughs and vomits in doorways on the high road, a corpulent Somali man in a greatcoat, Jack Daniels in hand, slaloming between Turkish delivery trolleys; a veritable herd of cow hooves and tripe in Ridley Road and the besuited Ghanian, bovine bits well-bagged, dropping discreetly into his cute little BMW convertible, well in time for Saturday lunch.
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