Burgers in Shoreditch

That first week of the seven-day Summer 2012 I had a yen for a burger. Also I was fed up of scuttling from the office to somewhere in Spitalfields for take-out and scuttling back, which is all you can do when it's cold and/or wet. So I resolved to try some places in Shoreditch and Hoxton Square. So here they are...

First, the Red Dog Saloon, Hoxton Square. French fries, blue cheese, good slaw.

Next, The Book Club, Leonard Street. Cheese and bacon, thick chips, yum.

Third, The Byron, Hoxton Square - I was keeping it simple that day. Still yum.

Fourth, Ruby Cafe, Charlotte Road. Again, I was keeping it simple, and the beef was excellent.

Fifth. The Strongroom, Curtain Road. Simple, decent and honest.

Sixth, and yes, this isn't a burger, but fish and chips at Jamies on Bishopsgate. By then summer was over, it was pouring with rain and this was as far as I was prepared to scuttle.

All the burgers were good, solid, well-cooked and well-presented. All the places were interesting and had friendly, efficient staff. All the prices are about the same: say around £8-£14 depending on the exact combination. The Strongroom was cheapest and the Red Dog Saloon the most expensive. Jamie's wasn't as expensive as you might think - I've paid more at the fish-and-chip shop in Covent Garden, and waited longer to be served. 

Street Art in Shoreditch

I work less than a quarter of a mile from the heart of Shoreditch. The City of London is alleged to be a world centre of financial expertise: I'm dubious about the whole idea that anyone can be any good at investment these days. Shoreditch / Spitalfields / Bethnal Green / Hoxton is an undoubted centre, if not the centre, of street art in the world. And it's on my doorstep.

We had summer a couple of weeks ago, and the artists were out. One guy spent a week doing this amazing piece.  Click for details - it's worth it.

Late May London Moments

Window cleaners on Holborn at half-past seven in the morning; lovin' the new interior of Caffe Nero; chalk graffiti on a utilities cabinet  on Commercial Street; art under the arches at Waterloo; the City from Waterloo Bridge, full zoom and pixellated; that Matalan three girls poster, I want the one on the right; recruiters in Caffe Nero at eight in the morning. After a few polite bits of small talk, she said in as loud and boisterous a manner as it looks "so, we'd like to talk about your plans and thoughts for the future, and when we can get you to leave GSK". Ba-boom!

Escape Artist in the Covent Garden Piazza

Street performers are as much, if not more, part of Covent Garden than Tuttons. I was wandering through the other evening with an ice-cream from Thornton's and a new wallet from Fossil when I chanced across this guy. I stayed to watch, and very entertaining it was as well. Before starting on the escape act, he had done some juggling with the diabolo and three knives. Since I can barely hold one knife to eat without it falling on the floor, juggling three is pretty neat trick. Then he did the escape trick.

The trick is to take a deep breath and expand your body as the assistants are putting on the chain and rope. When it's time to escape, let all the air out and shrink yourself. That's why the chains can be made to fall off. I'm not sure about the straight-jacket, but I think it's an acquired trick with a shoulder-movement. Doesn't make it any the less impressive.

On Finishing In Search of Lost Time

A few weeks ago I finished reading the final volume of In Search of Lost Time. The Penguin edition is in six volumes: The Way By Swann's; In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower; The Guermantes Way; Sodom and Gomorrah; The Prisoner and The Fugitive; Finding Time Again. Full disclosure: I gave up about a third of the way through The Prisoner and The Fugitive because the endless  obsessive details and worryings over Albertine's faithfulness and doings started to feel repetitive after one hundred and fifty pages. Otherwise, I have slogged through the lot, even if reading The Guermantes Way felt like hitting my head with a hammer at times. I'm glad I did.

I have memories of trying to read Scott Moncrieff's translation when at university and suffering badly. I find the Penguin translations effortlessly readable and without the give-away signs that it was written to be "accessible". If you're a reader, you know you have to read Proust. You don't have to do it now, and some knowledge of the history of the time will help, or the younger amongst you will be wondering why he doesn't just track Albertine's smartphone with Footprints.

You don't review Proust, and more than you review Beethoven or Aristotle. Along with Musil's Man Without Qualities, Joyce's Ulysses, James's Late Novels (The Wings of A Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl), In Search of Lost Time is canonical. I glanced through it about ten years ago one Saturday morning in a Waterstones and bounced right off it: the subject matter seemed to me frivolous and ultra-refined. One day I just bought the Penguin edition volumes and put them on the shelf to read later, and three years ago or so, I was ready to read it.

Everyone starts with The Way by Swann's and very few get any further: it's actually quite a tough read in places. Instead, start with In The Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom, which should remind you of being a teenager and has the most laugh-out-loud moments, as well as some of the most memorable images and episodes. I suspect I will appreciate The Guermantes Way more the second time around, but I'm not at all sure I'm going to rush back to Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust's look at the homosexual and lesbian scene amongst the aristocracy. By today's standards, even in comparison to The Well of Loneliness (one of many books I've read and almost completely forgotten: I remember it as being emotionally but not physically explicit), his treatment seems tame, but he thought it was scandelous at the time.    

You need to know who these people are he's talking about, so you need to read the others before reading Finding Time Again. And if you're under fifty, don't bother reading it at all, because you won't have the life experience to make sense of it. I would not have understood what on earth he was talking about ten years ago, but oh boy do I now. The second half is a prefect description of the sense of change, falling and increasing irrelevance that one feels as one's hair gets greyer: Proust's narrator returns to Parisian society after a long period in a sanatorium and finds it full of people he's never heard of, who would never have been allowed past the door when he climbed his way through the window - the narrator is a social climber. It's a meditation on the exact ways his High Society has now become marginal and a memory of itself: mod out the details and it's about your life, but only if you are the narrator's age. As I get older, I get further from the rest of the world, which is full of strangers I don't want to do with, and what means more to me are the memories. Proust felt the same way. Reading that second half of felt like having some of myself explained to me.

The whole project is about the importance re-living one's life through memory. Important, that is, if you're a reflective, distracted, intellectual who wasn't too engaged with the practicalities of the world. Which is me. The point about his madeleine is that it brought the events back to him with a richness that they didn't have at the time. Only through memory can he understand what happened and see it for what it was. This isn't the "we need to live more in the moment, and pay attention to our lives" cliche: Proust's point is that it's exactly "living in the moment" that prevents us from understanding its significance and depth. That's what memory is for: it's only when we have time to remember an event fully that we can see what it really was.

This is why everyone looks at photographs, and older people write private memoires. This is what we have left of our lives. Proust didn't need a day job and was a great writer, so his memoire will have to stand for all those of us who do and aren't.

"Just Be Stevie Nicks" - Or Not

Tavi Gevinson, the world's favourite pixie fashion blogger, gave a talk to TEDxTeen called "Still Figuring It Out" about the ways that teens like her were, well, still figuring out life, maturity and the whole schmeer. 

Her closing piece of advice is: "Just Be Stevie Nicks". Why? She says: "My favourite thing about her, other than, like, everything, is that she has always been unapologetically present on stage, and unapologetic about her flaws and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings and she makes you listen to them and think about them".

You mean, the Stevie Nicks who had four abortions and was consequently sterile? Who took prescription medication and had a severe bloat-out for a decade? Who has never held down a long-term relationship in her life? Who was a coke-head? Who broke up one of the most successful rock bands in history by having an affair with another of the members? (Though I grant it takes two to tango and Mick Fleetwood was tango-ing a lot then.) Who learned so much about the 12-Step program from her stay at Betty Ford that she let a psychiatrist prescribe downers for her because she couldn't do what hundreds of thousands can, which is work the program?

Apparently so.

Ms Gevinson, like all teenage girls, has the feeling that she's going to screw up at various points in her life, and wants to be loved and accepted afterwards. Which is understandable, if in a rather have-your-cake-and-eat-it manner. Stevie Nicks screwed up her personal life royally, did just pretty much whatever she pleased, gave not a fig for convention and, you know, a responsible and mature attitude to life, forced others to take her as she was or leave her, and, here's the punch line, got away with it. That's the attraction.

Freud got it wrong: what women want is easy to understand. They want to shout, scream, threaten, slap faces, break plates, smash windows, sell the new car for $10 in a blaze of revenge, walk out on the kids for a coke-dealing biker, steal money from the guy's wallet while he's asleep, disappoint and upset everyone... and for all of it to be forgotten tomorrow. Women want a clean slate for themselves and a detailed inventory for everyone else except a few close buddies. 

Which seems to have been Stevie Nicks' life. Except it wasn't. The reality is that when it mattered, Stevie Nicks delivered the albums and the concert sales. If she hadn't, the fans would have deserted her and the industry would have stopped taking her agent's calls. She could deliver like that by dint of a strong work ethic and a formidable and consistent talent. At that level of both, people will go some distance to overlook the tantrums, because they know you will deliver when it matters. The emotional incontinence is treated as a cost of doing business with the talent. Absent the talent, absent the tolerance. Most women are absent the talent: they can no more "just be Stevie Nicks" than most boys can "just be Eric Clapton". Because most boys are absent the talent as well.

"Just be Stevie Nicks" sounds cute. It's a nice soundbite, and the future will be full of soundbites from Ms Gevinson. I can't help feeling that her inner hard-working Jewish girl is really identifying with the incredibly talented Stevie Nicks who screwed up, showed up and did the work - but saying that would be nowhere near as audience-friendly as all that stuff about flaws, and she knew it. Unlike the Misses Gevinson and Nicks, we-the-audience don't have the talent, the drive and the sheer damn determination, and we'd rather not be reminded of it.

Third Space vs Third Place

Read the definition of the Third Space carefully. Now read the discussion of Ray Oldenberg's original idea . A gym in the middle of London with monthly membership of over £110 isn't "free or inexpensive" and conversation is not the main activity. But then nowhere in the UK is conversation the main activity - at least the kind of civic conversation that Oldenberg and others would have in mind. The English don't do civic conversation, because the English don't do civic, civil or citizen. Mostly they talk crap about football or polite nothings about anything else. If you ever had a substantive conversation with an English person, they were one of those people who were born in the wrong country.

The ad could only have been written by a single person from a family home they couldn't wait to leave and whose first job was totally boring and pointless. Or am I the only person who gets an implication is that work and home are places that sometimes you have to be when you don't want to, with people you'd rather not know, doing stuff you'd rather not be doing. 

The point is, of course, that those things are true. The point of work is that you get paid, so  you can pay income taxes, sales taxes, local taxes, pension, insurance, train fare, water, gas and electric, medical, dental, work clothes and shoes, gym subscription, food... did I leave anything out? Oh, right. Fun. If you have money left for that. So that's what work is for. Please don't tell me that what you get paid for is your passion, though actually, if you look up what "passion" means, you may find out that it doesn't mean in English what it means in HR-drone speak.

Home is for? I mean, if there are other people there? And sometimes you don't want them to be there and sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do when you're there? So if you live on your own, you're really missing a trick if you don't take the trouble to make your place somewhere you want to be. Or it becomes just the place where you sleep and have breakfast, which for a lot of single people in cities is pretty much what it is.

Maybe the ad writer has a point. The civic Third Place envisaged by Oldenberg is an "aspiration" (management-speak for "unrealistic goal, standard or idea"), not a reality. Maybe in a couple of places in Spain and France, but nowhere in Northern and Eastern Europe, or anywhere in the Anglo-sphere. Maybe the closest we can get is this commoditised Third Space, where we're temporarily free of the compulsory stuff.