Seriously

For my allowed exercise today I walked around the West End. Oxford street empty on a Saturday afternoon. I mean EMPTY. No one there but me and the occasional bus with no passengers. Businesses shut, customers self isolating and social distancing. It was uncomfortably strange. I don’t know what I was expecting.

I used to work in Eastcastle street. It runs parallel to the east end of Oxford Street on it’s north-side. That area between Eastcastle street and Mortimer Street was the heart of London’s fashion world, not retail but design studios, sample machinists, sample rooms, pleaters, fabric warehouses, button and trim wholesalers. No one outside the industry knew of it. Invisible until you worked there. I loved it. On a Saturday it was dead. If we were busy and I had to work the weekend, I used to enjoy, turning out of the crazy hubbub of the busiest shopping street in Europe onto the silent streets of a secret part of central London. Now it’s full of retail shops and bars, not a secret anymore and not central to making fashion happen.

Today that past, Saturday silence lay over Oxford Street too and it felt so wrong.

Turing down another empty street I came across a food store with no queue outside. I felt compelled to enter. We didn’t actually need anything food wise but with no other retail opportunities and no people needing me to get a fucking move on, I food browsed. I bought chocolates, French onion soup and an assortment of edible nonsense. It made me feel more normal.

I hope that a recognisable normal returns, and soon. I might not go to the West End again until I can enjoy complaining about how busy, smelly and crazy it is. I’m going to go back to keeping my walks local and complaining about the johnson. On the subject of the johnson, have you heard that there’s a campaign to get people to clap in support of him at a given time. #clapforboris. I wouldn’t bother if I were you, he’s had plenty of clap….I imagine.

To end on a positive, here’s the statue at the end of our street, he always looks pleased to have the company of pigeons.

Bless.