A couple of years ago I entered an ill-advised relationship with a woman a lot younger than myself. And for a while I was willing to ignore her screeching accent, her refusal to eat anything that didn’t come wrapped in plastic and her inability to pronounce the letter ‘t’ – particularly the one in my first name - because she was exceptionally pretty and she was half my age.
Earlier today I took a stroll down to the local supermarket. It’s on the High Road, the north-south road that crosses the east-west of White Hart Lane. WHL isn’t bad; it’s typically 1930s council stock, interspersed with more recent tiny Barratt Home-style apartments that have 80%-sized furniture in the show flats. It has the Cemetary, which is a thing of beauty and a valued spot of quiet contemplation. Just before it ends, it changes name for a few hundred yards and becomes Creighton Road – the Lane itself skulks off on its own like a scolded dog for a bit – which is where the saintly Bill Nicholson used to live.
Tottenham High Road itself is quite ugly. There’s no avoiding the fact, it simply is. It’s a range of chicken shops and bookies; one or two employment agencies full of shaven-headed eastern Europeans willing to work all night for bare minimum wage in an Osterley industrial shed packing your Christmas doo-dahs; a couple of those barber shops full of black guys in their twenties talking into a Bluetooth headset and texting with one hand, there’s a plasma high up on one wall, and nobody seems to be either cutting hair or having their hair cut.
You know those conversations you can have with strangers, where five seconds in, you realise it’s a mistake but you can’t back out? I had one of those. Some woman with a voice like a parrot being waterboarded sprang out of Love Lane – a name very much deceptive – and asked me if I lived round here. I said yes. It was a mistake.
“Where’s Norfumberlun Par Crow? Dah nair?” I told her Northumberland Park Road wasn’t down there, it was in the opposite direction, end of the road, turn left, first right.
“See? Smar’arse! Iss dah natway! Yorso futtin clevva you wen ron way! Arsow!”
She shouted all of this over the road to where a rat-faced fella in a Helly Hansen waterproof was skulking along trying to look inconspicuous. He shouted something back. I felt a lurching in the old lunch when I fell in that she was going to walk alongside me. Which she did, in her giant sheepskin boots and her denim leggings and her coat made from the pelts of the finest cat.
“See, I doe noe roun ear, I doen liveer, I live down Edmonton, I live Edmonton Green.”
Which pretty much explained it. My former girlie lived that way too. Like I said, nice girl but not what you’d call gifted with the social graces. And if this sounds snobbish, then very well, it’s snobbish. If Stoke Newington, our neighbour to the south, can look down on us, then we have every right to do the same to Edmonton. It’s what it’s there for.
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