Portrait d'une banlieue

A pleasantly sunny and unseasonably warm day today which could have been called an 'Indian Summer' had it fallen on the right side of winter. I met my friend J- up at Clapham Junction and we took a bus to Putney Bridge, where we walked out beside the river. I like Putney; my first impressions were that it bears a passing resemblance to Kingston and it certainly helps join the dots as to what lies between here and Hammersmith and how Greater London hangs together generally. I'm glad I saw this on the way in however, because the bus journey home was a protracted voyage through a bunch of housing estates, as well as those contingent little districts which I love to fetishise, like Roehampton Vale, New Malden and Tolworth Broadway.

Today was not the first time this week that I've had a chance to update my patchy, suburban pirate edition of 'The Knowledge', as I also ventured up to Lee, near Lewisham on Thursday, helping my friend G- shift all his worldly possessions from Farnham. At the moment, seismic shifts seem to be occurring in the social life that I never really considered myself as having, with these two big guns among my Surrey friends (J- and G-) both upping and heading into London in the last year; the latter, as reported, out to the south east and J- smack bang in the centre, in a flat a few feet away from Harrods.

I, too, having managed so far to hold steady out on the boundaries, look set to be sucked into the vortex once and for all in the coming months, that is, if the LSE offer is allowed to come to fruition. Apart from a few typical passing comments in my teenage years, London was never really where I saw myself but, as I have slowly come to understand (and as I have discussed with my two friends and even on the pages of this blog), there seems to be little by way of another option.

I often knock the Polytechnic but it has allowed me a fairly comfortable middle ground- one shallow spot in a swimming pool of Olympian proportions. Up until now, I have been having my Sainsburys' Basics cakes and eating them, too. I wonder how long this will be allowed to continue before I am swept out and away from this suburban equivalent of the Sargasso Sea...