Another pleasant weekend day as the Gentleman Friend and I took a bus down to St John’s Wood (a cut-rate Westbourne Grove) and then got onto the canal, walking eastwards through Regent’s Park (warthogs), Camden (tourists and dope smokers) and finally King’s Cross. The development here was looking fabulous. The first time I was in the area it was still a miserable junkie ridden dive; by the time we left for Malaysia Central St Martin’s had moved in and Granary Square and the steps leading down to the canal had opened. Now much of it is open, including flats ringed by Edwardian gasometers, streets lined with food stalls, and an outdoor cinema showing A Wizard of Oz. I bought a pistachio cannoli and a cold masala chai, and we settled on bean bags to watch about 20 minutes of the film. I can’t have seen it more than a couple of times but I feel that all the dialogue is memorised.
We left the canal at Barnsbury and walked through Islington to the Ottolenghi to collect some cakes for later. A stop at the Japanese print shop where a well informed young woman told us a bit about what to look out for in woodblocks, and chatted about Yoshitoshi etc. A fishmonger provided us with some crab and oysters to take home for dinner, and we were stopped on the way by a young man offering to sell us some steak. He and his comrade walked behind us for a bit, one saying ‘We can take turns carrying this bag, bruv,’ and the other replying ‘You’re a lazy fuck bruv.’ I wonder if we were only offered the steak because he was tired of carrying it.
After dinner we watched Mulholland Drive. I had watched it at university, quite soon after its release, but in a particularly unreceptive mood, feeling disengaged and angry and unable to enjoy anything much. I enjoyed it more this time around, could appreciate its artistry, but Lynch will never be one of my favourite directors.