Abandoned Flowers, 2007
Escaping Portobello
As he steps onto the Central Line a package brushes the canvas of The Nu-Rave Vagrant’s shoe. His fluorescent laces draw attention to the wrapping and, for once, the tube carriage follows his gaze, not just his face. _________________ The Nu-Rave Vagrant itches the matted, spiky hair of his beard, considering the discarded flowers with a Ketamine authority. ______________________ This close, in a certain light, one might swear a tear had rolled down his cheek, blending with the crusty blotches of desiccated glow-stick _________________ but the light is anything but certain. _________________ I turn my attention inward, escaping Portobello.
The early alarm and the hangover drone now seem a blissful treat compared to the crush of bastard tourists I braced, all made of backpacks and elbows and fuck off. Portobello Road on a Saturday. ______ What was I thinking? Getting wrapped up in the strange celebrity that surrounds a street and conjures this weekly pilgrimage of the wallet. It’s exactly why you avoid Oxford Street during the sales season, but at least that place is built for it: One always gets the impression that Portobello happened more by accident and just got frozen in time, like some quaint honey-trap, escaped only by scurrying under the Westway into the comparative safety of Ladbroke Grove.
The Westway should bisect the area, and in some places it does, but here it acts as some communal, cohesive centre, where Jamaican patties are served side-by-side with upmarket bangers and mash. ________ Any other day of the week, coming from this direction, Portobello becomes a mix of grotty vegetation, multi-coloured brickwork, ganja-seeping shopfronts and such basslines and beats that the very tarmac grooves.
But not on a Saturday. _________ On a Saturday it is such a heaving, rotten mess of tat and footfall that I would take Brent fucking Cross over it before making such a stupid error again.
© Matthew Sheret, 2008
