The Big Smoke

Last Monday afternoon, I conducted what will probably be my last interview for Time Out. By curious coincidence, this took place in Lisson Grove, a part of London that I unexpectedly moved to when I left the suburbs at 20 and stayed for seven years. Whenever I’m in the area, I check out my old abode – the lovely narrowboat called Dazzler that is pictured above.

Inevitably, I do so with mixed feelings. Revisiting a place that stores so many memories can be devastating because the memories do not return in a logical synapse-by-synapse fashion as they would when nudged by conventional means, but all at once, in a horrible disorientating rush. It’s like walking down the towpath and having a bucket of cold water emptied on your head.

This time was no different, although I was glad to see that Dazzler was in far better nick than last time I saw her, when she was rust-ridden, paint-peeling and looking like a dog that needed to be dealt with. In fact, at the moment, she looks...

Ida and Louise Cook appeared to outsiders to be two ordinary sisters from the London suburbs. They travelled into town every day, working hard at their lowly jobs for the civil service and coming home to their warm and supportive parents. They never expected to marry. They were part of the 'singled out' generation that suffered because thousands of young men had been killed in or traumatised by World War One.

But these two spinsters lived lives more fulfilled than many other women at the time.

Passionate and courageous spirits were hidden inside the Woolworth cardigans, tweed suits and sensible shoes. Ida poured her heart out in romantic novels that became bestsellers for Mills and Boon. And with the proceeds, the sisters carried out dangerous undercover missions in the late 1930s into the heart of Nazi Germany, rescuing dozens of Jews facing persecution and death.

Their story will be related at London's Wiener Library, the world's oldest Holocaust library, as part of a...

1 I should be tired of typing this, but it's another excellent piece from Another Nickel In The Machine, this time on author Colin Wilson, the author who briefly became the toast of the London intelligentsia in the 1960s.

2 The wonderful James Ward has stoked up unexpected interest with his proposal to form London's first Stationary Club.

3 Jason Cobb on the free newspapers beloved by London councils. Mine is called Lambeth Life, and it isn't very good.

4 Bollards of London hit the No 50 mark, with this beauty in Westminster.

5 Jessica Cargill Thompson's How To Be Unemployed blog ponders the best comfort food for the out of work. I will be trying out some of these myself in the very near future.

I am locked into an abusive relationship with the No 68 bus. It treats me abominably, I decry its existence, weep, wail and throw things at walls, but no matter how badly it behaves, still I go back for more. The 68 has found many ways to treat me shabbily. Most commonly, it will take ages to arrive and then halt, groaningly full, at the bus stop, spit out half-a-dozen passengers without letting anybody on for balance, and bugger off forthwith up Herne Hill. At other times, the driver won’t stop at all because there is already a 468 at the stop taking in passengers – even though the 468 only goes as far as Elephant and some of us are hoping to travel further than that.

Ooh, the aggravation. I stamp my little feet and make pointed comments to other people waiting at the stop, but it makes no difference other than that many of them now avoid me.

It gets worse when I get on the bus. The 68 travels through some of the worst traffic hotspots in South London – Camberwell...