Back To The Smoke

Sheila, the Little Ones and I arrived back home from Cornwall yesterday mid-afternoon to find Deepest Hackney doing what it does in the heat - disporting itself, especially its young men in love with their cars, their car stereos and, to the world-weary eye, themselves. I find I'm comparing this masculine style - this urban mastery performance - with that of the Cornwall surfers, another commerce-served, sun-fuelled sub-culture personified by guys working overtime on Doing Cool. Which is the more exacting, I wonder, in terms of keeping up those kinds of male appearances? The big city swagger or the wet-suited battle with the waves? Which audience is the more demanding of the performer, that found on the street or the beach? I think it's probably the former, though not by all that great a distance (there was quite a lot of car-strut in Cornwall too). The big difference was that women and children were part of the surfer scene, whereas that little junction of Downs Road, Cricketfield Road and Lower Clapton Road acquires an edgy, frontline feeling when the sun starts beating down. It was there yesterday: a foretaste of that apprehension I often feel here in the summers. Too many guns, too many knives, too many wired-up guys preoccupied with bigging themselves up. Am I just getting older or are some things turning sadder and uglier round here?

[This post also appears on my local blog, Claptonian]

Comments

[Ms Baroque]

Hi there Dave. See my post on the arrival of spring too! Hmm, I think it shows that we live in the same neighbourhood...

You never said where you were in Cornwall. It is wonderful, though, isn't it, to get away.