Seventy One

Day Seventy-One:  European Memories Series #3

The Two Places I Consider Moving to in London Every Day of My Life:  Camden Passage, Notting Hill

The first time I found myself in Camden Passage I seriously thought I was lost.  It would not be the first time I’d think those thoughts while in Angel, because after shopping for a few hours alone early December I ended up lost while parousing my favourite part of the King’s Cross area.  There was the Jack Wills where most of the employee’s were really good at their job and decided to chat me up everytime.  There was the Breakfast Club, where if you choose to eat on the patio after mid November they bring you coffee and blankets, bringing a syrup-deprived Canadian home for an hour and a half.  The Loops store with knitting needles and yarn from Peru.  The pubs, the vintage shops, the cobblestones, and the general atmosphere of absolute perfection.

It was yuppie central, if we went for breakfast on a Sunday morning and waited in line there were young couples with buggies and a group of friends, maybe a book club with new mommies, it seemed incredibly cosy as a community, one thing that I am driven towards is cosy-ness in any given place.  The apartments wver the shops, there was a school around the corner, and it was beautiful.  I miss, I miss thinking that I could live there, and start my own practise or just generally live in a loft above some Mom and Pop Ice Cream parlour and have a book club on Sunday mornings and be in London at all.  I miss it because I felt like I fit there, on a Monday afternoon in a dress and converse shoes with my headphones in shopping for yarn, stopping for a coffee and flirting with the employee’s.  In general, my best memories of Camden Passage have this gravitational pull that is more than cosmic, more than a “need,” it is unavoidable.  The day I land back in London I’ll be back in Camden Passage, drinking a coffee from the red egg mug and cosy at last.

The other place I consider moving to wuld be Notting Hill.  How quaint, considering I would venture to say it is the most expensive place to live in the entire city, but it is just so god damn beautiful.  Portobello Road market may not be the best market in the world but It it was so…frig, again, cosy.  The houses around it, the schools, how close it is to the parks, the churches, the leaves (Autumn, my favourite) the roads, the Second Cup witht eh cute barista’s and the Jack Wills whose employee’s never fail to make me feel good about myself every time I go in.  I seriously regret never buying anything.

There was this one moment about a few weeks before Christmas I was down at the market alone on the tube alone and I was walking up to the vintage store with the feminist radio that I would warm up in, and I was walking on the edge of a curb because there wasn’t really a sidewalk but I didn’t want to walk on the road and there was a fence and there were women (Southern Americans to be exact) walking on the street giggling,.  I was walking, and listening, and it reminded me of Ceara and how good of friends we are and how I wish one day we could walk down that road together and I could show her everything I saw that day and more.  I want to live in the white apartment with the bright red door and the small yard and the milk bottles that I was walking beside at the time.

I wish I took more pictures in Notting Hill.  I wish I could’ve told those two ladies how lucky they are, and how amazing the market was, and how the day was beautiful and life is so beautiful.  I wish I was on that curb right now that is probably littered with little drifts of snow.  I  remember that the sun was in my eyes and I got really lost one day and I found the dress booth at the market that I really loved and cried because I had found it.  I never realise how scary it would be to not find my way home if I did actually get really lost one day.

But I always find my way home. 

I miss London, did I mention that?

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