Today’s STP piece isn’t a story, isn’t even a real long-form piece. It’s partly a rant brought on by just the visceral, bowel-loosening disgust I feel when I see this sort of advert for a small flat costing nearly £800K. In Green Lanes for fuck’s sake. Or indeed anywhere to be frank and honest and open about my hatreds here, but this particular area has always been such a cosmopolitan one, another periphery refuge that had escaped at least some of the gentrification that’s been blighting the rest of the capital and this country. Or so I’d naively kind of hoped. And then later, this horror of a 4-story flat towering over little old me whilst standing on the platform at Finsbury Park station. Burn them all down; guillotine the oligarchs. Give their resources to us, the poor and disenfranchised. And then stop this whole system.
I’ve been writing about this part of London town as a background for some of the scenes & characters for the recent pieces in The Other Place and as I hadn’t been back to Haringey for quite a few years, needed to see what remained unchanged of what I remembered & what was now unrecognisable. I ate at a Turkish placed called Gökyüzü as one recommended by Jonathan Nunn in a recent Eater guide; he wasn’t wrong. A cold lamb head soup yoğurtlu paça çorbası as Jonathan described it, “a yin/yang”of yoghurt and oily Aleppo peppered hot oil floating on the top, the pieces of lamb, bubbling and hiding underneath the surface. Next, arnavut ciğeri, some cubed and diced lambs’ livers gently and lightly fried in flour along with a crisp, fresh, sharp parsley and onion salad and finally, a piede, again with lamb, the thin, snappy crust glistening with the butter brushed onto it when hot from the oven.
I’d got there early; almost opening time, hungry you see? Of course you do. So I got to get seated at one of the window seats; the great street and people watching location that I spent the next 120 minutes or so gazing through, making notes whilst that is, when I wasn’t otherwise occupied by the food or the pieces I’m writing. Or the book I was reading. I don’t need a lunch companion you see, indeed, sometimes it’s a real blessing to be Mr One Top, Mr Singleton Man. On the opposite side of the the road was a sign for Nicholas the printer just above one for a butchers (not, as it happens located in the same shop); with an equally interesting — almost palimpsest — street sign above it. Not MY Printer’s Devil this time.
I’d started out visiting to see the excellent “Chinese and British” exhibition at the British Library; that, the food and the sunshine that appeared as I walked back to Turnpike Lane, all combined to keep me comparatively sane.
