I seem to have a love/hate relationship with everything and everybody. One minute I love one person or one place and the next I am bored. I am exaggerating of course. I have many friends (even lovers) whom I have adored for many years; and places like Sicily or Syria where I love to go back again and again.

But I am definitely not exaggerating when I say that I both love and hate Shoreditch where I live. I love my loft of course, and the architecture of the whole area — not the horrid newly built stuff — and I really like most of the people I know there, in particular Mrs Patel who makes the best Gujarati food in town. I also love many of the new shops that have opened recently like Chiki Chic and the great places to eat like St John’s and Rochelle Canteen. But most of all, I love my almost daily walk to Waitrose through Bunhill Fields where William Blake and John Bunyan are buried.

As I walked through there this morning, I heard lovely piano music. I wondered if it was a mobile in the bag of the guy walking in front of me but he wasn’t reaching for it. Then I saw this rather handsome man (Fabio) playing the piano, right across from William Blake’s modest tomb. He was there as part of the City of London Festival. It was such a lovely surprise. Perhaps not quite in the same league as the protest against the demolition of The Foundry which I came across on Monday morning as I was walking up to the tube but just as unexpected.

Each made my day in a different way, unlike the two drunken women the other night who decided to put their car radio on full blast at 3.30 in the morning to practice their disco dance moves right on the pavement below my window. I took my revenge though. They couldn’t hear me as I shouted for them to stop making such a racket. So, I threw an egg onto the street which really startled them. They scampered with one shouting sorry, sorry and the other screaming for me to f***k off. I guess only in Shoreditch!

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I seem to have a love/hate relationship with everything and everybody. One minute I love one person or one place and the next I am bored. I am exaggerating of course. I have many friends (even lovers) whom I have adored for many years; and places like Sicily or Syria where I love to go back again and again.

But I am definitely not exaggerating when I say that I both love and hate Shoreditch where I live. I love my loft of course, and the architecture of the whole area — not the horrid newly built stuff — and I really like most of the people I know there, in particular Mrs Patel who makes the best Gujarati food in town. I also love many of the new shops that have opened recently like Chiki Chic and the great places to eat like St John’s and Rochelle Canteen. But most of all, I love my almost daily walk to Waitrose through Bunhill Fields where William Blake and John Bunyan are buried.

As I walked through there this morning, I heard lovely piano music. I wondered if it was a mobile in the bag of the guy walking in front of me but he wasn’t reaching for it. Then I saw this rather handsome man (Fabio) playing the piano, right across from William Blake’s modest tomb. He was there as part of the City of London Festival. It was such a lovely surprise. Perhaps not quite in the same league as the protest against the demolition of The Foundry which I came across on Monday morning as I was walking up to the tube but just as unexpected.

Each made my day in a different way, unlike the two drunken women the other night who decided to put their car radio on full blast at 3.30 in the morning to practice their disco dance moves right on the pavement below my window. I took my revenge though. They couldn’t hear me as I shouted for them to stop making such a racket. So, I threw an egg onto the street which really startled them. They scampered with one shouting sorry, sorry and the other screaming for me to f***k off. I guess only in Shoreditch!

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