I live in Cricklewood. There, I said it.
My local pub is called the Cricklewood. To enter The Cricklewood (The Cricklewood. Does it really deserve the definite article?) is to enter a world of consolidated loans, bad debt and crap teeth. This a no-frills pub for proper drinkers, who watch normal telly on the big screen when the football's done. This is a boozer's boozer. Not surprisingly, there are never many women in the Cricklewood, and on some nights none at all. How different this would look in another part of town! But it doesn't come any less gay than in here, all these Irishmen staggering into the toilet, pissed out of their heads, wearing the same clothes their own fathers would have worn to church. I can not imagine these men with wives or lives outside of these clothes or this pub.

Philip Roth
"There once was this photographer from New York. 'Smile' she always said. 'Smile!' I couldn't stand her or the whole phenomenon. Why smile into a camera? It makes no human sense. So I got rid of her and the smile."

Too much information
Yesterday on the train, the driver introduced himself to us by name. I have never come across this before, although by the time I arrived in West Hampstead, I'd already forgotten what it was (Ralph? Raymond?). Today, I perform my filthiest look, and it still isn’t nearly filthy enough to get the girl standing next to me to turn her iPod down (a similarly noisy male, on the other hand, I am much too chicken shit to even glance towards). Between filthy looks, I look instead at someone's Daily Mail, which reveals that P&O has been sold to “The Arabs”. Have I missed something here? The Arabs? Are they, like, a band? Maybe I’m being too touchy here. But I feel much the same way when football commentators talk about The Greeks instead of Greece. Is it just me, or do I detect a little colonial hauteur in such turns of phrase? But I digress. The next station is King’s Cross. Change here for a blow job and a gram of smack.