London's Finest

Score. I got the front desk to give me a normal coffee cup. It isn’t the bowl o’ coffee I’m used to, but it does the job. Now I’m not running down the squeaky stairs every five minutes for two hours.

People really are as friendly as everyone told me they would be. People just sit and start conversations - whether I want them to or not. Most of the time it’s been wonderfully enlightening, but every once in a while it’s exhausting. The English do have the gift of the gab. There is a porch outside the hotel that backs to the park, and the view is perfect for sitting and reading (or people-watching). I like the slow pace I’m able to have here...there aren’t 10 million things that need doing and the most important thing I have to decide is which corner shop to buy my apples. I love watching the children in their uniforms skipping their way to school in the mornings...the old men with canes ambling through the park on their daily constitutional...fathers pushing their babies in strollers gently down the walkway.... When someone breaks in it can be jarring. I shouldn’t complain, though. I’ve met some very interesting people.

Marilyn is from a small town outside of Liverpool. She lives in a double room above a kebab shop on the High Street and has to work two jobs to survive. She moved to London three years ago to follow her boyfriend, who promptly dropped her a few weeks after she arrived. She doesn’t seem to hold a grudge, and she laughs when she talks about how silly the man she thought she would marry is. It’s a bitter laugh, though, and she follows it with talk about her uncertain future. She is working for the bills and the bars, all the while knowing that the prettiness of her youth is slowly draining away.

David’s happy exterior belies a tortured soul underneath. His wife kicked him out last month and won’t let him see his 5-month-old son by himself. He has a problem with the drink, he says. He knows it’s bad, but he can’t get the health care needed to go into a detox program. They say he doesn’t drink enough to warrant a stamp on the paperwork - not enough to ruin his life quickly, but enough to destroy it slowly. He’s in the pub as soon as it opens every day at noon, drinking his unemployment check away. But like a true alcoholic, he tells me that his drinking isn’t as bad as it used to be and that he’ll cut down...eventually. He turns the conversation to the homeless of London, and behind his eyes I see the fear and destiny that one day he will join their ranks.

Bernard (Beh-naahd) is the self-appointed concierge of Kilburn. Bernard knows everyone and every place. After an initial interrogation of who I am and why I am here, he spends his remaining pint relating bus routes (“noombehr sixteen booss’ll tehk ya raight inta Loondahn”) and safety measures (“Cahrfool oof teh knaifes. Pehple’ll cootcha soon as look atcha”). He stops in his litany only for the numerous people who stop for a moment to say, “You all right then?” which seems to be the accepted form of greeting to a fellow Londoner.

The common denominator in all the people I have met is their almost zealous desire to live in America. To them, America is the Promised Land, where jobs are numerous and rent is cheap. They talk of friends who visited years ago with only a hundred pounds in their pockets. They talk of equality and fairness in the Land of Opportunity, of businesses built from nothing and a government that takes care of its people. Their eyes mist over as they talk about how successful their lives would be if only they could get to America.

I haven’t had the heart to kill their dreams.

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Worst take away - Yumchi Chinese in a Box

Price of the laundrette - 4 pounds 20 ( = $8.40)

Dogs in the park at this moment - 12

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