Being snowed out of Farnham I decided to spend the weekend in London rather than put my life in the hands of south west trains in trying to get home and back again. I have always wanted to have a look around Mayfair – being only one of two areas Eve says she could live in in the uk – so I decided to spend the morning exploring New Bond Street and round about. The mansion flat buildings are lovely and no doubt house stately and enormous apartments. But New Bond Street was remarkably unappealing – lots of very expensive shops full of diamonds and designers in which they deliberately try and intimidate the customer by having wanky looking doormen. Over half the shops were shut – despite being a Saturday – and those that were open were distinctly unwelcoming and uninteresting. It struck me as a place purely about demonstrating boring wealth – no heart. Flat and dead. Not at all what I was expecting – nothing that made me long to buy it (apart from a passionfruit fondant but I was unable to attract the shopgirl’s attention).
It has of course been incredibly cold and there was an uncanny lack of toilets. Bond Street station had several signs aggressively announcing “No Toilets. Nearest at Marble Arch.” (several streets away). Even Starbucks didn’t have one! I thought that was illegal!
I traversed Burlington Arcade and couldn’t help but note that though there were at least 100 people in the arcade I didn’t see a single person actually enter a shop. I studied one of these customer deprived enterprises with interest. It sold luggage – all shiny and new but in an old fashioned design of hard bags with straps – no wheels, no extendable handles. I then studied the Burly boy guarding the entrance – top hat-ed and tailed, and black. What a ridiculous, artificial and vaguely offensive nostalgia is being pickled here.
