I´ve come down to London for the weekend, and I´m reading St Augustine´s confessions. I recently picked up this completely beautiful Penguin edition for three quid:
Fantastic stuff: give me chastity and continence… but not yet. I am quite convinced that the Confessions have been read so keenly by Catholics throughout the ages who, in their devout study, have been most thorough in searching out all the most wicked bits of the narrative, book-marking them and reading them most carefully. This is the only sure way to avoid wickedness.
London is about the same as ever, except now it´s Spring. The old council estate in Highbury is noisy, aggressive, and the newspapers are full of stories of children stabbing each other. People everywhere are drinking cheap lager from cans.
Saturday night me and Boris went to one of those parties where you have to ring a mobile number on the night, that gives you directions to a “secret” location. By the time we´d finished drinking cheap lager in Soho, we managed to ring the number and find our way to a sqatted factory in the industrial part of Camden. It was about 4am, and the party was in full swing: usual mix of freaks and confused-looking teenagers on too much drugs, good music, very tough jungle of a flavour only London seems able to produce, with rasta MCs providing impossibly fast and complicated vocal overlays… overall, totally manic.
I went up to a desk that advertised balloons filled with nitrous oxide. See, this is where St Augustine comes into it. I asked at the desk if they had any beer for sale, and the girl told me, completely straight-faced: “no, sorry, we´ve only got cocaine”. I thought that was quite funny, and worth repeating in this blog.
As it happened, we decided that their thriving trade in dubious white powders didn´t need our help. Instead, we did manage to find a source of cans of cheap lager, which took us through quite nicely to about 8 in the morning.
See? St Augustine would have loved it. As he says in Book VI, part 7: “Lord… you were setting me before my own eyes so I could see how sordid I was, how deformed and squalid, how tainted with ulcers and sores.”
With that kind of hard-core misanthropic bitterness, St Augustine could only have been a Londoner.
St Augustine contemplates another line of coke
Post a Comment