A trip to the electric islands
A poetic-prose celebration of my local greasy spoon – The Electric Cafe. A classic of its kind. This first appeared in slightly different form within my feature on Black Bough Poetry’s Silver Branch series.
A poetic-prose celebration of my local greasy spoon – The Electric Cafe. A classic of its kind. This first appeared in slightly different form within my feature on Black Bough Poetry’s Silver Branch series.
It doesn’t take much to make a familiar place unfamiliar. A change in the weather – rain, bright sunshine, or more dramatically, snowfall or fog can all do it. Smells too – who hasn’t found themselves aware of sniffing more consciously than normal when drains are blocked, or there’s a whiff of barbecue, bonfire or worse in the air?
And then of course there are a place’s distinctive sounds.
You can tell a lot about a place from the local shops.
Especially on Norwood Road.
Yesterday, the St Jude storm sent me on something of a dérive within a small area of Lambeth. There were no trains due to the winds, so instead of standing on Tulse Hill’s platform 1, I made for Brixton, but wanting to avoid the main roads, headed up a road I’d never walked along before.