"london's brilliant parade" - elvis costello

"the lions and the tigers in regents park couldn't pay their way and now they're not the only ones"
"the lovely diorama is really part of the drama"
"i'm having the time of my life or something quite like it when i'm walking out and about in london's brilliant parade"



arriving too early for a jazz band rehearsal i decided to have a wander. in and out of brick lane past the boasts and come-ons of the curry house pimps, up and down the side roads with their road signs i can't understand, onto the outskirts of the mildly intimidating estate with its small clusters of bored youth, into the ethnic grocers where the smells instantly bring back memories of amman foods. i'm a south london boy and i wouldn't want it any other way, but i'm glad the east end is there.


my dad is a big elvis costello fan and i grew up with his albums on in the background and his songs part of my understanding of music - not this track so much, obviously since it wasn't released til the mid 90s. i still struggle not to rip him off too much as a songwriter as i find myself always wanting to slip a nice pun, triple rhyme or clever piece of wordplay into the middle of the second verse. and importantly he was one of the main bonds i had with glyn that i didnt really have with anyone else - part of the sharedness of where we were trying to come from and where we were trying to go.

"goodbye yellow brick road" - elton john

"when are you gonna come down? when are you going to land?"

i love south london. theres a part of me that worries that that might be a shameful thing to admit, but to me there has never been a question mark over it as a place to live. i carry its accent on my voice and its fingerprint in my brain. if only there were more tube stations it would be perfect. no, actually thats rubbish - its actually a bit crap, though i am convinced that pretty much everywhere else is at least as crap. its a homely sort of crap. you forgive its many flaws because it seems to hold you comfortingly and apologetically in its figurative embrace. i'm not trying to come over all "under the bridge" but lets face it, its better than la.

but despite this affinity, when it came to moving back to the smoke after those years of living away from it there was more than a flutter of trepidation. maybe this was because moving away had symbolised a break for freedom - freedom from parental control, freedom from becoming a local stereotype, freedom from all the haunting memories of the negativity of high school experience. like the baby pterodactyl in those mawkish "land before time" movies or the sheep in the monty python sketch, maybe i hadn't been flying so much as falling, plummeting with my eyes shut to convince myself that the wind rushing past my ears was the result of glorious forward momentum, destined to crash land back where i started while the face of gravity mocks me for failing to avoid my destiny of failure.

or maybe theres a sort of success in finally being able to admit:
i love south london