Bucket

Bucket lists used to be all the thing. Now they aren’t anything. That’s probably why I still have one. I have never wanted to swim with dolphins or go to Disneyland. Mostly I just want to be left alone with a big mug of tea and a book.

There are other, less mundane things on my list, but like any successful list, it’s important to have things you can actually do on them. If I only want to play drums for the Beatles, it just becomes a smouldering reminder of shattered dreams and that’s a terrible thing to have a list of.

One of the low hanging fruit on my list was to go to Columbia Road Flower Market and actually buy flowers. I’ve been to the market plenty of times before, it’s just I’ve never been in a position where I could successfully get flowers home. Until today.

The market is another liminal space. Sort of near Brick Lane, quite near Liverpool Street, a bit Hoxton, Shoreditch adjacent, not far from Bethnal Green and it only happens on Sundays. Blink and you miss it. It’s along a stretch of low, brown Victorian terraces, edged about by tower blocks and maisonettes in startling shades of brick with those ‘modern’ municipal touches that are so dated they feel older than the terraces. Red, wiggly metal Eighties sign edging for you? Coming right up.

The market opens at eight and we were there for half past. I was in no mood for crowds today and it gets mighty busy. Nothing marks out a hipster more than a balcony full of pot plants and the ability to buy a soy chai latte whilst browsing for yucca and the market is slap bang in the hipster heartland. We took the car because Jason has a nobbled ankle, and even whilst reversing into a parking spot I could see a man in a neckerchief and dungarees struggling down the road with an olive tree.

I once had the great good fortune to go to Columbia Road in peak peony season. It was intense. A sea of pouting buds in every shade of pink. Peonies are so sexual. Everything about them from the buds to the fully unfurled flowers are pure porn. It makes me laugh that they are mostly portrayed as chintzy when you know a peony would be a jolly whore with too much rouge, chasing you down the street in her chemise. Quite right too. It’s why I love them. The peonies are nearly done this year so I didn’t hold out much hope, but there were a few stalls selling the last odds and ends and I got those and a great fistful of hydrangea heads.

There are always good things to see at the market. There was a woman carrying a luxe, velvety grey cat in a rucksack on her front. The cat seemed to be enjoying itself. The woman seemed indifferent. There was a chap begging at the street corner who had a huge, handsome tabby cat with a bandana round its neck sitting on a cushion with him. I believe this cat owned the entire market. He acted as if he did.

There was a great road marking that said: ‘Sunday Toilets Only’, which I enjoyed. The illicit thrill of nipping there for a wee on a Friday. Nobody tells me when and where to urinate sir.

Running parallel to the flower market was a road with some antique and food stalls. An old Printers & Stationers there is now a restaurant. The printers’ sign is above a door with a long, thin window running its length. In the middle of the window, and completely at odds with the tasteful, Kinfolk style interior of the rest of the restaurant is a squashed, papier mache head of what can best be described as an old man vampire. He looked a bit like Bert and Ernie gone old and evil.

Opposite the antique stalls is a wall of heavily graffiti scrawled corrugated iron. We watched as a young man approached it with a set of spanners, unscrewed an iron panel and proceeded to create an oyster stall out of about two feet of pavement and a brick wall.

There was a gorgeous woman with olive skin, a slash of red lipstick and tousled Nigella Lawson style hair wearing something black and stylish that on me would look like a badly opened envelope but on her looked like pure sex. She had a small child with her whose name was Enzo. Enzo was the most determinedly naughty child I have seen in a long while. He attempted to steal a chair from outside a coffee shop. When that didn’t work he tried to break into a van. After that he did something unspeakable in a hedge. The woman seemed entirely worn down by the whole affair and would watch him with a world of weariness in her eyes. Occasionally she would murmur ‘Enzo’ before giving up and walking on. Just speaking was a draining experience. The most impressive thing about Enzo was that he did all his nefarious deeds in total silence, presumably to preserve his energy for all the awfulness he needed to get done.

I saw an incredibly small and tawdry looking shop called ‘World of Hat’ that delighted me. One of my hobbies is collecting good shop names and I am partial to any shop that has the word ‘world’ in it, with the notable exception of PC World. I find the ambition of the word ‘world’ in the shop title, coupled with the usually small and weirdly stocked emporium it describes to be wonderfully incongruous. A sort of triumph of hope over experience. I also saw what can only be described as a derelict tenement that Enzo will probably end up torturing someone in when he hits puberty badged up as: ‘Wonders of London Ltd.’

Driving through London is a tantalising experience. You catch glimpses of things as you whizz by, trying to remember what you can for when you can take your time, go back and walk. The only time you get to slow down sufficiently for proper observing is at traffic lights and in jams. Stuck at one set of lights I was tickled to see that someone had been having a bit of a street party. It was too upmarket for me. Rather than a smashed bottle, they had left a snapped wineglass precariously balanced on the edge of a wall. No two litre bottles of Londis cider in this neck of the woods.

We were home by half eleven and I spent a good twenty minutes faffing about arranging flowers in jugs and wandering around the boat with them while Jason and Oscar ignored me to get on with the seemingly never ending job of poking cables into and under things. At one stage, Jason accidentally turned off the power supply to the water pump with his bum while scrabbling about under the decking and it took an hour and a patiently amused neighbour to figure out what had happened. I expect that will get talked about on a WhatsApp group later.