The Art of Stalking Hats

Saturday was a day for dating. Normally I try to find something for us to do that we will both enjoy and which, as Jason is not into walking aimlessly about, is no trouble to get to. However, it was the Art Car Boot Fair over by Kings Cross and I wanted to go, so tickets were duly purchased and we set off. In theory, Kings Cross is super easy to get to from the boat, but we had failed to reckon with the ongoing engineering works that plague the DLR on weekends and will do so for the whole of eternity. The DLR is a very spindly line that is mostly up in the air and I think it erodes more quickly than the other lines due to altitude and weather. Even though it is now ‘my’ line, I can’t say that I have warmed to it. It’s the least sexy of the tube lines. Nobody rushes off for an illicit liaison on the DLR.

We ended up having to go to Canning Town, in the opposite direction to where we actually wanted. Then we had to hop onto the Jubilee Line and then we had to get the Northern Line. By the time we arrived we had pretty much quartered the city and were hot, hungry and a bit fed up.

The Fair was fun. There was a good mix of people I recognised and those I had never heard of and a wide variety of stuff to look at. You could buy t-shirts and ceramics, badges and stickers, paintings and prints and even a can of Gavin Turk’s piss. I did not buy a tin of piss. I’d find it hard to get enthusiastic about anyone’s piss, no matter how it comes prepared. I’m assuming it’s not fizzy, but I’d still worry about dropping the can and drenching myself in warm urine.

I saw Jeremy Deller, who Tilly and I met at the Waterstones’ Christmas event in Piccadilly. Last time I saw him, he asked me if I had seen Michael Rosen. I appreciated the fact that he thought I was the sort of person who would know about Michael Rosen’s movements. I talked to him about his art. When he left, Tilly said she had kept quiet because she had thought he was a celebrity chef and was a bit confused. It was a triumph of miscommunication. This time I still didn’t know where Michael Rosen was, but luckily nobody asked me. Jeremy was deep into book signings and I moved on, not wanting to open that can of worms.

Rankin, the actual Rankin, was offering fifteen minute photo shoots for £400. I didn’t have my photo taken. I didn’t feel I had missed out, because I hate having my photo taken, even by celebrities who Tilly would probably have mistaken for a Scottish crime author.

I really wanted a print by Unskilled Worker, but I had neither the money nor the room, so it wasn’t too difficult to pass by. More than anything I wanted the hat of a lady who we kept crossing paths with as we wandered about. It was a lilac straw affair, sculpted to look like a cross between an old electrical conductor and something that wouldn’t look amiss on Flash Gordon’s rocket. At one stage I started to follow her in the hope it might fall off her head into my hands, but Jason grabbed me before I could be done for stalking a hat. I wouldn’t mind making the front page of the Metro for that, to be honest but Jason promised lunch and I was willing to be distracted for snacks.

We sloped off to Granary Square and went foraging in the Lower Stable Street Market food stalls for lunch. I ended up with a delicious chicken and chorizo paella. Jason had a shawarma wrap. The lady with the hat passed by as we were eating. I did not follow her, much as I wanted to. Jason had decided that we needed to get some keys cut, which seemed like a far less thrilling adventure but he made it clear that he was very much not in favour of hat stalking, so keys it was. He had identified a key cutting emporium twenty minutes walk away and Google Maps said that we could walk most of the way on the canal towpath, so we set off.

Once we had left the mayhem of Kings Cross, the canal calmed down, peopled by the usual mad exercisers and dog walkers I have come to know and love as my new tribe. A small, curly mop of a dog was menacing some wildly indifferent coots, barking himself hoarse. Everyone looked at him pityingly, including some passing geese. He was having none of it and continued to bark, bark, bark, bark until you could hear him all over the park. Even though there were no bags of dog shit, swinging like strange fruit from the bushes, the towpath still smelled of crap. I expect that 90% of towpaths are actually made of compacted dog faeces judging by the smell on a hot day. That’s an idea to conjure with.

Half way into our journey, the canal disappeared into a fierce tunnel with no footpath so we had to stagger up a siding and out onto the road again. There were signs that alleged you could follow them back to the footpath. We duly followed them into a housing estate where the signs stopped with no canal in sight. Google Maps kept trying to make us go back to the bit of the towpath that we had just been to, so we struck out using our native cunning.

A fat lot of good that was.

We huffed up a significant incline, rolling with sweat. We passed a community centre which looked extremely familiar, even though I had no idea where we were. On reflection I think I might have gone to see a play called The Jewish Trojan Women there about thirty years ago. That was a bit weird.

At the top of the road was the Joseph Grimaldi park. I know this not because I went into the park, but because the place I had chosen to cling to the railings and try to get my lungs back down into my chest cavity instead of round my uvula, had a plaque that said he was buried there. Normally this would have me running into the park for a look, in the hope that his gravestone was a carved clown car with the wheels falling off. As I was mostly dead by this point and it seemed we had miles and miles to go before we slept, I noted it down and staggered onwards.

Eventually we popped up in Chapel Market, which I have never been to before, which is weird, because it’s about three feet from Islington High Street. It was very lively. Two girls were eating sandwiches on top of a grocery shop. A bunch of pigeons were making hay with a large quantity of someone’s biryani which had landed on the floor. Stalls were selling all manner of knock off designer gear and there was a lot of teenage preening going on outside McDonalds. I noted all this while Jason got his keys cut. He was ready for home by then, but I insisted on stopping at Badiani’s in Camden Passage for gelato as a reward for our efforts. It was the best decision I made all day.

When we got home, none of the keys we had cut worked, so we did all that trekking for nothing and it turns out I would have been better served, following the woman with the hat. Although there may not have been ice cream at the end of that particular adventure.