tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20734334.post-31838322367977104412008-02-17T10:49:00.014Z2008-02-19T11:49:50.841ZI drove up to Camden market this morning to see what damage last weekend's fire had caused. I'd heard about it on the news at the time but at that stage they weren't sure how much damage had been done. Since then I've been out of London mostly, and the only news I saw was Sky news one time, with one very solemn report from India saying, 'The famous Camden Market in London has been reduced to ashes.' So I thought I'd better go up and have a look for myself. <br /><br />I was expecting the whole place to be charcoal, all those places I used to go to when I was living in my car to be gone — but it's nothing like that. The Hawley Arms pub is destroyed, and there's half a row of boarded-up shops, and some top windows in the flats above blown in, and all of the stalls down the side, on the pub side of the canal, are gone. But it must have been very contained. The rest of the market, and the rest of Camden looks pretty much as it always has done, as buzzy and grubby and raunchy and edgy as it ever was when I was sleeping in the car and used to go down there to the Stables market across the way at the end of days I could afford to, for the cartons of hot chinese food being sold off cheaply for a pound. If anything, the soot and smoke stains and burnt-out shops, and the feint, lingering smell of woodsmoke mixed into more recent smoke from joss sticks and hashish layered with the stench of rancid canal water and new leather from the tiny squeeezed-together S&M shops and car fumes and sweat and cheap, fried street food, just add to the atmosphere.<br /><br />If the wind had been in the other direction that night though, it would have been a very different story...really would have been hell down there. It would have taken something that random. As it is with lives.<br /><br />I went to Andrew's dad's funeral on Wednesday, very sad.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/20734334-3183832236797710441?l=wanderingscribe.blogspot.com'/></div>WanderingScribehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10144517552286428103noreply@blogger.com67