Camden! I was talking to someone the other week about how when you’re in your early teens, Camden Market seems like the most amazing place in the world - remember the sensory overload when you turned right out of the tube station and headed up to the market? It felt kind of dangerous. Edgy. And there were goths. In fact, I’m starting to feel that the Brick Lane area is becoming a bit like it; maybe it’s the influx of an element of society I recently overheard being described as “all those crustie Euros”.

Of course, there still remain a few good reasons to go to NW1: the Jazz Cafe (though I try and boycott it on principle owing to their greedy ‘booking fee’), Primrose Hill - the hill not the terribly precious conurbation bit - and there’s a pub I quite like on Delancy Street, a road name I’ve long been a sucker for; though having also been to Delancy Street in NYC, while I appreciate Lorenz Hart hasn’t felt any balmy breezes blow there or indeed anywhere else recently, it sure ain’t fancy any more. On that theme I did go and have a Chinese meal on Mott Street and while I wish I could say it was incomparable, I just remember the menu being somewhat tricky to navigate.

Anyway, I didn’t go to Camden this weekend, but I did go to the Camden Town Group exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s great. And isn’t all ambiguous if disconcerting scenes of the artists’ charladies in drab bedrooms, though there were plenty of them. Indeed, appropriately enough considering last week’s blog, there were also several of Walter Sickert’s famous if somewhat murky paintings of the clientele and the stars of London’s music halls.

Outside of his paintings Sickert is probably best known today because of the American crime writer Patricia Cornwall’s theory (and book) about him being Jack the Ripper. I read that book - for sale in the Tate shop oddly enough - very quickly while on holiday in Paris and it is worth a look though I was somewhat underwhelmed by her evidence. I think it is safe to say that she really, really wants it to be true.

I’m going to see Arsenal play Blackburn Rovers now. Not in Miami, Hong Kong or Tokyo either. Not yet.

Oh, and as *insert ‘first signs of spring’ cliché here* I found myself humming the old standard ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most’ this morning on the way to work; a lovely song whoever does it (though Mark Murphy does it the bestest) and particularly loved by me for the inspired couplet which rhymes “College girls are writing sonnets” with “but I’m up on the shelf with last year’s Easter bonnets”.
More next week.