It's as if we'd never been away. Here I am again walking the streets of East London with two dogs. As I return home I am reassured by the sight of the high level white roof of an elderly vehicle. This time of course it's Billy instead of Scamper and the Land Rover instead of the VW Camper Van but still eerily similar.
I'll definitely miss the power showers in Field View (the new shower one could kindly describe as being like standing in a mist) and I will miss the quality of the local envirnoment. If you ignore our neighbours everything was very pretty and the local towns like Ware and Hertford were clean and smart. These streets have that inner city grime that displeases me although Billy is quite keen to find the occaisional discarded fast food wrapper.
There is life here though. I had great fun in the local 'international' supermarket. At any time of night and day I can now select from twenty different types of Haloumi cheese, three hundred brands of olives and a selection of fruits and vegetables delivered daily by NASA from some distant star system. The main target audience seems to be Turkish but they have evolved to keep with the times and most of the signs are in English and Polish.
I was put off when we arrived to move in by a group of hooded yoofs walking down the middle of the road. But now I am starting to notice some of the more positive groups in this melting pot - as I walk round the streets with B&P I am amused by the signs people have put up. "No Junk Mail and No God Squad" was a favourite and I made a mental note to commision a similar one. In the window of one brightly painted house was a notice explaining that Rosie's funeral would be in the church on Wednesday. This was a chance to say goodbye to someone who had lived in the area for eighty years - a remarkable thing in an area full of To Let signs and a population so obviously transient.
That includes us. Who knows where the next steps will take us and when?
