Days without alcohol 35
Shepherd's Bush has been thrown into mild inconvenience (I was going to say chaos, but this would be hyperbole) by the closure of the Central Line tube station. It's been shut down until October for the most unforgivable of reasons - they wish to rebuild and improve it so that it is fit for the 21st Century. How dare they?
Local traders have been protesting, worried that the loss of commuters will affect their business (though I think most people will be forced to take the bus, the stops of which are right outside the station, so not sure it will make all that much difference) and people like me are just annoyed because of the basic inconvenience of either having to walk or bus to White City or Holland Park instead - or, at a last resort, go on the Hammersmith and Shitty Line (though this was also closed today due to maintainance - why can't the Underground just leave things as they are, all broken and rubbish? Or replace everything overnight with all brand new facilities that we can be proud of? Honestly, they are crap).
It's funny how we take umbrage at this mild unsettlements. Perhaps it would be better for us all if we decided we'd turn this negative into a positive and for the next eight months leave home ten minutes earlier and just walk briskly up the hill to the next tube station, thus getting some much needed exercise and not really putting ourselves out too much. But we don't do that. We just complain. And I am not different. I was annoyed to have my journeys today delayed, as well as conscious of the fact that after getting off at Holland Park I now had to pay an additional 90 pence to get the bus down to the Bush - money that could have gone to a local trader like Starbucks (who amazingly have a branch at Holland Park as well, so they got my money anyway this afternoon). Goddamn progress!
So tonight I got the bus rather than the tube into town. I was going to Charing Cross Road, but the bus was headed to Piccadilly and rather than jump on the tube for one stop I decided to walk the last bit, down the back streets. It was a very enjoyable diversion as because it was Sunday there weren't many people around and it was getting dark and I was listening to my iPod and looking around the buildings. I noticed a building that I hadn't looked at before which had a carved sign on it announcing that it was the Oxford St Hat Factory (though I was at the back of the building, not on Oxford St itself). Clearly it isn't a hat factory any more, though I don't know what goes on in there, but it made me think about how a hundred years ago pretty much all men wore hats (just look at those old jumpy films of men walking too quickly down thronging streets, all in bowlers or sometime Top hats) and how consequently someone making hats would be rich enough to have a factory on Oxford Street. I wondered why and how things had changed, what it was that made hats go out of fashion, how galling it must have been for the hat manufacturers, what desperate measures did they take to try and persuade men to get back into wearing hats. Ultimately the whole hat fashion was a bit crazy - hats have little function really, maybe keeping your head warm, but mainly surely there (in the case of the bowler or the top) to confer status. In a modern world where we are constantly being sold things that we don't need, as well as being persuaded that we have to
shave our kiwi fruit, it's amazing that no-one has tried to reintroduce the superfluous hat, as the must have accessory for men - maybe this entry will give someone the idea to do so and the Oxford St Hat Factory may one day spring back to life. But I doubt it.
For the moment I think that the Hat Factory shows that things change, not necessarily for the better, not necessarily for the worse (is a world without all men wearing hats better or worse than a world where they do? There is no way to quantify it), they just change. And had London Underground not decided to selfishly upgrade its ancient, crumbling system then I would not have been walking in Soho tonight and noticed this building at all.
