On viewing posh markets through a launderette window
I've never been one to partake of the delights on offer at the Sunday market that's been popping up outside the train station every week for the last decade or so. The most time I spent watching it, rather than being a participant of it, was when I used to visit the local launderette – the one that vanished alongside the dry cleaners, key cutters and chicken shop (which, to my shame, I tried bartering at one night when I was really drunk) after the arches were purged by Network Rail and the units sat empty for years, waiting for upmarket boutiques to take seed and flourish.
But on the Sundays when I used the launderette, either to knock out all the bedding in one go or because our own washing machine was getting tetchy, it felt like a neutral point from where I could watch the to-and-fro of the gentry in the same way I sat in the viewing area of the Gorilla Kingdom at Chessington World of Adventures. I have yet to completely exorcise my cynicism about the place (the local market, not the Gorilla Kingdom) and I tend to bristle at the way in which the world "community" is evoked by my neighbours – in the sense that the primary goal of these initiatives is to keep house prices, and by extension the local rents, on an upward trajectory.
The launderette wasn't necessarily a place of tranquility and quiet – at least not as most people conceive it – with the constant clamour or dryers and washers. Though the machines were noticeably quieter than their household equivalents and there was a lulling quality to the hums and swishes they emitted.
The other patrons were preoccupied with their phones or a paperback. One Jamaican Granny used to come in at the same time as me and would regularly exclaim "Aaaah, shit!" to herself before having a little chuckle every few minutes. I really enjoyed her company. With these accompanying noises, I gazed out at the upper middle classes and their mannered consumerism – how they sauntered from stall to stall without much concern for the numbers run up on the stall holders' izettle displays before they tapped their phones against them.
I've made a few friends locally, which means I might hang out with them about once a year, my standard state of engagement for friendships. What with my childhood and adolescence spent stimming and my inability to maintain simple human relationships outside of my immediate family, I often suspect that I might be on the spectrum but don't want to engage in the necessary human contact that is involved with getting a diagnosis. Perhaps the pleasure of viewing the market wasn't just a class thing, but rather an opportunity to view people from a position of relative isolation and non-commitment? I don't dislike people but I can only really appreciate them when I'm a step or two removed from the thick of it. I know that others actively seek that dissolution of self that comes from the overwhelming hubbub of the crowd, be it a carnival, a football match, music festival or a Taylor Swift stadium gig. But for me, a crowd often hands a megaphone to that little, neurotic, internal speaker that I sometimes mistake for a self.
I'd found a satisfying dissolution when staring at the ways in which the suds, bubbles and grey-blue water frothed and eddied against the glass of the large washer, or in gazing out to observe how people who love fancy cheese manage to brush past each other with such proximity and never get into a fight about it.
All of this was taking place a mere few minutes walk away from the flashpoints of the riots that broke out whenever a trigger was pulled to lethal effect by the flying squad. I certainly had to keep a lid on my own temper as I hauled my ikea bulk bugs full of slightly damp clothes (the dryers ate too many coins to get them completely dry) over each shoulder and stomped through the train station underpass, back up the hill with a podcast or some math rock in my earbuds.
One question I could ask myself is whether it would be a similar experience if I was sat within a posh establishment looking out at a working class hub, one like the East Street market that branches off Walworth Road or maybe that one in Lewisham. What kind of posh establishment? That would have to be some kind of single origin coffee roaster, the ones that serve a good cup of black filter coffee with one of those v60 ceramic pour-overs. I could imagine myself with my iPad mini and my earthy/citrus Guatamalan preference looking out all the market goers, the ones who are savvy enough to know that the supermarkets always mark up on their produce. I would probably notice the marks made by a tough life, the stooped postures or bulging guts, gazes straying down to the pavement. It wouldn't feel exactly the same but there would be some overlap in the sense that a part of me will always seek to take refuge from the crowd rather than seek to be a part of it.
After the launderette was vanquished by Network Rail, I started using one that was located on a shopping parade in a nearby council estate. It was run by quite a stern looking woman who looked like she was possibly Turkish or from the Middle East. She wasn't one for conversation so I didn't push my luck trying to find out.
If there was one property that could describe this launderette, I would use the term, "gleaming". Even when the sun was streaming through the wide front windows, I never noticed a single mote of dust bobbing about in its rays. The floor and surfaces were similarly immaculate, with the inevitable signs of wear and tear on the machines and furnishings indicating how well cared for every nook and cranny was.
There was no view beyond that window of a bustling scene like the civic centre outside the old launderette – just some uniform council houses, ragged privet hedges and the odd passerby here and there. It wasn't so much a refuge from which to look at the world beyond as it was a crown jewel for the estate itself – an example of upkeep, discipline and service that went against all those popular cliches about council estates being vortexes of social entropy and degradation. Whenever I sat there with our family bedding swishing away in the background, marking up some PDFs in preparation for an upcoming lecture, the place itself became the focus for my fascination rather than the scene that unfolded outside.
If the old launderette returned to the scene of the posh Sunday market (it won't), I would probably appreciate it in a slightly different way. It would still be a kind of psychological stronghold for taking in the comings and goings of the gentry. But I would probably look on with more of a sense of curiousity and even compassion for a scene that I could never imagine myself functioning within.
Living in a city places you eyeball to eyeball with difference. You are sharing space with people and subcultures that you will never fully understand who will probably fail to understand you in turn. Some of these cultures may be those that you might feel at odds with in an ideological and material sense. But that doesn’t mean that this difference cannot also be a source of curiosity or fascination. That the irreconcilable difference itself might become a source of interest rather than a trigger for aversion.
Thanks for reading this
So I got a bit confident about my ability to post on a more regular basis last time, didn't I? I have been writing all of this time but a lot of it seemed to be little missives to myself rather than something that I wanted to share with the world. I often thought of a block as the usual cliche of the terrifying blankness of the unmarked page or the writer yanking sheets from their typewriter to ball up and toss against a wall. But there's another kind of block where you can be constant stream of words and ideas but none of it seems to stick, a thin stock of verbosity that lacks the substance to call itself gruel. I wondered for a while if I had the hyperlexia that is detailed in Alice Weaver’s excellent book, The Midnight Disease.
Then another book on writing, Brian Dillon's Essayism, seemed to offer me a particular way out. In one chapter, Dillon recalls his struggles with logic modules when studying for a philosophy degree and questions the necessity of logic as the unifying glue of the essay form:
I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument, never mind describing to myself, as the study of logic required, the parts and processes, more or less persuasive, of that argument. Instead there was, is, language itself and a repertoire of stylistic choices. When I could be bothered, I was a pretty good student, and mostly because, or so I thought, I had devised a scheme for composing my undergraduate essays. I thought that every essay should have what I called (privately) its particular “guiding metaphor.” The study and interpretation of a given work of literature was a matter, I imagined, of discovering the metaphor by which it could be described or (so as to distinguish myself, if only a little, from the available critical literature) redescribed. Once I had found this metaphor—sometimes it was obvious, but I preferred it when not—then the essay would in some real sense write itself, the figure unfolding and fulfilling its promise.Bryan Dillon.
Essayism -- Brian Dillon -- 2018 -- New York Review Books (pp. 100-101). Kindle Edition.
This turned out to be a kind of anchor for me and something I was able to recognise in my strongest essays: the cohesive power of a compelling, guiding image rather than an intricately plotted argument. And so, from all of my observations about class, gentrification and my aversion to crowds, an image of a bright room full of gleaming metal machines with a Sunday market outside its large front window took form.
This kind of thing was never an issue with my poems. The old art student in me might have left the old media behind but it was always the arrival of an image rather than argument or sentiment that would get me writing. I assumed that my essay writing was exempt from this but a punishing couple of months of word trickle has forced me to look at this in a different way. The ideas are always there, as are the sentences, paragraphs and pages. But none of it is ever in a state that I consider ready to ship until the image arrives to tie the necessary strands together and cast away the rest.
I’ll hold off from the usual self flagellation and empty promises about having worked out the secret key of turning myself into a content mill. I’ll just sign off by saying that I hope to bother your inbox at least one more time before the year is out and so I’ll wish you all the best for the New Year when I do.
Cheers,
Niall