You Got Wheels And I Wanna Go For A Ride

With neither Jax nor myself in ownership of a car, we have had to take a lot of taxis since upping sticks from my friend Sam’s Brixton attic over to the new flat in Shoreditch. For the big move we managed to fit our entire portable property into an Addison Lee 6-seater (for out-of-towners Addison Lee is a taxi service that behaves in the same way that your mum did when you were 15. When you’ve had a bad date and you’re pissed and lost and stuck inside a lukewarm kebab shop at 3am you call them up, tell them what you can see from the greasy window and they come and get you. The primary benefit of Addison Lee over mothers is that you pay them in money instead of guilty penance and they never tell you that you were a fool to have gone out with that boy in the first place). And since doing up the flat we have regularly called upon them when laden down with lampshades, tiles, paint, and everything we thought would fit onto Jax’s bike. Which brings me to Jax’s bike. I am not a cyclist. I can’t get on with the things. The seat hurts my lady bits and I constantly feel as if I am going to topple into the gutter. Also I’m not good when responsible for determining the navigation and speed of a vehicle. I think it goes back to when I was 10 years old and the park ranger at summer camp let us all have a little go at driving the 4x4 round the field. I hit the accelerator instead of the brake, mowed down a fence and landed us in the sailing pond. Nowadays I can’t go above 5mph on a pair of skis, 50 in a car, and I’m not even going to mention the time I was allowed to steer my friend Aitch’s family yacht. The only positive thing from that incident was that the canoeist was young and had no family to support.

I am therefore primarily a walker. I like walking. You get your bearings and a sense of place, you see interesting sights, you don’t miss a turning because you’re going too fast to see the name of the road and it doesn’t matter which way you go down a one way street. Walking is for smart people. Of course it means that I am at least thirty minutes late for every appointment, social or professional, in my daily life but that’s by the by. Jax is a bike fanatic and she insists on turning up everywhere piously sweating with her plum coloured jodhpurs on, displaying an array of flashing lights and hi-vis vests and banging on about how she’s carbon neutral. I tell her, after the broccoli soup she made in our new kitchen last week I don’t think she’ll ever be carbon neutral again, she’s practically bovine if the aromas wafting from our bathroom are any kind of indicator. Seriously, never blend 10 flowers of broccoli with water, heat it and eat it. That’s not soup, it ‘s organic nuclear waste. Anyway, I’m not sure that cycling is environmentally friendly at all because it a) raises the blood pressure of every bus and car driver in Central London, who then take out their stress on their partners, who in turn get stressed and burn the dinner, which wastes food and uses up excess fuel, b) it uses up more C02 than necessary because every cyclist I’ve ever met dodges red lights and nips round vehicles, which causes motor drivers to have to slam on their brakes which uses up carbon. Or makes them carbon un-neutral or whatever the phrase is. And c) you have to oil a bike, that’s using up natural resources. And d) now I’ve got into this, cyclists bore the crap out of everyone in the pub by relaying their journeys, routes, the time they skidded on a grate in front of a number 73 bus and how much their tyres cost, which makes us all drink ourselves stupid which makes them drink themselves stupid until they’re too drunk to cycle home and end up having to put the thing in the back of a taxi to get home. And so it goes on in a vicious, self-righteous circle. Anyway, Jax loves her bike, I do not.

We had to visit Ikea in Edmonton to go and get those things for the flat that only Ikea seems to sell now that Woolworths has gone bust. Well, John Lewis sells them too but at three times the price and as we’d already gone way over the non-existent budget, we were looking for a cheap and easy fix. We had a lengthy conversation about transport for this epic, Zone 5 excursion, and decided to compromise with a bus there, followed by the mandatory Addison Lee back if we had too much to carry. At 5pm on a Thursday from Liverpool Street out to North London, public transport is misery. Awash with grey and forlorn commuters reading London Lite on their way home from the City, I wanted to throw myself under the number 45 bus rather than get on it. Oyster Cards, they’re depressing as well, from the fake cheery blueness of the packaging to the sad little bleep it makes when you swipe it to pay your fare; the succession of passengers getting on and touching the screen sounded to me like a hospital heart monitor. Bleep, bleep, bleep, went the heart and soul of London, until the number of commuters trying to get on increased to such numbers that I panicked the city was going to flatline. Anyway, we wrenched ourselves onto a seat and passed the time by talking about sex, which is always amusing in confined public spaces. It rained outside as we rode for 40 minutes and then the bus stopped and the driver shouted ‘everyone off.’ We could not see the big blue and yellow sign that promised unwaveringly to Make Our House a Home. The driver was non-committal. They’d changed his route over the radio and the bus was now out of service. We could wait for the next one in twenty minutes or walk a mile over the bridge and up the embankment, cut through the car park and get there on foot. We opted for the latter, then immediately regretted it as we crossed the bridge and found ourselves essentially in the middle of a very busy dual carriageway. The warehouse of cheap and easy home treats was beckoning us like a siren on the rocks and we could not reach her.

We stood for twenty minutes on the central reservation, and watched the next in-service number 45 go past and swing into the car park and drop off a load of middle-aged, heavy-weight women to the front door of the store. Finally we spotted a gap in the road and, now soaked through from the rain and promising ourselves a large plate of meatballs from the canteen, we sprinted like we were 14 years old in the county finals of the 50 yard dash. We made it and ran for cover into the lobby. The canteen was closed for refurbishment. We pushed on.

Jax got over-excited and started trying to buy plastic cutlery drainers that sit over the sink, and a bath rail. I reminded her that we don’t even have a bath. She then veered emotionally in the opposite direction when we hit the crockery department. She had had her heart set on Cath Kidston and Emma Bridgewater mugs and bowls and plates, but at 15 quid a pop, and bearing in mind we are struggling to finance toilet paper (those £50 light switches look great but they have a lot to answer for) we had decided against it, for now. Jax threw a tantrum. Ikea was shit. She wanted Bridgewater and she wanted it now. I walked away from her like a parent with a hysterical toddler, but then thought she might start trashing the display of sixties themed swirly plates, so I went back to calm her down. We managed to settle on plain white, and only 4 of everything, as they would be temporary until my plan to win the Lottery came to fruition. Then, in the living room department we struck gold with the most comfortable big fat armchair in the world, with a blue and white candy striped cover, the last on the shelf, to finish it off. We were over the moon, it would sit directly in the living room bay window, We would read our books in it while sipping tea and having the occasional nap, it looked Christmassy and Summery in equal measures and it came whole, not flat-packed. Jackpot. We hauled it onto a giant trolley and swerved it over to the checkout . Definitely too much treasure to carry on to a bus in the rain. I called our surrogate mother and they promised to send someone straight over.

The Addison Lee driver met us with a smile and a roll of the eyes.
“What on earth have you got here girls? We’ll never get that armchair in the back of this motor.”
We grinned at him like errant teenagers. The armchair fitted in, just, with a lot of panting and puffing from the driver. We told him our woes with public transport and how hungry we were with the lack of Swedish meatballs. He didn’t tell us for not eating before we left, he simply informed us that the Subway in the nearby retail park had Meatball Marinara sandwiches as their special of the day. How he knew this, I did not even care. To Subway we went and the three of us lined up Meatball Marinaras with Diet Cokes on the side. Back in Shoreditch the driver jumped out, opened the boot and took the armchair all the way up three flights of stairs and proudly into our living room. We tipped him handsomely and off he drove away into the night.
“Thanks Mum,” I whispered as I closed the front door.