Dirty Alleyways

I think alleyways are great. Especially alleyways of the tiny, dank, dubious variety. With overflowing bins of rubbish, piles of rotting cardboard and lone smokers. The ones which, when looked down, will make a more prudent person reconsider and take a more circuitutious route to avoid some unknown, horrendous fate which will almost definitely take place if they go down said alleyway. They are literally the best.


I recently had an interview down a particularly fantastically dubious alleyway called Parliament Court near Liverpool St Station. I thoroughly recommend it. As far as dirty, dingy alleyways go this one is pretty spot on. Round the back of Spitalfields, you can really imagine someone getting stabbed and left in a pool of their own blood, mixing with the dirty puddles of god knows in one of the many anonymous doorways. To add to the flavour, there was even a complimentary escape message chalked onto the brickwork of a tacky pub. To top things off, there was have a big bin of confidential waste. Not just normal waste. Confidential. Anything which has confidential written on it is automatically exciting. If I am not supposed to know what it is, I definitely want to.

Adjoining the right wall were three storeys of scaffolding, complete with ladders, boards, buckets and whatnot. When I saw this, I must admit, I did have a bit of a Lara Croft moment. I imagined running around East London in some scantily clad, tight fitting clothes, a dubious bra and a pair of seriously dangerous looking pistols looking for some weird russian artifact (maybe the missing jewels of anastasia, or maybe anastasia herself...) I'd climb up scaffolding being chased by some vicious bulldogs, which of course I would shoot, then hide from the RSPCA in a converted filing cabinet. Or maybe a real filing cabinet, I am quite small. Then I'd look in the wardrobe and find a pile of money and a medipack before men in black suits started pursuing me.

Of course this would never happen. I do not climb ladders and I refuse to run for anything, even a bus. If I miss the bus, its the bus that loses, not me. It loses out on my fabulous presense. People who run for buses are suckers. If I was a bus driver and I saw someone running for my bus, I would absolutely drive on. You need to get some amusement from somewhere if all you do is ferry people around all day.