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2007-04-18 - 12:39 a.m.

The home tourist

I've just been to see Stained Glass Heroes in the basement of a bar in Shoreditch.

This band's new single is to be released in a limited edition of 500, with the sleeve of each copy designed by a different person.

Some time ago, the band sent out blank sleeves to anyone interested in designing a sleeve and the results will soon be in the shops. Some of the results are on their website. All of the results were on display at tonight's single launch, shown on five screens placed around the stage.

I did one.

I got all excited when it appeared on one of the screens.

I am 38.

What a pleasant thing. To see a good band I'd never seen before in a venue I'd never visited, with the nice added touch of the artwork, designed in part by several members of the cheerful audience, being presented on some crappy tellies.

It's at events like this that I imagine I'm from out of town, or indeed from another country, and this is what I experience on one of my few nights in London. It's my way of pretending that this is what London is like all the time and thus making the experience of living there somehow more of a thrill. It's what I'd like to happen if I spent a few nights in a city abroad.

And since I'm going to New York next week, I'm particularly conscious of this little routine of fantasy tourism at the moment. Obviously, when I say "It's what I'd like to happen if I spent a few nights in a city abroad", I don't mean literally. If in New York I actually end up in a basement bar where Stained Glass Heroes are doing a single launch, I'll probably become midly distressed.

Continuing in the spirit of seeing London through new eyes, I decided to go home by a novel if tedious route. The venue is a long way from where I live with no direct route home. There were however buses from virtually outside the venue with Clapham Junction as their destination. This is somewhere I can get home from relatively easily.

Of course, having Clapham Junction as your destination doesn't mean you're getting there anytime soon. It's easy to be beguiled by a backlit destination tempting you with its distinguished white-on-black London Transport lettering and forget about the seven ages of man that you'll have to experience before the fucking bus actually gets there. I mean, we're all marked for death, but you don't start measuring a baby for the coffin, do you? Similarly, you don't catch the 35 from Kingsland Road if you mean to get back to south west London anytime before the sun dies. To make it worse 1) the bus went past the end of two streets that my ex-girlfriend used to live on. I didn't realise we were taking the scenic route through the scars on my heart. To make it worse 2) on the train from Clapham, I picked up an abandoned copy of Keeping My Words, a collection of quotations on the various stages of life's rich eiderdown, collated by the late Magnus Magnusson. So enthralled was I by Lily Tomlin's pithy observations on sex and Pope Pious VII's wry take on childbirth that I missed my twatting station and had to get a bus back to complete my unecessarily extended previously-high-sprit-dampening evening.

Bloody tourists.


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