Last night, Kat spent half an hour while I was getting ready for bed watching her new favorite show, fucked up people on hornsey road. It plays every weekend night, from about ten o’clock until two or three in the morning, on the big picture window in our bedroom. Last night was the episode in which the guy peed on the Internet cafe across the street. It was kind of a lot of pee, and we started awarding points for every person who stepped in the stream, which ran all the way to the street, and subtracting them for people who avoided it. fucked up people won by seven.

We live on kind of a strange block. Just up the road, about a half mile north, is Crouch End, which is what the English call posh, with boutiques and cutesy cafes and restaurants that serve sandwiches on weird, chewy flat bread. Down the road a bit to the southeast is the nicer side of Finsbury Park, which isn’t quite as fancy as Crouch End- James McAvoy lives in Crouch End, but nobody all that famous lives around Finsbury Park. Still, there’s a nice supermarket and some mid-grade chain restaurants and a couple of pricey pubs, things like that.

And then there’s our stretch of Hornsey. They shot 28 weeks later here, apparently, which seems about right on a Saturday night when the drunk Irishmen and the drunk Jamaicans are holding a contest to see whose music can be louder the other’s. I never feel like it’s actually dangerous, but the sirens drown out the Pogues and the reggae both about three times an hour.

Tonight there’s not much in the way of excitement, but it’s still early. The pubs close in London at eleven, unless they have a special license. This is a World War II thing. During the Blitz, Churchill ordered all pubs closed early because if they were open late, it’d give the Nazis a prime target. Nazis haven’t been a threat in London for a pretty long time- though the BNP is on the rise, so keep your fingers crossed- but nobody bothered to change it because it somehow became tradition, and the English hate to fuck with tradition. It leaves a bad taste in their mouth, makes them feel like they’re being judged as inadequate, and they are a contrary sort of people who resent that sort of thing. See also why the drive on the wrong side of the road, or why they switched over to the metric system entirely, except for the pint glass, which has worked just fine for centuries and needs no improvement…

But there aren’t any pubs on this stretch of Hornsey, just a couple off-licenses and a pair of newsagents that close every night around six, sometimes five and sometimes seven, unless it’s a Sunday and then probably two o’clock. There are corner cafes, which are sort of a cross between a greasy spoon diner in Mississippi and one of those fast food restaurants that used to be a Whataburger but lost its franchise. Two of those, plus a chicken joint- London is full of chicken joints, all of them with American names that are totally inappropriate and arbitrary. The one downstairs is texas fried chicken, which is even funnier if you’re from Texas and know that, for all of the state’s many culinary delights, fried chicken ain’t one of them. But KFC is a global brand, and over here it spawns imitators. dixy fried chicken is one of the bigger ones, but there’s tennessee fried chicken and kennedy fried chicken, too. Kennedy is my favorite, because it conjures up America without actually having anything to do with it, plus it keeps the KFC acronym fresh in a potential customer’s mind… Besides that, you’ve got a half-assed locksmith and the Internet cafe. Which isn’t actually a cafe at all, except for a fridge with cokes and bottled water, plus a box of Snickers and Cadbury bars for 50p a piece. internet cafe in the UK, and various other parts of Western Europe, has nothing to do with cafes, just exists as a place where your average punter- that’s dude on the street- can come in and get online for about £1 an hour, which isn’t so bad.

And this is home. It’s never quiet, but there’s usually something to watch. A couple nights ago, the star of the show was Pink Skirt Lady, who was harassing every single man who walked past for money, which seemed like a waste of time. We kept the window open for an hour or so, and never saw anyone hand her a thing. But I guess, then, she wasn’t the only one wasting time.