Positive #1: Smells
With its high Indian and Bangladeshi population, the smell of my Whitechapel neighbours’ cooking often sends spasms of jealous pleasure across my tongue. They are usually sharp, spicy, tangy scents that saturate the air completely and come dancing to my amateurish nostrils in waves of hot, thick perfection. They make me hover by the back door in a semi-delirium.
Positive #2: Sounds
There is a short old Bangladeshi man with a grey beard and a faded faruque cap who hunches over crates of green mangoes near Whitechapel station every afternoon. Barely opening his mouth (but opening it just enough for you to see his yellow teeth inside), he says ‘Ayyy mango, mango, mango,’ over and over again. I like his hard-selling tactics. I am growing fond of him.
Positive #3: Sights
Spitalfields Markets are clean, colourful and spacious. Likewise the Sunday Upmarket off of Brick Lane is well-structured and lovely. But it is the people who spread out their knick-knacks on blankets along Brick Lane that I like seeing most. Matchbox cars and size 16 shoes and folded chequered shirts and plastic pearls and battered CD players and tiny vases and lycra masks and two old pots and bouquets of green lighters and coat-hangers of multicoloured ribbons at 20p each and a framed picture of a German-Shepherd in profile are all spread out evenly on tartan blankets and their sellers lean against brick walls smoking and eating red liquorice.
Positive #4: Let’s skip taste and touch and go for the sixth sense: The Ghost of Nikolai
Nikolai was the guy who lived in my room for four years or so before I moved in. I get snippets of information about him from my flatmates, and, from what I’ve been able to piece together, it seems like he was a bit of a loner. He spent hours alone in his room, coming out occasionally to watch marathon screenings of The World at War on the History channel and never once having friends drop by for tea and croissants. Of course I could ask more questions about him, but I prefer to imagine what he did in this little room with too little natural lighting and too many broken power-points. Did he comb his fringe over his eyes, lie on his bed and stare up at the ceiling? Did he tap absent-minded, compulsive beats on the desk with his fingernails? Did he write long lists of Mario Brothers characters, from most favourite to least favourite? Did he find, as I do, that creative spirit is strangled by beige walls and paisley curtains? Ah, but here I’m being too negative again! For all I know he had the time of his life in here…
Positive #5: Let’s forget the senses altogether and turn to: The Irony of Whitechapel McDonald’s
This will take a little bit of research to verify, but I recently discovered that the McDonald’s that I pass every morning on my way to the tube station has an interesting history. It used to be a furniture store, and upstairs it housed the Jewish Social Club. In May 1907, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Gorky themselves all walked up those stairs for the congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Apparently they came to London as part of their European tour, attempting to spread the seed of revolution. Some of them stayed on Fulbourne street, which I can reach in about two minutes from my front door.
Imagine that. From a place where people discussed the horrible alienation induced by the division of labour and made passionate speeches about capitalist control over the means of production, to the plastic-seated, fry-sizzling, fake-smiled epitome of modern capitalism: McDonald’s. How depressing. Perhaps I shall entrench the irony further and go eat a McNugget in honour of Lenin and Trotsky. I’ll dunk it in some Sweet n’ Sour sauce and try to come around to the view of many: that people will always prefer their right to work for chocolate thickshakes than equality.
And so it would appear my attempt at a positive post has failed. I do enjoy irony, though, so perhaps it’s not all bad! Here’s another sign that Whitechapel may have some hidden treasures:
