MY PIECE OF THE CITY

Dear Readers,

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Love to you all,

Hanif

Writers get used to spending a lot of time alone, thinking stuff over, feeling moody. Indolence is indispensable, I have to remind my agent.

When I lived in West Kensington between the mid-seventies and the late eighties, after I finished writing for the day at five o’clock, I would trot down to the Three Kings on North End Road. It was always pretty empty. I’d read the papers and drink a couple of pints with the other ghosts, old men in exhausted suits. It became a habit. 

Moving to this house in Shepherd’s Bush in the late nineties, where I am now, I began the search for another local. It seemed like a necessity. I needed to find a place to do nothing. Somewhere to hold court, a place that wasn’t home. Then I found the Rouge.

Shepherd’s Bush was an area I didn’t know so well. There were a lot of scuzzy pubs, boarding houses, B&Bs and pensioners. People used to say ‘you’ll never gentrify the Bush’. It was a badge of pride that this neighbourhood– featured shabbily in both Steptoe and Son and Quadrophenia - was beyond respectability and the smoothings of super-capitalism.   

An unremarkable café at the end of the street, the Rouge became my Shangri-La. It was part of a chain, but inside it was surprisingly elegant, with old tiles from when the site was a butcher’s shop, comfortable seats and crass pictures of Paris.  But the best thing about the Rouge was the fact that few people ever went there, except for coffee. Sometimes tourists would pass by, come in and have a hot meal. The food was truly awful, and you wanted to warn them.