The mania of the morning builds up. Suddenly discovering I'm meant to be at work in five minutes... build up begins... tearing out... it gets higher... no swipe card... hammering at door to be let back in.. nearing a peak... rushing down the staircase.. out the door.. out the gate... and suddenly it shatters.
Police have cordoned off Penton Rise around a massive metallic-looking truck. Dull grey tape zigzags across the road and two cops shuffle around a bit aimlessly. They climb in the truck, they adjust the tape, they chat with our security guard, they persuade a pedestrian that he can't in fact jump the tape. No sir, he can't. Sir, he will have to just take a detour, please.
Grumbling, panting, down the road, up a narrow lane, back on Pentonville, confronted with the tape again. Students climb the barricades, traffic crawls to a murmur.
Pant, pant. All uphill, already a half hour late.
And then I pass by the other side of the tape. A crumpled tangle of a bicycle. Dust heaped around it. Clothes in a mound by it. Spotted tarmac. And then, looming so forebodingly over it, that massive, grey truck. An entire horror played out in the one image of its remnants. Needless to say the cyclist didn't survive.
And then at lunch, at a nice, cosy, yellow restaurant with a view of Upper Street's pram-pushing masses and shambling pedestrians (it is late afternoon; the trendy types are presumably at work in the City), a loud lady comes to sit at the chair behind.
In a few seconds, I hear the deep slide of my handbag moving rapidly away from me.
Clumsy lady, I think, and don't bother to retrieve it. I imagine a tangle of handbag arms, hers in mine, caught under her chair. Routine.
Slllliddee.
Still? I wonder. How much of a tangle before you panic? I reach out - we're back to back, I haven't seen her - and retrieve my bag, placing it close by me.
She's loud on the phone. Loud to the stewardess. She decides to move tables, to sit next to A now and shuffles over, dropping some things. There's hardly any room between her and A. Their bags on the floor between them.
In some minutes, A moves her handbag over to the other side, looking disturbed. A lady from a table across has said, loudly, clearly, "She's trying your handbag now". And so she was. Reach out her heel, stick it in the loop of the handbag, deep slide and it would be hers. To take and run? To wallet pick?
She seemed completely unfazed though. Still on the phone. She's just seen someone warn us about her, completely openly, but she carries on her conversation even as she gets up and moves to another table. The lady from the table across told us she was trying it again. Brazenly. Completely publicly. As normal as if she was choosing cheese toppings.
I moved back to concentrating on the view outside. The sights and sounds of Upper Street. And noticed that now, from the centre of my window, prams and old couples had disappeared. Instead there were two cops taking a lengthy testimony from witnesses. What a delightful neighbourhood.
