How many times do you have to tread in vomit before it puts you off your dinner? This wasn’t, in my case and that of my companions, an academic question: as we walked from my son’s flat in Haggerston, east London, towards the City, we must have passed puddles of sick running into double figures – in some parts of Shoreditch the puke lay so extensively on the pavement that the chunks of food glistering in its bile seemed like some duodenal wrack, left behind when the Great Vomit Wave of ’14 finally retreated. Still, what did we expect at 11.30 on a Saturday night? This part of London, having reached a critical mass of hipsters, has now started to draw in revellers from Essex, who debouche at Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street Stations, drink, dance and kebab up, then leave their viscid spoor behind them as they beat a retreat.
Not that they were routed by 11.30 – the streets were teeming with lads in neatly pressed white shirts and lasses tottering about on high heels like soused foals. My own lad was sniffy about the influx, but I admonished him: “It serves you right. Here you are, occupying an ex-council flat that was built for these people’s grandparents; they’re simply fighting back against the neoliberal curse of gentrification with the only weapons they have, puke and beats.” Puke & Beats might, alternatively, have been a suitable name for the restaurant we were aiming for: the Duck & Waffle, which nestles on the 40th floor of the old Heron Tower in the heart of the Great Metonym.
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