The High Street Dies Softly in North Finchley

Care of the recession, my local high street is dying. For example, here's the message left on the window of what used to be my local branch of GAME:

'Insert Coin to play again' - What used to be North Finchley GAME

You can't fault them for the wit, and besides, I always had good service there, and they even polished some of my slightly scratched CDs and DVDs. (I have a CD player and console which both seem to freak out the moment they detect the tiniest of scratches.) Then the recession happened.

Worst of all, it's really hard to get jobs right now. I've got a whole brace of qualifications and working 'experience' (oh, what a dreadful cliché!), and I'm finding it difficult to get employed after my own redundancy. What are a couple of young workers, whose main on-the-job training was in the dying art of high street retail, going to do now? The Job Centre is never the most enjoyable place to visit, and that's when the recession beast isn't on the loose, making one start having Yosser Hughes flashbacks.

The rest of recession-era Finchley High Street isn't looking too good either. Many shops, restaurants and businesses have either closed down, are closing down or are surreptitiously selling their properties on Estate Agent sites. More jobs lost. The big shock was our local branch of Irish themed boozer O'Neill's. I had discovered it for sale, albeit not too openly, while researching properties near the high street for a martial arts club I belong to. It's the first time I've seen a branded pub close down since the Firkin chain keeled over and died in 2001.

There is, of course, a recession on. (In fact we're now officially in a second recession...) Rents remain over-inflated and symptomatic of a country that's far too dependent on expensive money and over-priced property. But while George Osborne, a history graduate with no sense of history, tries to save the economy by destroying it, and big chains like GAME cut their losses and stave off oblivion (at least for now), there is another big problem, namely parking charges.

These are particularly onerous in the Finchley area. First of all, you can't even use a parking meter yet must instead spend 20 minutes arranging a ticket by telephone. It also costs up to £2.00 an hour for the privilege.

Most people go to the supermarket instead. Colney Hatch Tesco's, after all, has free parking.

Meanwhile, the local high street goes dark. On the other hand, parts of the UK have been experiencing this long before the 2008 recession took hold.

A Day On The Rails...

There was an argument at the station. A man had been stopped by the ticket inspectors at the top of the stairs. They were arguing like it was a matter of life or death. Eventually the man stormed off without paying, swearing at one inspector who told him to go make an official complaint, then swore back at him in turn. Neither man won.

I got on the train. It went past a huge cemetary where a funeral was taking place. Apart from the hearse and the old fashioned black and chrome Bentley for the family, there were cars - and lots of them. They were parked behind each other in a long, continuous line leading up to the avenue where the funeral was no doubt taking place. That was the roundabout tribute to this person - never mind the garish floral tributes, it was the twenty or so cars, all carrying those who wanted to say goodbye.

Later, on the tube train, I saw a dishevelled looking woman reading a newspaper. She looked rather lank and grubby, her long greasy hair hanging over her face as she looked down on the paper. She had a battered black leather jacket under which poked out the bottom of a women's white top with green stripes - the kind you might get out of Bon Marche. Her legs were pipe thin and clad in narrow jeans. This was all topped off with a pair of dirty white cowboy boots that ended with long pointed toes. It was quite a sight.

Then she looked up and turned out to be a man with a thick bikers' moustache. I quickly looked away.

When I got back, the ticket inspectors had doubled in number and there were two policemen too. They were taking no chances. Fare dodgers seem to think a free ride is worth pulling a knife out for these days. Or maybe it was just a performance put on for the commuters - or a mixture of both.

A Day Out In Clapham.

On the train into London, two kids sat behind me. A girl and a boy, aged 15 or 16, Asian, eating snacks. Like most young people, they talked, talked, talked and talked without actually saying anything. Silence or anything too remotely serious is torture for the young and they know it. All those sullen, silent, erious adult faces on the train: it's better to go yak-yak-yak-yak-yak than that, and gorge on junk to drown out the howl of the speeding train.

Their accents were mostly Bengali but, this being East London, there was cockney, Essex and Jafaican here and there too, a wild car crash of accents. It was Babel with crisps and chocolate.

Later I found myself by the Long Pond on Clapham Common. The Sun was shining brightly on the water so I shielded my eyes as I took pictures. The ducks bobbled about aimlessly or chased each other off in mini tidal waves of fury.

Then I saw the fox. At first I thought it was asleep. But then I noticed its rictus grin, the dried, blackened bloodstains. and the leg that had almost entirely been ripped off. A big dog must have got it a night or so before, yet it looked so peaceful.

I felt I had to take a picture of it. Odd though this sounds, I felt like I was at a crime scene of a place where a great tragedy had taken place. If I didn't take a picture, who'd believe the fox had lived or died? As I did this, a short schoolgirl - maybe 14 - in grownups' makeup walked past and looked at me with a mix of alarm and disgust. There was no room in her life for death and the unusual. Her sweater was deep red - the colour of blood.

I then met up with a friend at a McDonald's in Liverpool Street. Some young men behind us got into a fight over next to nothing. An off duty policemen intervened though and herded them outside to calm down. As we walked past, he was still doing this, all the while drinking his milkshake.