Clone High Streets

This Wednesday afternoon I did something totally out of character: I went for a stroll down the closest thing that my district of South London has to a high street. For fun. And things began surprisingly well. Having made it, intact, past the ASBO of teenagers who lurk outside Chicken Express between the hours of 4pm and 11pm, and the bottleneck of middle-aged drunks who block the pavement outside William Hill between the hours of 7am and 11pm, I popped into a convenience store to buy a newspaper.

But here, not for the first time — a manager once refused to let me use his phone to report a mugging to the police — things went awry. I was required to hang around, shifting weight from one leg to another, while the cashier concluded a long and angry telephone conversation with a relative in Uttar Pradesh. A request for a copy of The Times produced the remark “quarter past four”. And it eventually transpired they only had the Express in stock. Finally, a visit to a nearby Portuguese café, to absorb the exciting news (on page 27) that OK! magazine is launching a German edition, was marred by an episode of a Portuguese soap being blasted at customers in Dolby Surround Sound. I abandoned the newspaper and cappuccino to return to the peace of my flat, which, incidentally, is on the market, should anyone fancy the sound of it.

The field trip had been inspired by the novelist Joan Brady, who recently made headlines on being paid £115,000 after suffering a degenerative nerve disease allegedly caused by toxic fumes from Conkers, an “environmentally friendly” shoe shop in Devon. For me, the story — Conkers, in its settlement, denied liability — illustrated a simple but important point…

Read atTimes Online