It's not a crack house, it's a crack home

It's been an age since I've blogged, but I couldn't leave Thatcher and Spandeau Ballet on the home page any longer!

Busy times. I've been looking for a new place to live. Putney is nice, sleepy and pretty, but if I wanted to live in a place with too many Aussies, no nightlife and bad transport connections, I'd have stayed in Sydney, maybe moved to Castle Hill.

I'm moving to Brixton, the borough of Lambeth. "No, seriously". Jamaicans and Carribeans selling turtle eggs, aphrodisiacs and crack rocks at the station. Reggae and funk blaring out through the underground. Gurners spilling out of clubs at midday. Christians yelling about Jesus alot. It's mad and grotty, but it's the real London.

I had the choice of moving into a box sized room with shitty furniture in Clapham North (the equiv of Balmain) or a rambling mansion (as Romantics would put it. Realists may call it a shitty dive) only a short bus ride away in the heart of clubland (there is no Sydney equiv. Imagine Kings X, Newtown and Surry Hills get together with Jamaica and Africa, have a few drinks, get a bit silly and have a mutant child. That child woul be Brixton).

The place is incredibly huge and ridiculously cheap. By far the biggest place I've lived in. Bigger than the haunted place on Probert St (for those that remember. It had a desk that was too big to move). The front yard (or 'Garden' as English call it, even if it only contains one tree and some weeds) is easily 15 steps to the door. The house is 3 stories. Every room is coloured in mad colours, like they've let loose an army of children on acid armed with crayons. Hallway - electric blue with silver stars. Kitchen - lurid green. My bedroom - blood red.

There are 5 girls living there. One of them could be a prostitute - 'student, works from home' scantily dressed with blonde mullet, fake eyelashes, stone washed denim, Eastern European accent, says 'dahlink' a lot. She looks like she belongs on a 70's soft porn nudie calendar pumping gas in denim short shorts. Another is an art dealer. Her room is filled with oil paintings. (drug smuggler).

And yet it's a comfortable home.