>_ Crash.

Too full of crap. Too many problems. Too much running (at any one time). It just doesn’t work anymore. This is a permanent fatal error? Type 0. Type more. Backup (selectively). Uninstall. Empty the trash with nostalgia. Those silly attachments: those unread files, unopened folders. “That’s made some space.” All that space - all that vast empty space just waiting to be filled - pictures, ideas, words and memories. Reinstall. Wait. Watch the clock, the date. Don’t look at the trash. Suddenly all is a new version.

>_ “You shouldn’t have any memory problems now.”

Close the laptop as if it were a box. Outside, back in the past, there are twinkly lights lit up like synapses, memories wrapped in plastic like the smell of old tinsel on real and severed trees. Frozen sparks. Inside there is candlelight, untroubled by the wind - bright, orange, steady. Safe. We are in its glow, months before closing time. Every sip is a sentence, every bite a Sunday roast.

Backpack, books, laptop. You are allowed only two items you do not need. The toothbrush? The unwritten-in journal? Buy a new one of each. All this stuff - this junk, this crap, these unread pages and unopened books.

>_ “You can’t take it with you, you know.”

Take care, of all of it.

I can’t think of a metaphor for finding old albums you used to listen to as a teenager. There must be one. Time travel, maybe. No, that’s not a metaphor. That’s what they do. Old teenage albums - dog-eared cardboard CD covers and sticky coffee-ringed plastic cases - they’re metaphors in themselves.

It’s a Fire - these dreams have passed me by.

Ten years ago, unsurprisingly, it was 1997. 1997 and 1996, which was the year before that. I was all black T-shirts and badly-bleached hair. I had a blue bedroom permanently thick with the scent of caked candlewax, belching out Portishead from every speaker. Beth Gibbons lived under my bed, didn’t you know? Playing Portishead now reminds me of paints - oil and acrylic, mostly, but white spirit is there too. The bedroom window view of a West London nowhere. Massive Attack’s Protection makes me smell glue. That’s smell, not sniff. The Boy Nextdoor™ with the pale blue eyes (Mr Ocean Colour Scene) who let me photograph him playing the guitar, and the blonde best friend at the bar with the Bacardi and Richmond’s. Camden Market by day - looking for ties - Hammersmith riverside by night - back to mine for dip and Eddie Izzard, talking and smoking till 6am when my mum would come downstairs and look at us both like the disgraces we were. You were going to be an actress. I just wanted to go to university. I just wanted to share a flat with some friends and be Anna from This Life. I used to down Vodka then like I use full stops now. That was the year that Princess Diana died, as if you didn’t know. We were both there in Kensington Gardens after all, smoking, still drunk from the night before. The year we held juvenile dinner parties with boys with real blond hair and a packet of cigarettes stolen from your mum’s drawer. We only ever pretended to be grown up. We never needed a fake ID.

This post, which probably makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t suddenly realised they’re not 17 anymore, was brought to you by incense from Camden Market, the Girl From Mars and Oh Yeah. As I type these words, Tim Wheeler has just sung “it was the best time of my life”.

They certainly didn’t waste any time. Having only seen it today I’ve no idea when it began.

Retro World is gone. The arch the surplus army store squatted in has been demolished. Those insane little stalls, deep within the catacombs that sold everything from shop dummy limbs to old coins to military buttons, Britpop badges and 1920s cricket bats now no longer exist. This is because the catacombs now no longer exist. Stables Market was Mos Eisley, Diagon Alley and the unseen vaults of the TARDIS all in one. It was one of my favourite parts of London. But now it’s all gone, forever. Irretrievably. It’s just rubble, bricks and dust.

The new Stables Market

Maybe the proposed redevelopment won’t look so bad. Maybe it will retain the character of the original Victorian market whilst improving accessibility, functionality and catchment, just as they say. Maybe it won’t be just another high street Bluewater.

Or maybe it doesn’t really matter what the new Stables Market will be like. Because it won’t be Stables Market. London has already lost one of its most unique and wonderful hidden treasures.

Forever.