Head Space Daily Words...

Head Space Daily has been anything but Daily in recent times, largely due to the fact I have been working, which is an extremely good thing but leaves me little time to write anything remotely coherent. Any spare moments have been generally taken up with running my youngest son's football team. Talking of which, our final game of the season took place a couple of weeks ago, with a resounding 5-0 victory, ending in a champagne shower of Fanta, copious amounts of custard creams and Celebrations aplenty, as we bid farewell to one of our team, who bowed out with a hat trick. Get in!!

One of the best things about being freelance is working in different locations and being able to experience different areas of London town. So far this year, I have spent time in Docklands, Fitzrovia and my latest haunt has been Kensington High Street, which is truly another world. The amount of money sloshing about those parts is a whole different level. The houses are incredible and the streets, as well as probably being actually paved with gold, have the feel of old well to do London. Kensington Palace is a stone's throw away, with Britain's most expensive street - Kensington Palace Gardens - with it's foreboding security guard sitting in his hut, running alongside the Palace. What you see is what you get - a sense of look but don't touch.

On my first day, parked opposite the building in which I was working, was a black and red sports car. A grotesque, hideous, ostentatious, monstrosity - a gigantic, ill formed, metallic reptile. It is obviously an exquisite piece of craftsmanship and bespoke engineering but not my cup of tea. If you couldn't guess, I'm not into cars in the slightest. To me they are a functional means of getting from A to B, then again I have and never will be in the position to afford a Maserati. Having googled the car, it looks like it could be a Maserati Birdcage, which can reach a top speed of 217 mph, which must come in handy in London. 

These kind of cars are status symbols, as are personalised number plates, which seem to have become the latest middle class trend of status display.

The funniest personalised number plate I have seen recently was when a guy in a porsche drove past us on the M6 with a number plate that spelt the word JIT5U. He was branding himself via his registration number, saying to guys - back off, I'm really hard - and to girls - I'm tough and available. I think the number plate D1CK would have been far more suitable.

At least he got his message across coherently though. The number plates that mean nothing are the worst. Why bother? On the internet I found a personalised number plate for sale which reads BI5 JMY. Look at it. It means nothing beyond a random combination of letters and a number five. Yet how wrong could I be. This little combo translates as "BIG JIMMY." Good grief. Treat someone like a fool and they'll behave like one I guess. I would love to know if anyone has bought the registration number M5V TWT yet.

Anyway, back to Kensington. I don't know West London very well at all, so it is an area to explore. A walk along Kensington Church Street and you're in Notting Hill, where I have not been for a long time. There are some tremendous buildings and places of interest but I would never feel as comfortable there as I do in South East London, where I live, or the East End. That's where home is and the particular area of West London that I've been talking about, feels like a different world, the playground of the mega rich. Fair play to them, they've earned it, they can enjoy it and spend it however they want. Although it is a lifestyle that is out of my reach, I would never want to grab hold of it, even if I could. You can keep your strange Maserati batmobiles, I would rather live in a world of nonsensical registration numbers...