I've got a blister on my heel...

...not a big one, just the small kind that appear from an irritation that can only be caused by a pair of new shoes. Fresh and crisp, the color of the water off the Caribbean, a harbinger of spring, these new shoes have worn the skin of my right heel shiny, like the rubber heal of my disproportioned childhood Barbies. These shoes have yet to form to my feet, their mold still holds form to whatever cast they were created from, the standard artificial foot of a UK size four. They are new. They aren't mine yet.

This morning I sat in a park, a rather nice one near my University. It's called Highbury & Islington, and sits between roads lined with rows of Siamese houses, attached at the ribs and shoulders to each other. The temperature boasted proudly to be in the low 70's and everyone in the city of London crawled from the cool, dimly lit recesses of their homes or offices and out into the light. The cloudless, un-caged sun. I took my shoes off, used my purse for a pillow, and watched as a spider crawled from toe to toe, disappearing for a second to resurface on my next appendage. Next to me a couple barbequed. A dog pissed on some Daffodils near the pavement. A group of 20 somethings chain smoked under a tree. Who could say this moment wasn't perfect?

ignore the world's whitest legs and notice the shoes.

I'm at work now, down in a windowless basement. Black shirt, black skirt, black tights. The weather is inconsequential down here. But today, when I changed, I noticed the insides of my new blue shoes were smudged brown, the dirt from my bare feet staining the polka dot interior. Slight indentations marked where my soiled toes had been; the shoes began to form to me. My feet are still dirty, hidden beneath my tights, harboring particles of the spring. I'll spend the remaining hours of daylight down in this steralized basement and will get home well past sunset, when the temperatures dip down into the 40's again. But my feet will remember what the morning held and the ways that the sun brought freckles to my skin, how the ground left dirt on the underside of my toes. I'll go to bed with dirty feet. And I'll dirty them again tomorrow, in a different park under the same spring sun.

The Land that Time Forgot

Welcome to Myddleton Road, or as my flatmate, Tess, so fondly calls it: The Land that Time Forgot. Running perpendicular to the road I live on, Myddleton road really is a forgotten land. It's a high road* of sorts but its hidden away in a completely residential area. So imagine, here you are, standing on the edge of Myddleton Road, staring down past the first block of houses and onto the multitude of chintzy plastic store fronts. You walk down Myddleton and see the mural painted on the locked wooden gate that stands next to the River Walk; to your left you see a small fenced park that doesn't allow dogs and you wonder what the hell else it could be for. And then suddenly, you are in the heart of Myddleton. You are staring at shopfronts, not sure of what they're actually selling, while simultaneously trying to ignore the cat-calls of the hoards of older men and construction workers that seem to spend their lives on the sidewalks. And then there it is, right in front of you, the shining beacon of Myddleton, the shop that was the inspiration for its nickname: George Moore Men's Wear.

A store untouched by time...or maintenance rather.

This picture does the shop little justice, but luckily you are standing right in front of it. You can see through the grimy glass pane that George's men's wear window display has remained untouched for the past several decades. The 70's? The 80's? It's hard to tell. Especially when all you can focus on is the pair of whitey tighties strapped on to a lower-parts-only male mannequin. They're not so white anymore though, everything in the shopfront has been tinged yellow with age, the unluckier objects are brown with mold from what can only be assumed to be leaking water. It's fascinating, really, that someone closed up shop and left everything as-is in the window. But wait...

Then you glance at the front door and see a paper sign, not aged or yellow, taped up that informs you that this building is alarmed so don't even think about breaking in. Who would hang that sign if no one's there? And why would anyone bother to alarm a shop that hasn't been open in at least 30 years?

It's late the next time you walk Myddleton. You're returning from work and the sun has long set. You're shrinking as far down into your coat as you possibly can to avoid the Mary Poppin winds that have made their way to London. And then you reach George's shop. And you hear music. Percussion to be precise. Yes, you are sure someone is playing the drums in George's shop. You look above the front door and notice a light is on inside. Who is playing drums inside? Does someone live there? Is that why there's an alarm? And has anyone bothered to tell George?

It's several months later now, and once again you are walking down Myddleton late in the evening. You are listening to your iPod and humming along when suddenly you notice cars blocking the intersection up ahead. You get close and notice yellow caution tape. And that the cars are police vehicles. And there's people all around speaking to police officers.

You take out your headphones and cautiously approach what can only be deemed as a crime scene. You hear a cop ask a woman, "Did you see the fight?" And then you sigh. Phew! Just a fight? What a commotion. You walk past the crime scene, making sure to stay outside the tape, and once past it, you begin to cross the road. It's only as a result of turtle-ing yourself down into your coat that you happen to notice the POOL OF BLOOD you nearly step in. Right there in the middle of the road. And outside the yellow tape for Pete's sake. Just a POOL OF BLOOD resting in the road, waiting for your foot to land in it. You side step the puddle and then promptly do the only reasonable, rational thing...you run the rest of the way home.

A day later you find out from your flatmate that the crime scene was the result of a stabbing. Welcome to Myddleton Road.**

*high road: does not actually mean the name of the road, but simply means the road with all the shops on it.

**my neighborhood is in fact quite safe, and there is no reason for anyone to be alarmed at all. crime can happen in any neighborhood and from what i've heard, nothing like this has really happened here before and they don't really expect it to again.