DALSTON NOIR #5 The Following

Egon pondering the meanness of life

Read here Episode #1 | Episode #2 | Episode #3 | Episode #4

Walking up Kingsland High Road, Egon savoured the invigorating effects of his flat white. Hackney used to be one of London’s poorest areas, filled with immigrants and dwellings in need of repair. Now, looking at house and rent prices, this was hard to believe. Mingling with the multi-cultural crowd, Egon feels like a man of the world, glad to have moved away from his village in Shropshire where monoculture and monothinking had taken over even the more advanced human beings.

DALSTON NOIR #3 The Past Isn’t A Different Country

Egon pondering the meanness of life

Read here Dalston Noir #1 Trouble On Kingsland Road
Read here Dalston Noir #2 It Was a Dog’s Life After All

‘The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.’ (Karl Marx)

Still befuddled, Egon enters his studio flat, which really is the real-estate agency’s term for bedsit, on Graham Road. There always lingered a slight morbid and musty smell in these Victorian houses and Egon resented the fact that he kept looking at the same four walls.

Lying on his bed, he feels as if the walls are closing him on him, or maybe he’d just been here for too long, but as he isn’t paying rent he isn’t complaining.
After splitting up with his ex, he felt lucky not having to move back into a flat-share, which he thought was undignified at the age of 35, but unavoidable in London where being able to live on your own was considered a luxury.