Somehow, more than any other city with which I'm familiar, London seems most itself when it's wet, cold, grey and miserable. Today London is indeed very London. To add to the general feeling of woe, the bell in the chapel across the way where John Donne was once preacher has once again been tolling the passing of a bencher all afternoon. (Yes, I do know for whom the bell tolls, a former member of my own chambers in fact.)
Perversely enough, I first decided I wanted to live in London when on a school trip to some play or other on an evening much like this. I have a fragment of a memory of standing somewhere in the vicinity of TCR tube and thinking, "I could be part of this". I regularly do things like this to myself.
And it's somewhere near there that I found myself last night: Bradley's Spanish Bar on Hanway Street. I have a vague recollection of knowing, or at least knowing of, the place when I first lived here, but I had certainly not been there for years when A., Dr Lovely, Steph and I rediscovered it a few years ago, and promptly chose it as one of the main central London haunts for all of us, thankfully abandoning the awful Tottenham (although that remains, as far as I know, the only pub actually on Oxford Street and therefore required visiting when playing various drinking games, most notably PubCrawl London Monopoly -but we're all well past that, surely).
It's an acquired taste, certainly. Hanway Street, which runs somewhat pointlessly round the back of the Virgin Megastore between the ends of Oxford Street and TCR, was memorably, and accurately, described by a Time Out article I remember reading as "smelling of piss". It's a grim, unlit little alleyway. The area was once known as Little Spain and there are several Spanish places on it, most notably Costa Dorada restaurant, (Flamenco every Friday and Saturday), where A, Dr_L and myself, much later and extremely pissed that same night once met the Spanish Mafia. Probably. The tapas bar on the other side of the road is To Be Avoided, although Troy House, a club which hovers vaguely on the boundaries of legality, is upstairs and a story in itself.
Bradleys Spanish Bar is on the corner where it bends back to Oxford Street, and doesn't look too preposessing from the street. For one thing it's tiny. Really, really tiny. Twenty people upstairs and it's uncomfortably full. The lavatories are.. basic is perhaps the best way of putting it. Downstairs there is perhaps slightly more space, and it's also significantly darker: much better. The term "dive" might have been invented for it.
The others (save the much missed Dr_Lovely, who hangs out in expensive Manhattan bars instead these days), including Rob, Alan, and Fi mainly tend to go there at the weekend, but I've slipped into the habit, when I need something stronger than my usual coffee (Maison Bertaux, opposite Soho House in Greek St, best café -so long as "idiosyncratic" isn't a word that fills you with uncertainty and concern- in London) before I can face the tube home, of dropping in for a drink there rather than the pubs closer to my office. Those are full of lawyers, and although there are some nights when I do indeed go looking for lawyers to drink with (specific ones, I'm not in the habit of seeking out random members of my profession to drink with), people I might actually know are part of what I'm specifically trying to avoid when I'm in this kind of mood.
So I go to Bradleys, as I did last night, and listen to The Best Jukebox In The World (really, no contest) and the extremely cute Spanish woman behind the bar smiles at me, until it's safe to face the underground. I think I may do the same again tonight.
Madwoman on the tube this morning, incidentally. She looked quite normal and safe as I got on at KingsX.. and then, just as the door shut, she burst into a tirade against the woman who had just passed her on the way to the Last Seat (cow), claiming she'd been kicked and attempting to retaliate. Things went downhill from there... And my trial on Thursday has turned into an argument about costs bah humbug.
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