Here is Mr P. (still suffering from all that dental work) and I enjoying a bowl of porridge this morning – though you would not know from our expressions! Feeling a little like we are posing  in a Dutch Masterpiece. Yes…Welcome to our humble abode. The camera was balancing on the sink when I took this. I was thinking about home as we wandered around Holloway today, to see if I could (unsuccessfully) buy some cheap snow boots for the impending Siberian weather we are  supposedly expecting in the next little while.  As I snapped a few pictures I thought about the last 30 years I have been wandering round the Nags Head, how it has changed, and how it has not. I also thought about when you live up close to something for long enough you sort of stop seeing the ‘warts and all’, unless you have something to change your perspective, like a camera or a visitor. A camera is a bit like a visitor.  I get that feeling when being behind my titchy beaten up old camera that I am  seeing the world though an extra set of eyes.

So here is Holloway, the Nag’s Head Holloway. The stuff dreams are made of. Lots of people around where I live never go to Holloway as they find it too ‘real’ and a bit too grubby. Lots of people who live on top of the hill in Highgate, drive down to  the Waitrose car park but will never set foot in Holloway itself. I like it. Though I think it is time it had another little face lift  or a little bit of a wash and brush up, especially the Nag’s Head Market, as it is a long time since they knocked down the old houses at the back and created the ‘shopping arcade’ and the ‘new’ Safeway which became Morrisons.  There used to be a pub called the Nag’s Head, but it has turned into a really ugly amusement arcade. YUk, so much for history and tradition.

Holloway has got a lot going for it and too much to do in one daily post, but in a nut shell….. It has some amazing food shops,  fruit and veg shops, a great factory shoe shop, some good places to have tea, my favourite being Amici and Croissant D’or, the one in Holloway Road near the Odeon Cinema ( best and cheapest cakes and pastries in Norf Landan) fab pound shops   (Mr P. trying on some 3D glasses in the tidiest pound shop in the world  – Poundland, where we bought veg and fruit seeds and iris bulbs today all for           (under) a pound…yer know! James Selby’s department store, a Waitrose,  trees and that’s just the beginning. It lies on the A1,  has a clan of  hardened drinkers who seems to have a  license to sit outside the factory shoe shop, scaring all the locals, so there is no-where for anyone to sit who is waiting for a bus, it is very noisy and polluted…but like they say it is HOME.

SONG OF THE DAY- Tam Linn -Steely Span

A bit of finery for today.