How to make
recommends… going green in Epping and SE1 – and a good haircut
The greatest ‘going out’ thrill I’ve had since March was going to see my good man Tom Braham of A Nod Is As Good As A Wink barbershop near The Quietus office in Islington to get my barnet sorted after lockdown. To be able to sit in a chair, being improved and having a one-on-one conversation, felt like a liberation, and cycling back home across the reservoirs past old dudes necking brandy with dub blasting from their portable cassette deck and the London bricks golden in the summer light was a reminder of why I love this city. Perhaps for the duration, we need to make sure we take what we can from these small pleasures.
I’m currently under post-travel quarantine and absolutely busting to get to Epping Forest at the end of it on Saturday, followed by a trip to the Garden Museum’s Derek Jarman exhibition (which runs until December 13) in Lambeth. It’s been superb to see how his horticulture at Dungeness has given people an ‘in’ to Jarman’s work in recent years – radical queer art discovered via rusting sculpture and esoteric planting.
Then to dinner at Andrew Edmunds in Soho, where the wine is stupendous and everything is delicious because it is cooked in butter. It’s one of those dark and slightly naughty places I always dreamed of going to before I ever came to London, and which now seems to cling on by the skin of its teeth. At least we know that, out of all of them, the forest will endure. Turner’s memoir, alternative Epping Forest tribute Out Of The Woods, is out now. For The Quietus, see thequietus.com