Sunday 6th April, 2025
This was a humid one. My woollen overcoat hung heavy at a one-night-only PV in a laundrette on Bethnal Green’s biggest road, officially titled Joe Shone Hatchwell at Solis Laundrette. Real fans will recognise his name. We first met when he delivered a drawing to the cafe, then again for an interview, then again to discuss my writing the essay for his show. So, I didn’t need to read the exhibition text. I knew it said some things about the show, described three of the works, and quoted Hatchwell various times. It marked an emotional turnaround. I tend to deride anything written on an A4 sheet of paper at one of these things. Piled by the door, punters hope the essays can shed light on what they’re looking at but are often left frowning at several barely-comprehensible paragraphs, then stuffing the sheet into their bags and forgetting about them forever. I hoped that wouldn’t happen today. I watched someone bend over, pick up a sheet, and begin reading the words on the back, but a wave of dread came over me. I looked away and joined the hubbub outside.
A passer-by on an e-scooter stopped to ask, “What is this?” Lots of people hanging around outside a laundrette isn’t normal, I guess. Once he was told, he walked inside, picked up a sheet, grabbed a tinnie from an ice bucket, and had a look around. There were two kinds of tinnie available: green and pink. The same option was actually offered to us a week or so ago. We went to two PVs on Cork Street and nearly completed the world’s first free evening, such was the abundance of booze. We gleefully plunged into buckets of ice, fishing for normal G&Ts (green) and cheeky ones (pink). Across the road we identified two separate beer access points. I would have written about it had I not hot-footed it to sunny Spain, which was neither sunny (it rained) nor really Spain (it was the Basque Country).
That holiday contained only one complaint. There were too many English people in the old town. You could spot them a mile off: the pale-skinned girlfriend and her toe-shaped boyfriend, walking hand-in-hand down cobbled streets. It doesn’t feel like being abroad when you look up inside a small bar to realise that, given the clientele, you could be in the pub down the road. I overheard a group of middle-aged friends arguing about their evening. One woman was fed up with the pintxos.
“I don’t want to be standing up all the time,” she complained. “Do they really only sell anchovies in here?”
“We’re grazing,” her husband replied. “Just enjoy grazing.”
“I just want to be full,” she said.
I bit the head off of a fish and we left in search of bars with fewer Brits inside. We were successful. Once we had washed down enough calamari and croquettes and ham and bread with enough vermouth, we went home. I was content hearing English accents at the exhibition, which was, in short, really good. I had a good time. We all drank some pink and green drinks, but there wasn’t any funny business. It was a Sunday evening, Suze had work the next morning, and I was tired after a weekend supervising London’s silliest cafe. I said goodbye to Joe, wrapped my jaws around London’s most famous sandwich, and got the train home.
