It's like when you love a man; yes, you can see the flaws but you love despite, because of, regardless of them. It really is love at first sight. I think I decided in 1984 I was in love with Brixton, even though, as a streatham resident I didn't actually get selected until 1993 and didn't take up residence until 1995.
I love Brixton because it has two hundred years of crap architecture visible as you drive round the residential side road.
I love Brixton because you sit on the bus and listen to the two women behind learning Spanish by reading Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales with English on one page and Spanish on another. A white baby with a white Mum, sitting on Mum's back wrapped in an African-style papoose shawl, watches them absolutely entranced.
I go to the crappy local flea-pit cinema for an HD live from NY of Rosenkavalier and bump into a member of Lambeth Labour. The tills aren't working and I tut at the half-wit who needs a calculate to work out the cost of 3 glasses of wine at £4.20 each.
I go to a backstreet pub and sit up at the bar, smoking (sssshhhhh!) while the jike box plays classic 50s Rock 'n' Roll plus (the two) Greatest Hits of Dr. Hook. Yeah, kind of random...
I pass the "West Indian Continental Grocery" and the Fairy Lights still illuminating the trees of Central Brixton. The cab-driver's music proclaims "Our God is an awesome God" - the music is shit, but, somehow I love it, because it's Brixton I love. Half one in the morning and people are still moving around on foot. Rush Common is beautiful with its thin veneer of snow - sod it, Rush Common is beautiful full stop, this long thin strip of green that gives lungs to the congested A23, makes us different from every other arterial road.
I know just about every problem that besets Brixton, the poverty, the violence, the absence of hope. But for me, Brixton is the greatest town on earth. Above all, it's home!
