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beautifully irregular handmade sash windows…).
    It’s a house deeply imbued with precisely that kind of ‘effortlessly pared-down’, ‘homespun’, ‘artisan-style’ ambience which all those pathetically desperate, headscarf-wearing, cheesecake-eating, middle-class ponces in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel can only ever aspire to (and slaver over, and throw money at, and still come away wanting).
    The bricks outside are stained black from a fire (years ago–possibly when the houses opposite were bombed out during the war, and where now there’s just a tall wire fence, an expanse of municipal lawn and a block of flats), but the front door is immaculate (the palest pale yellow–with an astonishingly large, antique clenched-fist knocker) and the windows inside (curtain-less, of course ) are pristinely shuttered with a series of wonderfully faded, grey oak panels.
    Mwah!
    Solomon has an enviable eye (for everything , damn him: art, music, fiction, fashion, furniture). And he’s rich. And he’s handsome. And he’s impossibly successful. But it wasn’t always so.
    (Don’t think for a moment that he’s one of your proud African princes who wears colourful dresses and a matching tasselled cap. Oh God no . Not he. Solomon has yanked himself up by the bootstraps from irredeemably common stock; his mother–I’ve met her–uses the hem of her skirt to blow her nose on, picks her teeth with a kitchen knife, crosses her arms across her considerable girth, squeezes them–her face set into an expression of exquisite concentration–pushes out a fart, and then sighs her relief.
    Solomon knows how to box, is a whizz in the kitchen, falls casually into peerless patois, broad cockney (at a push–although he prefers to flirt with perfect modulation), can fix an old Cortina, owns three killer Dobermans, sneers at ‘ponces’ and ‘cunts’ and affectation, is principled, has ‘standards’, lives by his own ‘ethical guidelines’–and Christ knows they’re strict ones. This man could’ve roomed with the late Ayatollah Khomeini and have found his morals ‘unedifying’.
    Clean? You’re saying clean ? Solomon polishes underneath his shoes. His toilet habits make the Japanese look sloppy).
    We went to UCL together. I did Media Studies and English. Solomon did Philosophy. In truth, I couldn’t ever have called us ‘the best of mates’ (we’re chalk and cheese–he’s definitely the chalk. And me? I’m generally served up–slightly above room temperature–on a greasy platter).
    His attitude towards me has always been one of genial (nay sanguine) toleration (although he could teach Anna Wintour some lessons in haughty . Cutting? Cutting ?! Like Jack the Ripper’s razor ).
     
    I actually found this house (I did . That’s my single claim to fame, and–I suspect–the only reason I’m still living here). I brought Solomon on board to remove the locks (he’s got himself an O’ Level in Breaking and Entering) and we started off as a couple of squatters hanging loose in the basement.
    But Solomon ‘worked out a deal’ (of course he did) with an early bunch of contractors. Rented, invested, ducked and dived. Soon got his hands on the ground floor, the first floor, then the second and then the third. Journeyed from ‘Social Outcast’ to ‘Pillar of the Community’ (sits on the board of governors at a local school, has four children of various hues on a mentoring programme, fought tooth and nail for a new zebra crossing, founded a local ‘living history’ society to encourage racial integration among the bolshy cockney and Asian populations).
    Meantime, I’m still quietly lodged in my original basement room, thinking about girls, playing on my XBOX, listening to Funkadelic; a tragic carbunkle hitched (like a bloated tick) on to the smooth heel of Solomon’s relentlessly advancing, righteously ideological, all-conquering life-style.
    I mean where’s the guy find the time, huh ?
    Sometimes (if I’m lucky)