09 August 2011

That's Enough Riots (Ed)

And so the chaos in London continues, although I'm lucky to have seen very little of it first-hand. I work near King's Cross, which has been largely unaffected; it certainly hasn't reduced the length of the queue to take photos of platform 9 3/4. I walked home through Fitzrovia, which was eerily quiet. It almost felt as though an air-raid siren had gone off and everyone but me had heard. The Sainsbury's on Great Portland Street was closed so I headed for the Waitrose on Marylebone High Street, in case the Tescos in NoMaRo were closed.


But Marylebone was as bustling as it always is on a sunny summer evening: people shopping, hanging out outside the pubs and eating at the resturants' curb-side tables. Timely and witty as ever, one of the windows of Daunt Books was decked out with copies of Amor Towles' Rules of Civility. Judging by (possibly apocryphal) reports that Waterstone's was the only shop in Croydon not to be raided (and the fact that bookshops in general seem to have been left alone) and, in any case, given Daunt's location in SoMaRo, it seems unlikely that any of the rioters will see this irony.

Rules of Civility at Daunt Books

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